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The taming of psychoanalysis in geography
lelicity Callard
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Department of Geography, Queen Mary University of london, Mile lnd Road, london l1 1NS, UK.
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Social & Cultural Geography, Vol. 4, No. 3, September 2003
The taming of psychoanalysis in geography
Felicity Callard
Department of Geography, Queen Mary University of London, Mile End Road,
London E1 4NS, UK
In the last decade, social and cultural geography has experienced a psychoanalytic turn:
geographers have used insights from Freud, Lacan, Klein, Winnicott, Kristeva and others
to deepen and re-orient our understandings of subjectivity and socio-spatial formations. In
this paper, I argue that in the process, psychoanalytic geography has tended to render
psychoanalysis compatible with the imperatives currently driving social and cultural
geography (such as the demand to theorize resistance and develop particular understand-
ings of politicized subjectivities and spatialities). Many of Freuds founding insights,
however, work at odds with such imperatives: Freuds formulation of the unconscious
points to a realm that is not malleable in terms of cultural resignication, and that
conceives the individual as subject as much to inertia and repetition as to progressive
transformation. The paper demonstrates how geography has worked to tame psychoana-
lytic theory by downplaying its more politically unpalatable aspects. In so doing, it argues
that the time is now right for those aspects to be brought to light.
Key words: Psychoanalysis, psychoanalytic turn, Freud, cultural geography, unconscious,
resistance.
The question of interdisciplinarity
Trying to specify a genuinely psychoanalytic concept
of the unconscious, I have become increasingly
aware how this basic Freudian idea constantly
threatens to dissolve into something more recogniz-
ably psychologicaleven in the works of psycho-
analysts themselves. (Dean 2000: 9)
Geographers elaborations of the psychoana-
lytic concept of the unconscious have, I shall
argue, not stayed that concepts dissolution
into something more recognizably psychologi-
cal. Tim Deans commentary on the ease with
which the psychoanalytic unconscious may ex-
perience dissolution is directed primarily to his
colleagues in the eld of literary criticism and
cultural theory, and operates in the service of
his larger argument about why a genuinely
psychoanalytic concept of the unconscious
might enable a more far-reaching critique of
sexuality and identity than those currently in
operation under the sign of social construction-
ism. I shall return to the question of the rela-
tionship between psychoanalysis and social
constructionism later. For now, I use Deans
statement to point to the curious fragility of the
psychoanalytic unconsciousa concept that
has been, from the very moment of its birth in
Freuds writings, under threat. As the psycho-
ISSN 1464-9365 print/ISSN 1470-1197 online/03/03029518 2003 Taylor & Francis Ltd
DOI: 10.1080/1464936032000108913
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296 Felicity Callard
analyst and philosopher Jean Laplanche (1976,
1999a) has repeatedly argued, the ferocity and
strangeness of that unconscious was deeply
unsettlingand Freuds domestication of that
ferocity in many of his writings was only the
rst of countless scholarly and clinical manoeu-
vres that have reduced the potency of the psy-
choanalytic unconscious. The question
remains, of course, that if the psychoanalytic
conception of the unconscious is so fragile, and
if geographers are, as I am claiming, indeed
using a more familiarless psychoanalytic
understanding of the unconscious, why might
that matter? Or, to put it otherwise, what are
the consequences of a tamed psychoanalysis for
the practices of social and cultural geography?
After all, that disciplinary domain is at some
distance from the clinical practice of psycho-
analysis itself. By illustrating how and why
geographers have come to engage with the
psychoanalytic corpus, I hope to demonstrate
that what I am calling, after Dean, the psycho-
analytic unconscious, has been tamed, and indi-
cate why that taming is problematic not only
for psychoanalytic geography, but for social
and cultural geography more generally. While
this essay can function only as a preliminary
foray into the epistemological and ontological
commitments of psychoanalytically oriented
geographical scholarship, I also hope at least to
indicate how a genuinely psychoanalytic con-
cept of the unconscious might be important in
addressing subjectivity and analysing socio-
spatial formations.
My argument proceeds by interrogating the
psychoanalytic turn in geography. This turn is
of recent provenance: it commenced in the
early 1990s and wasand still isallied with
the simultaneous blossoming of critical social
and cultural geography. Although the number
of geographers working intimately and directly
with psychoanalytic literature is still relatively
small, there is at this point a wide acknowl-
edgement within social and cultural geography
of the value of psychoanalytic approaches. In
addressing this psychoanalytic turn, I wish to
understand two things. First, the working of
the motor that drove the turn (why, in other
words, certain social and cultural geographers
saw the need for psychoanalysis at a particular
moment in the history of those sub-disciplines).
Second, the consequences of that turn (in terms
of the kinds of psychoanalytic geography being
practised within social and cultural geography,
and the concomitant vision of psychoanalysis
within geography). As far as I know, there has
been no extensive account of the intersection of
geography and psychoanalysis since Steve Piles
detailed analysis of geographers interactions
with psychoanalysis (1996: 8195).
1
I do not,
however, consider my task in this essay to be
rst and foremost a retrospective of psychoana-
lytic geography. For while my analysis will
inevitably delineate a genealogy of psycho-
analytic geographyand hence will enumerate
particular authors and characterize certain
movements as trendsmy project here depends
largely on my treating, for better or worse,
psychoanalytic geography as a largely unied
corpus. That is clearly a brusque gesture, but
one that I believe has its advantages as well as
its pitfalls. But more on that later.
Any reection on the psychoanalytic turn in
human geography must necessarily consider the
nature of interdisciplinary knowledge pro-
duction. The coming together of a hetero-
geneous body of geographical literature with a
heterogeneous body of psychoanalytic litera-
ture cannot but raise the question of how such
a coming together has been effected, and the
perils as well as potentialities accompanying
such an encounter. My interests lie in under-
standing how social and cultural geographers
have been fascinated by particular aspects and
interpretations of a vast psychoanalytic corpus.
