It’s difficult to associate the Freudian couch with anything other than a New York shrink catering to that unique kind of neurosis that afflicts the upper-crust of the cosmopolitan metropole. However, a good portion of the 100+ LACKers were non-academics—social workers, activists, Amazon Warehouse workers, even a Midwestern pastor, many of whom did not have a graduate degree and most originating from the Midwest.
By Matthew Moore
The recent pages of Harper’s Magazine feature an obituary of psychoanalysis. “The death of psychoanalysis as we know it?” This is the question emblazoned on the April 2025 cover. Inside, Maggie Doherty’s dispatch from the 2023 American Psychoanalytic Association paints a hysterical picture of the field: a predominantly white gerontocracy of academics, clinicians, and editorial boards obstinate and frothing in the face of what Doherty terms “the social turn.” Which is to say that the old guard, the field’s superegoic censor, remains steadfast in their belief that psychoanalysis has nothing whatsoever to say about racism, transgenderism, capitalism, climate change, or resurgent authoritarianism. These issues concern society, not the psyche.
You would quickly be disabused of such a notion, however, if you attended this year’s LACK conference, featuring a keynote by the enfante terrible himself, Slavoj Žižek, which took place at Otterbein University outside Columbus, Ohio from March 13th to 15th.
A splinter group schismed in search of the social, LACK bills itself as a gathering of minds at the nexus of “Lacanian psychoanalytic theory and German Idealism.” It’s difficult to associate the Freudian couch with anything other than a New York shrink catering to that unique kind of neurosis that afflicts the upper-crust of the cosmopolitan metropole. However, a good portion of the 100+ LACKers were non-academics—social workers, activists, Amazon Warehouse workers, even a Midwestern pastor, many of whom did not have a graduate degree and most originating from the Midwest.
As a lifelong Midwesterner and a longtime reader of psychoanalysis, then, I felt compelled to drive from my St. Louis to Columbus in an attempt to understand not just the question of why the social turn in psychoanalysis now, but what could psychoanalysis do here?—in the back country, my country, that, since Trump’s rise to infamy, has, perhaps unfairly or not totally unreasonably, been portrayed as the nation’s unbridled Id.
If the Midwest rebukes this characterization, there’s several miles of I-70 somewhere between Terre Haute and Dayton that does it no favors. “Fudge Factory! Exit 163,” the billboards exclaim. “The best fudge comes from Uranus.” Yes, the name of the factory is Uranus, and there are such a number of these signs that one begins to feel as if they are experiencing a Rabelasian scatire, something carnivalesque that only the Midwest can accomplish with decadent, sweet treats and unrepressed anal obscenity.
I was reminded of this on the second day of the conference at a panel titled “Weirdness, Waste, and the Symptom.” Michael Gray’s paper on “The Shit of History: No Fickle Matter” discussed waste not as an accidental byproduct of capitalism, but a structural necessity, a means by which we can convince ourselves that all of this is sustainable, that we can clean up our shit and master our mess. Freud intuited as much in 1908 when in “Character and Anal Ertocism” he wrote of the relation between “the complexes of interest in money and defecation” whereby financial mastery, neurotic hoarding, becomes a sublimation of that most wasteful of erogenous zones.
The Fudge Factory was at least instructive insofar that, as someone who grew up in a poor, working-class community in rural Missouri, I’ve long thought of my home as excremental, something to be survived and mastered lest it master you. Getting chewed up and spat out beats ejection from other orifices. The six-and-a-half drive across corn to Columbus reminded me of this. The unspooling miles of interstate—fields fallen fallow foregrounding abandoned barns triumphantly exclaiming “TRUMP”—reminded me of my mother’s Kentucky drawl that, throughout my childhood, made me hear “interstate” as “inner-state.” But, there was truth to this phonetic slip.
Growing up, anytime I drove with my parents down I-35, the interstate that bypassed the small town Main Streets where we lived, I watched the flat expanse of pasture and old prairie until the line between my own dissociative daydreams and the landscape blurred. So quiet, so empty was this place with its ruins of foreclosed farmsteads and shuttered Main Streets, that, as a kid who dreamt of escape, I frequently pretended that I was the sole survivor of a post-apocalyptic world in the wake of some cataclysmic armageddon.
Maybe, as my own analyst has taught me, I’m still dealing with this emptiness. I brought my own shit, my class baggage, my professional ambitions, and my fantasies of mastery to LACK. Indeed, I was also presenting a paper on post-apocalyptic science fiction, novels like Mary Shelley’s The Last Man and M.P. Shiel’s The Purple Cloud wherein global plagues and world-encompassing volcanic miasmas cull the earth’s population and leave only one solitary man to survive. In his study of Freud’s analysis of Paul Schreber’s memoirs—a psychotic who believed himself to be the chosen survivor of an impending apocalypse and a loss of his masculinity through a process of “unmanning”—Eric Santner describes such narratives as dramatizing a politics of “survivorship” in which the dead, decaying world must be mastered.
As I drove across the Ohio state line, however, I couldn’t help but remember the train derailment in East Palestine, Ohio—the toxic plume of hydrogen chloride, the grave health outcomes of working-class Midwesterners in a rural town that looked so much like my own. A Chernoybyl-esque scene that left one of the town’s residents to remark that “it feels like an apocalyptic movie.” But, I also remembered Trump’s visit, administering his idea of disaster relief in the form of his beloved McDonalds, and despite the environmental and physical trauma, or, rather, because of it, the president-elect enjoying an electoral turnout 10% stronger in Columbiana county in 2024 compared to 2016.
On one of the last panels, “Group Psychology and the Leader,” on the final day of the conference, Daniel Cho delivered his paper “One Rudely Stamp’d: The Leader as Exception.” Drawing upon a brief case study of a certain type of patient that Freud categorized as “the exception” who believe themselves to be persecuted by a cosmic injustice whereby they have “renounced enough and suffered enough,” Cho argued that if a figure like Trump garnered popular appeal it was due less to some perceived business acumen and competent mastery, but more to the lack thereof: if he is a master, he is one who channels an emotion of grievance linked to perceptions of unfairness, injurious self-sacrifice without recognition, and arrested mastery.
If this has been a running theme in Trump’s campaigns and administrations since 2016 when he bemoaned the fact that the Democratic establishment wouldn’t let him win, that the elections would be rigged against him, that people of color enjoyed employment advantages over whites, it is because, as Freud put it, the grievance of un-mastery so easily mobilizes empathy, or, a “fellow-feeling” (Gemeinschaft) that captures a common feeling that “we all demand reparation for early wounds to our narcissism, our self-love.”
Matt is a first-generation student and writer from the rural Midwest, currently a PhD student in English and American Literature at Washington University in St. Louis. He holds an MFA in Creative Writing and Environment from Iowa State University. His essays can be found in Of Rust and Glass and Sublation Magazine. Find him at mattmo-washu.bsky.social.
