Fixation: Freud’s Queer Counter-Concept

This talk will examine how Freud’s recourse to the unstable term “fixation” both grounds and troubles his heteronormative, male-identified, oedipally inflected metapsychology. Although Freud uses the term “fixation” throughout his writings, the meaning he ascribes to the term varies widely. Freud invokes the term in relation to repression, regression, perversion, homosexuality, femininity, Jewish writing, and mourning. Fixation often emerges as Freud’s rhetorical way of “fixing” conceptual impasses that challenge prescribed masculine/feminine positions. As a vestige of infantile sexuality, fixation institutes the syncopated temporality of psychic and sexual life and disrupts Freud’s attempts to construct a (hetero) normative, teleological model of sexual development.

Elissa Marder is Professor of French and Comparative Literature at Emory University where she is also affiliated with the Departments of Philosophy and Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies. She is a founding member of the Emory Psychoanalytic Studies Program, served for many years as Director and is now on the PSP “Leadership Team.” Her publications include: Dead Time: Temporal Disorders in the Wake of Modernity (Baudelaire and Flaubert) (Stanford University Press, 2001); The Mother in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction: Psychoanalysis, Photography, Deconstruction (Fordham University Press, 2012); and Literature and Psychoanalysis: Open Questions, ed. Elissa Marder. Paragraph Volume 40; Issue 3 (November, 2017).

Readings:
Marder, Elissa. “Freud’s Fictions: Fixation, Femininity, Photography.” Paragraph 40, no. 3 (2017): 349–367.
Freud, Sigmund. “A Case of Paranoia Running Counter to the Psycho-Analytic Theory of the Disease.” In The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, edited by James Strachey, 261-272, vol. 14. London: Hogarth, 1957.

Please register via email (sipsas_admin@princeton.edu) by October 15 for access to readings and to reserve a seat and a box lunch.