I shall therefore not treat this as an occasion to
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The taming of psychoanalysis in geography 297
discourse upon how contemporary psychoanal-
ysis has taken up elements of social and cul-
tural theory, though that is, unsurprisingly, an
equally rich and fascinating story. (See in par-
ticular the work of the American relational
psychoanalysts and the journal Psychoanalytic
Dialogues, which frequently hosts discussions
with social and cultural theorists such as Judith
Butler. Stephen Mitchell and Lewis Arons ed-
ited collection (1999) epitomizes this particular
movement within psychoanalysis.) With regard
to the question of interdisciplinarity, there are
three broad concerns that prompt my inquiries:
1 The dangers of interdisciplinarity
While interdisciplinarity is often heralded as an
unquestionably good thing, it is crucial to
acknowledge the difcult undercurrents threat-
ening to pull the practice of interdisciplinarity
apart. While the uttering of interdisciplinarity
usually acts as a hopeful performativeI want
to be interdisciplinary; thus I am interdisci-
plinarythe practice of interdisciplinarity is
always subject to the temptations of disci-
plinary cannibalization and expulsion. For, as
psychoanalytically inclined geographers have
elegantly demonstrated, borders are places of
often frantic and violent boundary making
and such boundaries can be strengthened both
by incorporating the other (and hence turning
its difference into sameness) and by expelling
the other (thereby rejecting it as unacceptably
alien). (See Sibley 1988, 1995b and Wilton 1998
for examples of violent boundary making; see
Deutsche 1991: 78 and Schoenberger 2001 for
analyses of the perils of interdisciplinarity.)
Caution in the face of such dangers is apposite
with regard to the encounter between psycho-
analysis and geography: their founding princi-
ples, modes of operation and methodological
commitments are very different from one an-
other and so the threat of violent incorporation
or expulsion is great. I shall, in fact, argue that
geography, in the process of swallowing parts
of psychoanalysis, has transformed those parts
into its own imagethereby turning difference
into sameness, incommensurability into com-
mensurability.
2 The motives underlying geographers
interest in psychoanalysis
It is also important to analyse how geographers
have approached psychoanalytic writings. Such
an analysis would encompass both the kinds of
geographical problematics that psychoanalysis
has been called upon to address, and the kinds
of textsand kinds of psychoanalytic au-
thorsthat have been considered particularly
appropriate. There is an important corollary to
such investigations: Which psychoanalytic writ-
ings have geographers left untouched or dis-
avowed, and what might the consequences be
of that avoidance or disavowal? Interdisci-
plinary operations often involve the production
of a vision, or image, of each disciplinary
domain for the eyes of the other. Such an image
is necessarily one that becomes (over-)-
investedhighlighting certain aspects of or ten-
dencies within that domain at the exclusion of
others.
3 The generational effects of the psycho-
analytic turn within geography
It is important to reect upon how the rst
generation of psychoanalytic geographers is
setting the stage for future practice, and how it
is thereby helping to construct a particular
legacy.
2
I have long been preoccupied with how
the inauguration of new theoretical positions
within disciplines and sub-disciplines might
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298 Felicity Callard
exacerbate intellectual amnesias and establish
particular kinds of legacies. I suggest that most
incursions of new theory into a discipline
attempt to respond to particular unanswered
questions or problematics within that disci-
pline. Furthermore, that new theory often
takes up, partially unresolved, those previous
problematics. As I shall demonstrate below, the
progress of the psychoanalytic turn in geogra-
phy could be argued to have followed such a
trajectory: psychoanalytic insights were used by
one scholar to great effect to move beyond the
impasses characterizing the structureagency
debate (Pile 1993); and psychoanalysis was de-
signed to deepen the analyses of those commit-
ted to social constructionist positions. In the
process, psychoanalysis has, arguably, been
transformed into a version of social construc-
tionism itselfcarrying with it the difculties
attendant upon social constructionist positions.
To summarize, my interest in the workings
of interdisciplinary unions lies in the manner in
which they allow one to identify particular
one might say symptomaticpoints of pressure
within a discipline whose soreness, it is hoped,
the interdisciplinary union will assuage. How
might we understand the points of pressure
within social and cultural geography?
Current psychoanalytic geographies
The taming of psychoanalysis in geography is
a bold title. Given that both this title, and
indeed my comments here, may be read as
overly critical of the rich body of psycho-
analytic geography in existence, let me make
clear my intent in this essay. The paper com-
menced its life as a short and somewhat
inammatory talk that I delivered at the An-
nual Conference of the Royal Geographical
Society (with the Institute of British Geogra-
phers) in 2001 in which, in line with the estab-
lished genre of the position paper, I offered
some strong arguments regarding whence psy-
choanalytic geographies had arisen and whither
they mightand ought togo. The time
seemed to be right to reect on the course that
psychoanalytic geography was taking, and the
paper aimed to be provocative. In expanding
that paper into this longer essay I have decided,
after much thought, to maintain the tenor of
those original statements in order better to
register the force of my intervention. That
decision of course has had repercussions vis-a`-
vis the way I have written the paper and the
way in which you, as readers, will receive it.
For example, as with all position taking, I tend
to coalesce into identiable trends varied schol-
arly contributions that do not deserve such
rough handling. I also use short-hands: I tend
to generalize about psychoanalytic geography,
which means that I overlook divergences of
opinions amongst psychoanalytic scholars, and
may well claim a general absence within psy-
choanalytic geography when there is no such
absence in the writings of one particular
scholar. I also tend to treat Freud as a synec-
doche for psychoanalysis. Psychoanalysis, as
innumerable commentators have emphasized, is
an extraordinarily diverse body of knowledge. I
do not cover here the often extraordinary dif-
ferences between Freuds writings and those of,
say, Donald W. Winnicott, Melanie Klein, Julia
Kristeva, and Jacques Lacanwriters whom
certain geographers and geographically inter-
ested cultural theorists have found more inspi-
rational than Freud himself [see the work of
David Sibley (1988, 1995a, 1995b, 1999) on
Kristeva and on the object relations school,
Robert Wilton (1998) on Kristeva, Stuart
Aitken (Aitken 2001; Aitken and Herman 1997)
on Winnicott, and Virginia Blum and Heidi
Nast (1996, 2000) on Lacan].
3
My argument, as
I made brutally clear at the start by using Tim
Deans invidious phrase a genuinely psycho-
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The taming of psychoanalysis in geography 299
analytic concept of the unconscious (my ital-
ics), is dependent on a very particular reading
of Freud. That reading is deeply indebted to a
Continental tradition of scholars inuenced by
Jacques Lacans and Jean Laplanches readings
of Freud, and not sympathetic to most Anglo-
American readings of psychoanalysis.
