Bracha L. Ettinger - Psychoanalyst

Psychoanalyst

Bracha L. Ettinger is a regarded theoretician who had proposed an ontology of string-like subject-subject (trans-subjective) and subject-object (transjective) transmissivity, working at the intersections of human subjectivity, feminine sexuality, maternal subjectivity, psychoanalysis, art and aesthetics, who had contributed to psychoanalysis a feminine-maternal function and structure with its symbolic, imaginary and real dimensions. She is a senior clinical psychologist, and a practising psychoanalyst. Her artistic practice and her articulation, since 1985, of what has become known as the matrixial theory of trans-subjectivity have transformed contemporary debates in contemporary art, psychoanalysis, women studies and cultural studies. Bracha L. Ettinger is member of the Tel Aviv Institute for Contemporary Psychoanalysis (TAICP), the New Lacanian School (NLS) and the World Association of Psychoanalysis (AMP / WAP). For Ettinger, the Freudian attitude to psychoanalysis is crucial as it emphasizes the phantasmatic value of materials that arise during regression. To Freud and Lacan she adds, however, a feminie-maternal space-time with its particular structures, functions and dynamics in the Unconscious. She claims that in a similar way to which, when seduction is assigned to the paternal figure during regression it is recognized in most cases as a result of the therapeutic process itself and is worked-through accordingly: without therapist's father-blaming and without a resulting father-hate, therapists must likewise realize that during regression phantasmatic maternal "not-enoughness" appears and must also be recognized as the result of the process itself and be worked-through without mother-hating that she considers as contributing to a "psychotization" of the subject and a block to the passage from rage to sorrow and compassion. To be able to recognize the phantasmatic status of the psychic material arizing during therapy, the Lacanian concepts of Symbolic, Imaginary and Real are useful to her. The idea of a corpo-Real is a part of her symboliseation of a new feminine psychic zone (the matrixial, the womb as time space of psychic encounter-event), in both male and female subjects, and of the feminine-matrixial sexual difference. Thus, even if Ettinger critics the Freudian and Lacanian analysis of the feminine she considers herself as post or neo Freudian and Lacanian, who elaborates the feminine in continuity to these psychoanalysts but claims a supplementary feminine-maternal Eros.