Anat Schumann’s lecture Encountering Otherness – On the Ability (and Inability) for Psychic Movement within Sexual States of Mind suggests several psychoanalytic reflections on the ability (and inability) for psychic movement within sexual states of mind, in relation to the capacity to tolerate otherness in the psyche. Following the archaic bisexualities as described by Winnicott and Tustin, as well as Kristeva’s elaboration on the concept of abjection, I explore various psychic scenarios in which the sexual difference may represent the traumatic encounter with the ‘not-me’, resulting in the splitting of psychic bisexuality which may affect the individual’s sexual states of mind at different levels of integration. In the schizoid-paranoid psychic areas, an encounter with the unfamiliar or the ‘foreign’, which
unconsciously resonates an internal threatening object, may lead to persecutory withdrawal.

This psychic scenario will be discussed in the case of homophobic phenomena as a state of dissociated psychic bisexuality. At the more primitive autistic-contiguous mode of experience, a traumatic encounter with the primary not-me may be revealed through compulsive and fetishistic sexual states of mind, when one is clinging to an Other while simultaneously effacing its wholeness and humanness. Through clinical illustration, the protective quality of a fetishistic object as an autistic object will be examined, and the ‘sexualization of abjection’ will be discussed as a manifestation of an autistic enclave which involves the splitting of
primary psychic bisexuality. Finally, I will emphasize the significance of bisexual analytic attitude which may facilitate psychic movement within anxiety-saturated and rigidified sexual states of mind.

For more details and registration .