I am in no doubt as to the crucial role that
geographers interested in psychoanalysis have
played in demonstrating the importance of a
body of writings to a discipline that was, and
in certain ways still is, so hostile to it. My
realization that I could inhabit a place in ge-
ography despite my fascination with Freud is
certainly due to the work of scholars such as
Aitken (Aitken and Herman 1997; Lukinbeal
and Aitken 1998), Bondi (1993, 1997, 1999a,
1999b), Nast (1998, 1999, 2000), Pile (1991,
1993, 1996, 1998), Rose (1993, 1995a, 1995b,
1996) and Sibley (1995a, 1995b) whose psycho-
analytically inected writings have greatly ad-
vanced the theoretical and epistemological
frameworks within which critical social and
cultural geography operates. That I can pro-
duce a critique of the directions that psycho-
analytic geography has been taking is an
indicator of the strength and visibility of a
body of work that, several years ago, would
not necessarily have been regarded by the geo-
graphical mainstream as a visible body. It
should go without saying that I regard the
regular interrogation of an sub-disciplinary do-
mainin this case psychoanalytic geogra-
phyto be vital for its ongoing success.
And so to the kernel of my argument. Geog-
raphers who have worked with psychoanalysis
have tended to do so in a way that has down-
played or avoided what I see as the most
troubling, and thus for me important, implica-
tions of Freuds thought. This is largely be-
cause uses of psychoanalytic theory in
geography have tended to render psychoanaly-
sis compatible with other theoretical axiomat-
ics currently dominating social and cultural
geography. Most obviously, and of most
signicance for the direction in which psycho-
analytic geography is moving, this has meant
rendering psychoanalysis compatible with a
critical-geographical framework characterized
theoretically by assimilated versions of Michel
Foucault, Judith Butler, and certain kinds of
anti-essentialist feminist and critical race the-
ory.
4
Such a framework, I shall aver, operates
with a curiously idealized model of subjectivity
and of politicseven when that framework is
used to attend to the unruly sphere of the
psyche, and hence, apparently, to the uncon-
scious. It is a model that imagines the psyche as
malleable and always potentially able to con-
test and overcome the vicissitudes that beset it.
It is a psyche, I would argue, shorn of the
encumbrances of an unaccommodating uncon-
scious, of the paralysis of traumatic repetition
(in contrast with progressive movement), and
of the virulence and intractability of self-
destructiveness, aggressivity and pernicious
fantasies.
In making this grand assertion, I want to
argue that Freudian psychoanalysis offers a
thoroughgoing challenge to other models of
subjectivity and of the social currently in use in
social and cultural geography. My own attrac-
tion to psychoanalysis is founded on what I see
as its incommensurability with many other the-
ories that aim to understand the processes of
socio-cultural formationparticularly those of
social constructionism. (The incommensurabil-
ity between the psychoanalytic unconscious
and the commitments of mainstream histori-
cism and social constructionism has been
shown most forcefully by several scholars
whose work is indebted to Lacan: Joan Copjec
1994, Tim Dean 1997, 2000 and Slavoj Z

izek
1999. I discuss the impact of such interventions
concerning the incommensurability of psycho-
analysis and versions of social constructionism
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300 Felicity Callard
later in this essay.) The question of how a
Freudian account of subjectivityone that
does justice to the psychoanalytic concept of
the unconsciousfundamentally differs from a
social constructionist or historicist account is
clearly huge and worthy of a paper in itself. For
now, I would emphasize that the Freudian
unconscious is not strictly a cultural artefact,
and hence is not subject to the kinds of cultur-
alist reworkings or resignications of identity
characteristic of social constructionist ap-
proaches.
5
But psychoanalytic theory has entered ge-
ography largely in the service of social con-
structionism and, in particular, under the sign
of resistance. Psychoanalysis has been enlisted
under the umbrella of a critical geography that
is committed to attending to difference, to
understanding regimes of power, and to think-
ing the shape of a liberatory cultural politics.
Hence psychoanalysis has, for example, been
used to undermine what are understood as the
hegemonic formations of masculinity, white-
ness and Occidentalism by pointing to how
such formations are riven by instability and
impurity (Jacobs 1996; Pile 1996). Such a model
of subjectivity, politics, resistance and the psy-
che is driven by great and unsustainable opti-
mism. Such a model is at odds with what I
think of psychoanalysiss most profound in-
sightsinsights concerning the intractability of
the unconscious and its imperviousness to pol-
itical goadings, and the anarchic and implac-
able movement of the drives. We have, in my
mind, too quickly co-opted psychoanalysis into
the service of a particular model of political
resistance without fully interrogating the pro-
found challengespsychic resistancesthat
psychoanalysis poses to such an endeavour.
6
In the remainder of this essay, I shall elabor-
ate on my hasty claims by moving more slowly
through geographers engagements with psy-
choanalytic theory. I do so with the hope that
the reasons for my concern over the prevalence
of a politically idealistic psyche within geogra-
phy will become clearer.
* * *
Psychoanalysis has entered geography through
several, overlapping routes. Some scholars have
direct or indirect connections with the clinical
practice of psychotherapy or psychoanalysis,
and have drawn psychoanalytic and/or psy-
chotherapeutic insights that they use with
powerful effects in their geographical work (see
particularly Bondi 1999a, 1999b). Several fem-
inist scholars have produced revisionist read-
ings of metapsychological psychoanalytic
material in order to critique geographys episte-
mological claims. (For example, Bondi 1997
and Rose 1995a, 1996 have found Irigaray in-
spiring for this purpose, and Blum and Nast
1996, 2000 have provided riveting critiques of
Lacans analytic framework.) Most geogra-
phers using psychoanalysis have found in the
writings of particular psychoanalysts fertile
material for addressing pressing geographical
questions emerging in the context of their own
research projects (Nast 1998, 2000; Pile 1996;
and Sibley 1988, 1995a, 1995b).
Let me turn to Steve Piles early writings as
an exemplary instance of the manner in which
psychoanalysis was brought within the fold of
geography. Pile was central in effecting geogra-
phers serious engagement with psycho-
analysis.
