Charlie Stephenson

Bartleby the Gooner Gooning is a contemporary subculture built around excessive engagement with internet pornography. Non-psychoanalytic writing on the emergent identity category of “the gooner” has often posited these subjects as emblematic of the most troubling features of contemporary life. In a Substack post typical of the genre, the writer P.E. Moskowitz observes that the “whole world…feels like a form of gooning now—catharsis for the sake of it, catharsis that breeds nihilism, catharsis that dehumanizes, catharsis that disenables any productive form of pleasure in the future.” Viewing the phenomenon through the work of Freud, Lacan, and Laplanche, however, allows us to ask what the gooners might have to teach us about trauma, infantile sexuality, and the metapsychology of moral panics.

Loryn Hatch

Hitting the Limits with Anorexia in Private Practice Countless words have been written about the captivating symptom of anorexia. But often for the anorexic who is brought to treatment, putting words to the symptom is superfluous. In many eating disorder clinics in the US this sentiment is reinforced; the invitation to speak is postponed and actively rejected, deemed meaningless until weight has been stabilized. When speech is invited, it is only as a response to the prescriptive interventions supplied like supplements to be ingested along with force fed meals. The patient is pushed to replace her specific regimen of eating nothing, which follows scripts of control and restriction, for new scripts that are subject to the same superegoic logic. For the psychoanalyst, who first and foremost desires the anorexic’s speech, the relationship between words and the object nothing, with which the anorexic subject nourishes herself, is mysterious, elusive, and essential to put into play. For the anorexic to speak from the real sites of the body where jouissance has erupted in ways she seeks to privately control and restrict, is to transform the nothing she fills herself with for an experience in which the lack in the symbolic is confronted and desire is put into motion through her speech. The analyst desires her to risk something other than the real of her own existence through her words. The clinical quandaries that erupt at the charged and dangerous limits the anorexic symptom summons will be explored in relation to a selection of theory that orients, directs, and offers openings for this challenging work.