PSYCHOANALYSIS DISPATCH #8
Dispatch #8 enters the fray with a focus on the textures of art, writing, and the liminal spaces where they intersect. This dispatch asks: how do we navigate the often rigid frameworks of artistic discourse, reimagining stale environments to find meaning in discomfort and unease?
Estelle Hoy speaks with Elida Silvey about her book saké blue, a frenetic, vibrant exploration of contemporary art writing where Hoy dismantles the neuroses of cultural clichés and the art world’s over-reliance on jargon. In their conversation, they touch on time as a material, Pinocchio’s phallic nose, and the existential game of writing itself. Susan Finlay sits down with Caitlin McLoughlin to discuss her book The Jacques Lacan Foundation, unpacking the unlikely marriage of psychoanalysis and humour, the enduring influence of Lacan’s legacy on the arts, literature, and the bolstering of intellectual credentials. An experimental script, KleptoParasite by Maria Drăgoi, conjures murky light, worn furnishings, and an oppressive heat, creating a vivid atmosphere where tension and relief play out in equal measure, with moments of clarity as stark as the glare of fluorescent light. Finally, a poem by Dorothy Spencer, offering a moment of lyrical reprieve, its imagery resonating like a sharp intake of breath in a stifling room.
Dispatch #8 invites you to linger in spaces where art, memory, and narrative collide, creating fragments of new meaning amidst the disarray.
And We, Who Have Always Thought
#8: Estelle Hoy in conversation with Elida Silvey
“Once you’ve tacked 'Lacan' onto something, it’s sacred.”
#8: The Berlin based writer Susan Finlay talks to Caitlin McLoughlin about her eclectic influences, the precarity of the art world and needing to be in a ‘good place’ to write.
Kleptoparasite
#8: An experimental script by Maria Drăgoi
Until The Last Light Goes Out I Was Still Here
#8: Until The Last Light Goes Out I Was Still Here by Dorothy Spencer
Eternal Friday Night: Hannah Levene on her debut novel Greasepaint
#7: Aimee Ballinger talks to the experimental writer Hannah Levene about butches, musicality and only wanting to write the good chapters.
God is Trans
#7: P. Eldridge speaks with Lamya about navigating the intersections of their identity, writing from personal experience, coming out, and writing as an action which promotes action and resistance.
Storytelling Truth: Lessons from Secondhand Time: The Last of the Soviets by Svetlana Alexievich
#7: Karolina Cialkaite reviews Svetlana Alexievich’s Secondhand Time and its exploration of the collapse of Soviet ideology through personal stories, revealing the tension between meaning and truth. Like therapy, it challenges fixed perspectives and opens space for new understanding.
Day Dreams
#7: A short story by Enya Ettershank
Embodying My Ideas
#6: Juliana Huxtable in conversation with P. Eldridge.
On Pressurising Words
#6: Activist, analyst and writer Lara Sheehi reckons with what we ask of Palestinians when we task them with documenting their own ethnic cleansing: what it means to write from a place of coercion, whilst still seeking to undermine and disrupt the violent narratives of the oppressor.
Reading Therapy: Talking to My Mother, a Psychotherapist
#6: Jemima Skala reflects on a lifetime of shared books and conversations with a working psychotherapist, who also happens to be her mother.
Ambiguity, Within Reason: Walter Serner’s Continuing Critical Relevance
#6: Alicia Gladston looks at the works of Walter Serner and how he used satire and absurdity to undermine rigid fascistic categorisations of the self via the state during the 1920s and 1930s.
I Stroke Luck Downwards
#6: I Stroke Luck Downwards by Caitlin Hall
Clowning Our Way to Freedom with Nuar Alsadir
#5: Arcadia Molinas speaks to author, poet and psychoanalyst Nuar Alsadir, about her book Animal Joy, the revolutionary power of laughter and how to tap into what psychoanalyst Donald Winnicot called our “True Selves”.
Disappointing Artists with Hannah Regel
#5: Thea McLachlan speaks to Hannah Regel about effort, archives, and Regel’s debut novel, The Last Sane Woman.
Schizo-Culture: Book and Object
#5: Elvia García writes about Schitzo-Culture, books as objects, and the men who have tried to take ownership of both.
Dead Ringer
#5: A short story by Alastair Wong.
Three Poems
#5: Three Poems by Grayson Sanghani
Harmless Literature with Dennis Cooper
#4: Francis Whorrall-Campbell speaks to cult writer Dennis Cooper about inserting thoughts into your reader’s psyche, confusion as the truth, a preference for queerness, and the representational value of gay literature.
Oscar, Would You Love Me if My Boobs Were Bigger?
#4: An essay by Arcadia Molinas in homage to Brontez Purnell