7
As Pile himself emphasized,
geographers such as Jacqueline Burgess and her
colleagues had already utilized the insights of
the psychoanalytic clinician Foulkes in relation
to group therapy (Burgess, Limb and Harrison
1988a, 1988b). Despite the existence of this
work, however, a wide-ranging appreciation of
the productivity of psychoanalytic methods and
theories for geographical inquiries was not yet
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The taming of psychoanalysis in geography 301
in place. Piles rst intervention was directed
towards the practice of qualitative research. In
1991, he argued that debates about qualitative
research methods could benet enormously
from psychoanalysis, since
nowhere has the relationship between the ques-
tioner, questioned and the lived world been more
closely examined than in the psychoanalytic litera-
ture , and much of this debate concerns power
relations in the nexus of knowing, communicating
and the personal. (Pile 1991: 460)
For Pile, the analytic principles of transference
and counter-transference were enormously im-
portant in untangling the complex relationships
between qualitative researchers and their sub-
jectsmost obviously because, as he put it,
geographers had much to learn from the recog-
nition of the power relationships between the
analyst and analysand in therapeutic discourse
(1991: 462). Pile argued that by recognizing the
operations of transference, and by framing that
transference in relation to the third register of
the social and signifying order governing ev-
eryday life, geographers might be able to move
away from attempting to capture the insights
of their research subject and towards partici-
pating in the recovery of that subjects voice
(1991: 467).
Two years later, Piles intervention into the
structureagency debate that dominated discus-
sions between human geographers in the 1980s
pivoted on his important claim that psycho-
analysis broke the opposition between structure
and agency. Arguably, this paper was the cata-
lyst for bringing psychoanalysis into the
purview of a wide range of human geogra-
phersespecially given the fact that it acted as
a kind of manifesto. For as Pile put it in his
abstract,
I suggest that it is inconceivable that the self can
be understood, and therefore that a truly human
geography can be imagined, without drawing on the
insights of psychoanalysis because it offers a theory
of the self which neither denies, nor relies on, a
structureagency dichotomy. (1993: 122)
In that paper, Pile demonstrated how psycho-
analysis transforms lay understandings of ex-
ternal (social) and internal (individual) forces:
psychoanalytic theory, in its theories of the
unconscious, describes how the social enters,
constitutes and positions the individual and,
similarly, by showing that desire, fantasy and
meaning are a (real) part of everyday life, it
shows how the social is entered, constituted
and positioned by individuals (1993: 123).
Crucially for Pile, psychoanalysis could be used
to address the relation between power and
language and, as a corollary to this, might
be enormously useful for geography by virtue
of its ability to contribute to contemporary
debates on the politics of identity, to help
articulate a politics of movement (and not
merely position), [and] to respond to the
demand for a politics of desire (1993: 136
137).
I am interested in both these papers not only
because of their manifest importance in ex-
plaining the difference that psychoanalysis
could make to practices of human geography,
but because they demonstrate the epistemologi-
cal and political contexts surrounding the in-
cursion of psychoanalysis into geography. For
both papers show how psychoanalysis was in-
voked in order to help address the understand-
ing of power relations, and the development of
politicized identity formations. I suggest that a
similar context and similar imperatives frame
much other work in the eld of psychoanalytic
geography. Let me now briey and schemati-
cally gesture towards what I see as three over-
lapping arenas in which psychoanalytic
geography is currently animating debates and
research within social and cultural geography:
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302 Felicity Callard
1 Boundaries, territory and spatial trans-
gression
Psychoanalysis has perhaps been of most direct
and obvious help in illuminating the manner in
which boundaries (between the interior and the
exterior, and between groups) are over-invested
and hence liable to become locales of anxiety
and hostility. David Sibley (1988, 1995a, 1995b)
is the most important proponent of this line of
enquiry. Sibley, accounting for his interest in
psychoanalysis, has averred that
psychoanalytical theory has considerable value be-
cause it can help us to understand better not only the
representation of others but also our own feelings
about the abject, our own insecurities about differ-
ence The psychoanalytic turn, rather than being
a fad as this term suggests, provides a vocabulary
and cues for observation and analysis which are
helpful in getting to grips with difference. (1995b:
185186)
Sibleys work on exclusion has drawn jointly
on the work of object relations and on Kris-
tevas famous argument concerning the cate-
gory of the abject (Kristeva 1982). Other
writers have followed Sibleys lead in address-
ing the drawing and maintenance of psychic
and material boundaries (Hoggett 1992; Wilton
1998). Robyn Longhurst, following the work of
psychoanalytically inuenced cultural theorist
Anne McClintock (1995), argues for a situated
psychoanalysis that would pay specic atten-
tion to the notion of abjection in Longhursts
own work on bodily boundaries and their ex-
cesses and transgressions (2001: 28). Freuds
conception of the unheimlichthe uncanny as
the unhomely (Freud 1919)has also been
enormously productive for geographers. Jane
M. Jacobs, for example, in thinking through
the implications of psychoanalysis in her own
work on the city, has argued that The uncanny
appearance of an embodied Aboriginal occu-
pation and an unknowable Aboriginal sacred in
the secular space of the city of Perth set in train
an anxious politics of reterritorialisation
[1996: 130; see also Wiltons use of the uncanny
(1998)].
2 Subjectivities and spatialities
A preoccupation with how psychoanalysis
might more generally aid investigations into the
formation of subjectivity, society and space
characterizes most scholarship produced by
psychoanalytically oriented geographers. Steve
Pile, for example, has described his interpret-
ation of Freud and Lacan as one which is open
to the uidity and xity of subjectivityand
beyond this, spatiality (1996: 95). Several geog-
raphers have mobilized psychoanalytic insights
to develop a trenchant critique of existing
socio-spatial relations. Heidi Nast, for exam-
ple, has developed the concept of the het-
eronormative Oedipal (1998, 2000) to
understand how [o]edipalized versions of
heterosexuality inform modern socio-
spatialities, national and international laws and
practices, and social, political, and economic
imaginaries and language (1998: 197). She has
described her work as turning Freud on his
head, arguing that congurations of desire are
not historically and culturally transcendent
but are rather subject to larger political econ-
omic conquests (1998: 198). Stuart Aitkens
work has engaged psychoanalysis in an imagin-
ative variety of ways. What draws that work
together is Aitkens commitment to critiquing
what he sees as Freuds depoliticizing and
deterministic view of repressive social rela-
tions. Aitken pushes instead for the develop-
ment of contemporary, post-structural readings
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The taming of psychoanalysis in geography 303
of object relationships that he believes will
provide a psychoanalytic interpretation of no-
tions of spatialities of difference that are not
only tolerant but liberatory (2001: 91, 99).
