| This dissertation considers encounters between psychoanalytic insights and practices and legal culture. Through readings of these encounters, I ask what psychoanalysis and law have to say to one another, what tensions exist between the conceptions of the subject that define each discipline, and what sort of culture each requires and sustains. I suggest in response to these questions that despite the apparent incommensurability between these two discursive practices—the manner in which they construct their respective projects, the subjects these practices address, and the formal mechanisms that govern their application—psychoanalysis and law actually converge in significant ways. In particular, psychoanalysis as a system of knowledge-production inhabits legal culture in a manner that often seems to threaten that culture's stability, but also in ways that reaffirm its apparent inviolability. Yet the influence runs in both directions: proponents and detractors of psychoanalysis alike frequently characterize psychoanalytic practice in reference to processes associated with legal institutions and legal reasoning.; In part, then, this dissertation explores specific areas in which legal culture has absorbed psychoanalytic “reasoning,” even as it continues to battle against the putative challenge to its own premises that this reasoning represents. It also considers instances in which psychoanalytic culture confronts the pervasive legal constructs that organize democratic institutions. My discussion is informed by theoretical work from a variety of disciplinary contexts and takes up an equally varied assortment of texts, including a Freud lecture on criminal interrogation techniques, judicial opinions on cases involving homosexuality, sadomasochism, and repressed memory claims, and the work of the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission. At stake in all of these encounters between law and the psychoanalytic, broadly conceived, are conceptions of democracy and its ideal citizens. I have organized the first section of this dissertation, consisting of two chapters, around the question of “influence” between and within legal and psychoanalytic processes, and its perceived and actual dangers to democratic ideals. Part Two consists of three case studies exploring particular encounters between law and the psychoanalytic and the democratic principles these encounters illuminate and trouble. |
