Adrian Yen

University of California, Davis, Social-Cultural Anthropology, Graduate Student

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I am an Africanist anthropologist of medicine, science, and violence who uses ethnography to problematize the constitutive leitmotif of our time--trauma. Based on a decade of fieldwork in the war torn Acholi region of Uganda, my research traces the greater cultural-political significance of what rural people I work with prosaically refer to as cen (pronounced chen, literally ghostly vengeance)--an order of vengeful spirit that results in excess as a consequence of the recent LRA conflict and whose status as a contemporary agent of misfortune and suffering has become newly significant for an entire generation of trauma healing and psychosocial interventions since the end of the war. Using cen as a heuristic, my work explores the contours of the country's post-war reconstruction between 2008-2014, following the spirits across the life of three different international interventions.
Supervisors: Dr. Alan Klima, Dr. Donald Donham, Dr. Marisol de la Cadena, Dr. James Smith, and Dr. Cristiana Giordano
Address: Davis, California, United States

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Ethos 44(3): e15‐e17 e15 Illusions of a Future. Psychoanalysis and the Biopolitics of Desire

Kate Schechter's ethnography, Illusions of a Future, and its careful account of crisis as the con... more Kate Schechter's ethnography, Illusions of a Future, and its careful account of crisis as the constitutive leitmotif of contemporary psychoanalysis, is in many ways a cautionary tale about the perils that attend our accommodations of late liberal reforms. Through a close examination of psychoanalysis in Chicago and the historically important Chicago Institute for Psychoanalysis, Schechter renders the deeply vexing order of " structural marginalization " and " professional dispossession " psychoanalysts experience as they submit themselves and their keystone practice, psychoanalysis, to the rubrics of evidence-based medicine. The problem, as Schechter compellingly demonstrates, is not so much that psychoanalysis has been subordinated to the financial prerogatives that come with the restructuring of health care in the United States. But rather that what psychoanalysis is—how it has historically endeavored (with little success) to define itself vis à vis the analyst-patient relationship—has always been up for grabs and thus a source of great consternation for the profession. In Schechter's assessment, the experience of crisis in contemporary American psychoanalysis stems from this " undecidability, " and what she conjectures has been the historical failure of the profession to engage with the intersubjective or " personal element, " as she calls it, of the analyst-patient relationship itself. Schechter argues that this has remained an unanalyzed constraint throughout the history of the profession, and this is ultimately why she turns to an historical account of the Chicago Institute for Psychoanalysis. Using archival materials, she deftly reconstructs the genesis of this undecidability at the Institute and among its most influential figures, the progenitors of modern psychoanalysis in Chicago—Franz Alexander and Lionel Blitzsten. She begins by tracing the tumultuous relationship of the two including their debates and institutional battles for the proverbial soul of the field/profession. As Schechter shows, these epic confrontations did not stop with the two men, but in fact endured over the course of several generations as the respective students and protégés of each analyst took up their mantles, albeit with important nuances and adjustments. By rendering this history, what Schechter successfully shows is a profession already at odds with itself, riven by two distinct and opposing views about what psychoanalysis should be—the " sins of the father(s), " so to speak. Indeed, as Schechter explains, it is precisely Blitzsten and his descendants' attachments to the relational object of transference that we see latently manifested in contemporary analysts' efforts to remake themselves And yet, at the same time for Schechter, the significance of Blitzsten's earlier ascetic formulations of analysis in the contemporary case may only be understood insofar as they simultaneously respond to a more populist articulation of the profession, one that Alexander and his supporters once sought to promote in lieu of Blitzsten's approach. In this way, Schechter reveals how the contemporary experience of crisis in psychoanalysis hinges on a much longer historical debacle within the institution(s) of the profession itself. Yet Schechter's ethnography is much more than a mere history lesson. Indeed, what the ethnographer and practicing psychoanalyst is able to show is the way that the sins of the father have been decidedly generative of a particular (biopolitical) order of self-care and rationalization among analysts. Concrete examples of this are rendered palpable by Schechter as she carefully constructs a series of ethnographic vignettes. Through a gloss of three practicing psychoanalysts,

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Ethos 44(3): e15‐e17 e15 Illusions of a Future. Psychoanalysis and the Biopolitics of Desire

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Adrian Yen

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