3 Epistemological critiques
As I indicated earlier, feminist geographers
have drawn on psychoanalytic writers and
other feminist readings of psychoanalysis to
provide detailed accounts of the problematic
constitution of geographical knowledge. Gillian
Rose, in her ongoing investigation of the oper-
ations of phallocentrism (1993, 1995a, 1995b,
1996) has argued that the phallocentric space
of self/knowledge can be destabilized once one
has identied its complex and unstable mobili-
sations of fetishism and voyeurism (1995a:
775). Blum and Nasta wonderful pairing of a
literary scholar and a geographerhave, in
their intricate readings of Lacan, argued that
he is embedded in a two-dimensional account
of identity-formation, and that, moreover, his
universalization of the two-dimensional subject
guarantees an implacable bourgeois order of
the nuclear family (2000: 183). In challenging
the accounts of space and spatiality at work in
Lacans writings, they open to view the connec-
tions between those accounts and the problem-
atic models of social relations they assert lie at
the heart of his oeuvre.
Is it possible to draw together these diverse
projects? In the next section, I hope to show
that it is. I do so by arguing that this collectiv-
ity of psychoanalytically inected geographers
is united by the theoretical and political imper-
atives that drive varied, individual projects. I
shall show, in other words, how current psy-
choanalytic geographies are wedded to a par-
ticular kind of politicized reading of
psychoanalysis.
Whither psychoanalytic geographies?
[I]f psychoanalysis does not inform a politics of
resistance, of position and of subjectivity, then there
is little point in using it. (Pile 1996: 167)
Steve Pile delivers a potent warning against
what would, for him, be a useless form of
psychoanalysis. That kind of psychoanalysis
would be one that did not take a politics of
resistance, of position and of subjectivity as
one of its primary concerns. Piles warning
comes at the end of a summary of what he
believes a psychoanalytically informed account
of space might do. That summary includes the
claim that such an account would be alert to
social sanction, social power and the possibili-
ties of resistance (1996: 167). Piles warning is
an exemplary demonstration of the place that
psychoanalysis must take within current social
and cultural geographical theory and practice.
Psychoanalysis, in such a scenario, must be
used as a tool that will intimately assist with
political imperatives. Shurmer-Smith and Han-
nam, for example, have arguedshowing their
indebtedness to Piles workthat a tentative
geographical engagement with psychoanalysis,
may perhaps offer individuals of different gen-
ders and sexualities a chance to begin formulat-
ing a radical politics of desire (1994: 99). What
we see here, I suggest, is a strong commitment
to moving away from essentialist conceptuali-
sations of identity formation and space, and an
equally strong belief that psychoanalysis can
help us do so. Psychoanalytic geographers in
this respect are allied with a much more widely
spread commitment to non-essentialist, social
constructionist accounts pervasive across much
of the humanities and social sciences. Such
accounts are widely viewed as being the best
bet of developing, as Pile puts it, a politics of
resistance, position and subjectivity. I un-
doubtedly share the political urge towards de-
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304 Felicity Callard
veloping a politics of resistance, position and
subjectivity. But I want also to add further
commentary about the manner in which such a
political project is imagined, and to express
some caution about the speed with which deci-
sions about what resistance and subjectivity
might mean tend to be made.
I am troubled by this kind of politicized
mode of reading psychoanalysis. For such a
reading crucially depends, I believe, upon an
assumption that the unconscious can in some
way be resigniedin other words, that it can
shift under the weight of discursive interven-
tions. That assumption is, I believe, mistaken.
My argument here is indebted to the work of
Tim Dean who has, both in a series of articles,
and then in his book Beyond Sexuality (2000),
eloquently demonstrated how the Anglo-Amer-
ican reception, and subsequent deication, of
Foucault has vastly impacted the academy and
its understandings of sexuality, historicism and
psychoanalysis. Dean argues that, broadly
speaking, social constructionism in its various
guises has tended:
To either assimilate psychoanalysis to an essentially
Foucauldian epistemology or repudiate it as an
avatar of the ahistorical, universalizing view of sexu-
ality that social constructionism rightly sets out to
dismantle. Thus by way of amiable hermeneutic
domestication, on the one hand, or misguided rejec-
tion, on the other, what is most valuable about
psychoanalysis disappears completely. (Dean 2000:
4)
What is most valuable about psychoanalysis?
For Dean, psychoanalysis fundamentally chal-
lenges the oppositional nature of the debate
between essentialism and constructionism since
the unconscious cannot be conceived in either
biological or cultural terms. Dean, drawing on
Lacans formulations, and I, drawing on Jean
Laplanches careful readings of Freud (1976,
1999a, 1999b), would emphasize the following.
The unconscious is not a historical construct
if by this we mean that its contents might be
recuperated via discursive reclamation. That is
because the unconscious, while an effect of
language, is not reducible to discourses and
their effects. That is not because for Laplanche
and Lacan language is ahistorical, but rather
that because for them history itself is not
thoroughly discursive. That the unconscious is
not reducible to discourses entails the realiza-
tion that the unconscious is implacable in the
face of attempts to resignify its contents.
8
As
Laplanche has commented, elaborating on how
the unconscious must not be thought wholly on
a model of signication and representation:
The path I deliberately took consists in consid-
ering the unconscious element or trace not as a
stored memory or representation, but as a sort
of waste-product of certain processes of mem-
orisation (1999b: 89, italics in original).
I suggest that the current social construction-
ist orthodoxy within social and cultural geogra-
phy dictates that everythingprocesses,
practices, conceptscan be captured within the
skeins of discourse and that, consequently,
everything is (socially/culturally) constructed.
