How are presidents nominated and named? How do they speak? I will argue that Trump’s language is far more confined than the supposedly psychotic productions of Schreber. In fact, compared to Schreber, Trump’s language is a prison of linguistic confinement. Emma Lieber is a psychoanalyst-in-training and literary scholar whose critical and creative work has appeared in The Point Magazine, New England Review, Massachusetts Review, LA Review of Books, and various academic and psychoanalytic publications. Click here to read text of talk

“Our analysis tries to avoid the trap of analyzing Trump in order to follow the precise Trump logic set out in his full-page newspaper advertisement, on its own terms. Since this advertisement contains a rare example of Trump explicitly writing about psychoanalyzing, we abandon the many fruitless attempts to psychoanalyze Trump and instead use it as the basis for examining the conditions by which Trump himself deigns to psychoanalyze. We posit that under these conditions of disciplined reading, Trump will in effect psychoanalyze us. By this we mean that the conditions of a Trump presidency place us in the position of being analyzed by Trump and not the reverse, despite defensive maneuvers aimed at reasserting the expertise of those who so clearly lacked the understanding for anticipa...Read More

“Lacan locates the unconscious, the sublime nexus of all our psyches, in Baltimore in the morning. The unconscious, he tells us, is like dawn — that threshold between sleep and waking. It’s a pulsating neon sign, ticking time, advertising enjoyment. It is intermittent and fading, present and absent. The unconscious is like Baltimore, with its sublime oscillations between tender and tough, wounded and resilient, swaggering and fearful, Northern and Southern, black and white. According to Freud and Lacan, there is no universal “dream book,” meant to provide facile interpretations to every dream image. Neither is there an easy decoder ring for the psychology of Baltimore. Every resident must tell his and her own story of the psychology of this place. Yet we all awake e...Read More

“Psychoanalysis has died many times and in many places. The causes of its repeated demise are often less instructive than the conditions of its resurrection. The cause of death is always a version of the same: it is a discipline that demands too much. It is too austere and takes too long, costs too much, operates too slowly, and produces equivocal results. In short as a general condition, it is an impossible profession in a state of constant collapse. How it rises again from its own ashes however is always a story about the demands that arise in a particular time and place. It is always a particular story about a particular resurrection in the face of the universal impossibility.” – David Lichtenstein Click here to read “A Letter from New York” by David Lichte...Read More

“Sigmund Freud had a word for those whose unique gifts permit them to bend reality to their will: artists. According to Freud, the artist “allows his erotic and ambitious wishes full play in the life of fantasy. He finds the way back to reality, however, from this world of fantasy by making use of special gifts to mold his fantasies into truths of a new kind.” Trump has to be understood, then, as a reality artist, one who is adept at the strategies that turn his biggest whoppers into reality. It is reminiscent of Charles Foster Kane, in Orson Welles’ classic film, who, when informed by the war reporter he dispatched to Cuba that there was no war to be found but only delightful girls and beautiful scenery worthy of prose poems, famously replied, “Dear Wheeler, you provide the prose po...Read More