Given my commitment to Deans reading of the
genuinely psychoanalytic concept of the un-
conscious, I argue that this orthodoxy necess-
arily assimilates psychoanalysis to social
constructionism and hence reduces it of its
potential to move us beyond the frequent im-
passes of the social constructionist debate. To
repeat: the great interest of Freuds account lies
in the fact that the unconscious is only partly
reducible to the historical and geographical
co-ordinates in which it nds itselfand this is
because the unconscious is not and cannot be
reduced to a historical construct. More criti-
cally, this means that the unconscious, and
hence subjectivity, is not malleable in the way
that much current cultural and social theory
wishes.
9
Geographical work that has engaged
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The taming of psychoanalysis in geography 305
psychoanalysis has therefore tended to walk a
short-cut whereby it is imagined that psycho-
analysis can be seamlessly and immediately
sutured to a radical politics of resignication. A
short-cut imagines that we can reach the same
end point in a shorter time. But I would suggest
that such a short-cut cuts out the trouble that
intervenes on the way. It does so by ignoring
how the unconscious throws up large, intrac-
table obstacles in the path of the hoped-for
achievement of subjective transformation.
* * *
An examination of the citations and bibliogra-
phies of those geographers who have engaged
with Freud and psychoanalysis provides an
oblique way with which to afrm my sense that
critical geography has not as yet been very
willing to attend to the bleakest psychoanalytic
writings that discuss the refractory operations
of the unconscious. What follows derives from
a perfunctory and unsystematic perusal of psy-
choanalytically inclined geographers citations
and bibliographies. What is immediately no-
ticeable is the general paucity of references to
Freuds work (in comparison, say, with the
regular enumeration of Foucaults texts). Of
those Freudian texts that are referenced, of
particular interest to geographers is Freuds
essay The uncanny (1919) (cited, for example,
by Jacobs 1996, Pile 1996 and Wilton 1998);
Group psychology and the analysis of the ego
(1921) (cited by Pile 1991); and Civilisation and
its Discontents (1930) (cited by Sibley 1995b
and Pile 1996). As far as I have been able to
determine, there are virtually no references to
two of Freuds most important, and pessimistic
works, namely Beyond the Pleasure Principle
(1920) and Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety
(1926).
10
While this brief perusal of texts cer-
tainly cannot be used authoritatively to prove a
point, I think what it can indicate is the fa-
voured approach to Freud that geographers are
taking. [Notable for its absence in the geo-
graphical literature is the tradition of metapsy-
chological and philosophical psychoanalytic
theory that, drawing on Freud, has developed
Continentally in the work of Jacques Lacan
and Jean Laplanche (and that is being extended
today in the writings of those such as Joan
Copjec 1994, Tim Dean 1997, 2000, John
Fletcher 1992, 1999, Renata Salecl 1999 and
Slavoj Z

izek 1989, 1991, 1994, 1999). Several

readings by geographersparticularly by Rose
and Nasthave of course been deeply indebted
to Lacan. My point is that most of those
readings have been somewhat specic: they
have tended to focus on Lacans conceptualiza-
tions of the gaze, visuality, or the mirror stage,
in contrast with the more extensive uses of
Lacan to think socio-cultural forms in the work
of those such as Dean, Copjec and Z

izek.
Geography as a whole is, I would say, funda-
mentally wary about more extensive uses of
Lacantending to regard Lacan as blind to
historical and geographical difference, and
hence remaining unconvinced by the claims of
those such as Dean, Copjec and Z

izek that
Lacan can provide rich resources for cultural,
historical and social analysis.]
I also want to suggest that the imperatives
driving geographers uses of psychoanalysis can
be gleaned by analysing those geographical
scholars who have chosen to move away from
Freud and Lacan and towards other psychoan-
alytic thinkers. For such a move can itself be
read as an indicator of the dominant approach
to interpreting psychoanalysis tout courtof
how a particular kind of psychoanalysis is be-
ing installed in the geographical imaginary.
Aitken and Herman, for example, turn towards
Winnicott because they see him as not concep-
tualizing the separation of the child and her
external environment primarily in terms of ob-
jective distancing, naming, rationalizing or
compartmentalizing (1997: 63)which is their
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306 Felicity Callard
reading of Freud and Lacan. For Aitken and
Herman, Winnicott allows one to think about
identity formation in terms of a play of differ-
ences and through a uid, recursive process of
separation involving intuition, experimentation
and play (1997: 65). Freud and Lacan are
abandoned because they are seen as not tting
in with the current imperative to theorize dif-
ference, uidity and resistance in particular
ways. In other words, Freud and Lacan are
acceptable only if they can be made compatible
with those imperatives.
Preliminary conclusions
I have aimed to uncover some of the reasons
why social and cultural geography might have
experienced a recent psychoanalytic turn. My
account has emphasized that the kind of psy-
choanalysis towards which geographers have
been drawn is one that promises to buttress
their own commitment to particular models of
political resistance, transgression and re-
signication. I should point out that several
schools of psychoanalysis would be in agree-
ment concerning the compatibility of psycho-
analysis and those kinds of models. I, however,
following Tim Dean, have argued that estab-
lishing that compatibility involves eschewing
the psychoanalytic unconscious. I, of course,
realize that this kind of argument can be read
simply as a purists campaign for yet another
misguided return to the right Freud (a project
of course bound to fail). I acknowledge that
few geographers are likely to endorse my overly
stringent pronouncements concerning, in
Deans phrase, a genuinely psychoanalytic con-
cept of the unconscious. But if my argument
does not convince in that respect, I want to
conclude by emphasizing what is at stake in
illuminating which concepts are in the process
of being solidiedand which, simultaneously,
being rendered invisiblein the nascent sub-
disciplinary domain of psychoanalytic geogra-
phy. I return, therefore, to the problematics
laid out at the start in order to clarify how my
claims might relate to the current practices of
social and cultural geography.
Hence to the question of interdisciplinarity.
Erica Schoenberger, in addressing how matters
of interdisciplinarity are inevitably underlain
by questions of social power, has used the
phrase disciplinary cultures in order to focus
on the ways in which disciplines become in-
vested in particular ways of producing and
disseminating knowledge. For Schoenberger,
disciplinary cultures and their associated epis-
temological commitments shape our ways of
thinking about the material and social world
and how we understand ourselves and our
possibilities for action in that world (2001:
370). Disciplinary cultures, she adds, therefore
have enormous power in shaping identityof
who we understand ourselves to be in the
world and what we do there (2001: 370; italics
in original). What happens if we apply Schoen-
bergers insights to the disciplinary culture of
todays critical social and cultural geography?
One of the most characteristic features of this
disciplinary culture would be a commitment on
the part of its contributors that not only they
but their scholarly productions are capable of
acting, and do act, in the world. By this I mean
that the disciplinary culture demands that criti-
cal geographies in some way contribute to the
production of politicized subjectivities. (Here I
leave in abeyance the complex question of what
production might meanin particular the
manner in which the connections between
texts, discourses and subjectivities are imag-
ined.) Such a disciplinary culture makes it
difcult to countenance the lack of a capacity
to act, or the presence of severe obstacles to a
subjects agency. It is difcult, for example, to
imagine a critical geographer advocating a
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The taming of psychoanalysis in geography 307
theoretical approach that plays up, not down,
inertia and impotence, or one that does not in
some way gesture to the malleability of subjec-
tivity. Indeed I suggest that the disciplinary
culture of current critical social and cultural
geography makes it nigh impossible to draw
attention to, let alone dwell upon, the possibil-
ity that individuals might need to be theorized
in terms of impotence, the loss of agency, or
the lack of progressive transformation. But
such questions lie at the heart of Freuds pro-
found inquiries into the operations of human
subjectivity. I should emphasize that I am not
claiming that Freuds account is one in which
subjectivity is static or immovablefar from it.
But I am claiming that Freuds account, and his
insistence on the refractory operations of the
unconscious and of fantasy, puts many serious
obstaclesobstacles that should not and can-
not be banished by disavowing themin the
path of narratives of efcacious subjective
transformation. (To put it another way: those
serious obstacles do not block all formulations
of transformation and mobility, but they do
re-route the ways in which the concepts of
psychic transformation and mobility are imag-
ined.) Geography tends to operate with a polit-
ically idealistic psyche, I have claimed. That
psyche is politically idealistic because the inter-
disciplinary union of geography and psycho-
analysis has shrugged off the dark undertow in
Freuds writings.
Freudian texts that are not so beloved of
geographers include many of Freuds more
pessimistic writingsBeyond the Pleasure Prin-
ciple (1920), Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxi-
ety (1926), Analysis terminable and
interminable (1937), for examplewritings
that are profoundly under the sway of the
notorious concept of the death drive and of
aggressivity. What might happen if more social
and cultural geographers extended the range of
Freuds writings in which they took an interest?
I suggest that the texts just enumerated would
force a confrontation with a psyche deeply
antagonistic towards change; individuals
trapped in the repetition, rather than the super-
session, of traumatic formations; and deeply
rooted, unsmiling fantasies. Such a confron-
tation would pose unavoidable questions for
any political endeavour. In particular, it would
point to the danger of assuming that psycho-
analysis, as a theoretical apparatus, can be
unproblematically and quickly put to work to
effect political transformation. But such a con-
frontation would result in far from apolitical
consequences. Christopher Lane, in his work
on the psychoanalysis of race, has emphasized
the crucial importance of engaging with the
unconsciousand hence with the strength and
endurance of fantasy and aggressivityif one
wishes to address racial prejudice and hatred.
As Lane puts it, and indeed as Heidi Nasts
work has powerfully demonstrated (1998,
2000), What, Freud effectively asks, could be
more political than fantasy when it determines
the fate of entire communities, nations, and
even continents? (Lane 1998: 7). It is certainly
not the case that psychoanalysis and politics do
not go together; rather, it is perhaps the case
that the models of politics and the political that
we as critical geographers tend to favour can-
not be smoothly sutured to the models of sub-
jectivity adumbrated by psychoanalysis.
The central question underlying any psycho-
analytic geography must continue to be: What
are the formidable difculties in employing
psychoanalysis in the study of socio-cultural
and socio-spatial formations? Geographers
have, up till now, tended to subordinate psy-
choanalysis to social constructionist analyses in
which culturalist interpretations have trumped
the psychoanalytic unconscious. In my view,
what has not yet been fully imagined is a
psychoanalytic geography that does justice to
psychoanalysis rather than rendering it
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308 Felicity Callard
smoothly compatible with culturalist impera-
tives. The psychological unconsciousas op-
posed to the genuinely psychoanalytic concept
of the unconsciousis a lot more appealing to
critical geography because it is far easier to
change and transform. The terror associated
with the psychoanalytic unconscious is the need
to consider intransigence as well as transform-
ation (or perhaps intransigence in the very
process of transformation). And that, I think, is
not something that critical social and cultural
geography is particularly keen to consider.
Freudian psychoanalysis does, of course, coun-
tenance change; it does not, however, consider
change understood at the level of discursive
resignication to be all that it is cracked up to
be. Freud, in his pessimistic late paper Analysis
terminable and interminable (1937) asks
whether it is possible to dispose of an instinc-
tual conict permanently and denitivelyi.e.
to tame an instinctual demand in that fash-
ion (1937: 225). He can give no clear answer.
But psychoanalytic geography has, I suggest,
not faced such doubts in relation to its own
procedures of taming.
* * *
Pile, in a deliciously wry paragraph, has com-
mented on the reactions that psychoanalysis
received until recently amongst human geogra-
phers:
It is easy to claim that psychoanalysis has been
systematically misrepresented, but I would prefer to
suggest that particular aspects of psychoanalysis
have been selected and presented as if they were
symptomatic of the whole approach. Until very re-
cently, then, only specic characters from psycho-
analysis, wearing grotesque masks, have been
allowed to take the stage and they have been booed
off. From stage left, however, psychoanalysis has
appeared in other, different guises. The audience
waitstentatively and suspiciously. (Pile 1996: 81)
Those of us sympathetic towards psychoanaly-
sis are wearily familiar with the scene that Pile
colourfully narrates: we have been repeatedly
frustrated by how particular Freudian concepts
(most notoriously, penis envy) are dangled like
trophies to prove the woefully mistaken nature
of psychoanalytic interpretation. Such attacks
are now, mercifully, much less frequent within
geographyprecisely because of those geogra-
phers who have demonstrated why psychoanal-
ysis might be vital in thinking through
questions of subjectivity and spatiality. I want
to add a spin to Piles vignette. For I would
suggest that the current eld of psychoanalytic
geography shows certain similarities to the
scene Pile describes, whereby particular as-
pects of psychoanalysis have been selected and
presented as if they were symptomatic of the
whole approach. On the current stage, gures
such as the abject and the ego have centre
stage. The truly monstrous (in contrast to the
grotesquely parodic) gures of psychoanaly-
sisthose of the repetition compulsion, the
death drive, the traumatic neuroses, the
Freudian unconsciousare kept hiding in the
wings. If they enter, the entire stage of psycho-
analytic geography might shake, for such
gures threaten the models of resistance,
agency, and resignication that have, till now,
dominated discussions of psychoanalytic ge-
ography in particular and social and cultural
geography more broadly. It is time for those
gures to make their entrance.
Acknowledgements
I am grateful to Chris Philo and Hester Parr for
organizing the panels on Psychoanalytic Ge-
ographies at the 2001 Annual Conference of
the Royal Geographical Society (with the Insti-
tute of British Geographers) in Plymouth. I am
also indebted to the other participants in those
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The taming of psychoanalysis in geography 309
panels for their papers and for their comments
on the early version of this paper; to David
Sibley in his role as discussant; to the anony-
mous referees of this paper; and to Steve Pile
for many conversations over the years about
psychoanalysis and its place in geography. I
heard Erica Schoenberger deliver her paper on
interdisciplinarity at the 2000 RGSIBG confer-
ence in Leicester and, as is customary when I
hear or read her arguments, have thought hard
about it ever since. My discussions with
Constantina Papoulias on the question of how
to think the articulation between the sphere of
the psychic and that of the social are always
inspiring.
Notes
1 I should add that Liz Bondi has provided a brief
summary of psychoanalytically inected geographical
scholarship (1999a: 1517).
2 I am implicitly not placing myself squarely within this
rst generation of psychoanalytic geographers since,
although I have worked with psychoanalysis for a
number of years, I have not yet published psychoanalyt-
ically oriented essays. This is perhaps a duplicitous
gesture since arguably my conference papers could be
considered part of this process of legacy making.
3 As the referees of this paper rightly pointed out, I do
not mention Jungs corpus, nor the paucity of geo-
graphical work that engages with Jung. The question of
Jung and what geographers relationship to his work
might be is fascinating and worthy of further scholar-
ship; it is a question that I feel unable to address within
the theoretical constraints I use to frame this paper.
4 This is a large claim the smaller steps of which I am
unable to provide within the connes of a short journal
paper. See my previous essay (Callard 1998) where I
describe how the work of scholars such as Foucault and
Butler has been assimilatedoften in diluted form
within human geography, and the effects this has had
on the theoretical commitments of critical geography.
5 Tim Dean, articulating Lacans formulations concern-
ing sexuality, puts it thus: for Lacan sexuality is explic-
able in terms of neither nature nor nurture, since the
unconscious cannot be considered biologicalit isnt
part of my body and yet it isnt exactly culturally
constructed either. Instead, the unconscious may be
grasped as an index of how both biology and culture
fail to determine subjectivity and sexual desire. Think-
ing of the unconscious as neither biological nor cultural
allows us to distinguish (among other things) a properly
psychoanalytic from a merely psychological notion of
the unconscious (Dean 2000: 221). For Dean, this
failure on the part of both biology and culture to
determine subjectivity and sexual desire opens up the
possibility of an account that is not captive to the
endless redrawing of boundaries between the natural
and the cultural that so characterizes current debates
over identity and its cultural construction. In other
words, Deans model of a (Lacanian) psychoanalytic
unconscious gestures towards a conception of the pol-
itical that does not take as its project the privileging of
the resignication or denaturalization of identities
a privileging that is so widespread in todays discus-
sions concerning cultural politics.
6 Steve Pile has emphasized how psychic resistance oper-
ates to counter the operations of (political) resistance.
In his introduction to Geographies of Resistance he
writes: Psychic resistance is not only unconscious, it is
also highly dynamic. It can work in many ways to
defend people against interventionswhether thera-
peutic or politicalthat seek to persuade, to move
things on, to enable people to draw new conclusions
about the reasons for things (1997: 25). I would suggest
that such an acknowledgement of the depth and exten-
siveness of unconscious resistance is rare in psycho-
analytic geography.
7 As I note, there were geographers besides Pile working
with psychoanalysis at that moment. However, for a
variety of reasons, it was Piles papers of the early 1990s
that were, I believe, most visible in calling for geogra-
phys engagement with psychoanalysis.
8 My thanks to Constantina Papoulias who claried my
thoughts on this difcult point. I should also stress that
Lacan and Laplanche disagree extensively in the
specics of their conceptualization of the unconscious.
9 There is, of course, much more to be said about the
implications of this statement. A genuinely psychoana-
lytic concept of the unconscious radically reframes
how we might think the question of subjectivity and
subjective transformation. Psychoanalysis offers many
accounts of subjective transformationbut they are
not, I believe, equivalent to or compatible with many of
those animating discussions of identity and subjectivity
within critical geography. I hope to explore those psy-
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310 Felicity Callard
choanalytic accounts in future research. In particular, I
hope to demonstrate in greater detail why formulating
the unconscious as only partly reducible to the histori-
cal and geographical co-ordinates in which it nds itself
opens up different ways of interrogating the concept of
subjectivity.
10 I stress that Pile cites both Inhibitions, Symptoms and
Anxiety (Pile 1996, 1997) and Beyond the Pleasure
Principle (Pile 1996).
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Abstract translations
Apprivoiser la psychanalyse en geographie
Depuis dix ans, la geographie sociale et culturelle a
connu un tournant psychanalytique: beaucoup de
geographes se sont tournes vers Freud, Lacan, Klein,
Winnicott, Kristeva et autres an dapprofondir et de
reorienter notre comprehension de la subjectivite et
des structures socio-spatiales. Dans cet article, je
sugge`re que, a` travers ce processus, la geographie
psychanalytique a eut tendance a` adapter la psych-
analyse aux preoccupations centrales de la geogra-
phie culturelle et sociale (tels que le besoin de
theoriser la resistance et developper des analyses
particulie`res de subjectivites et espaces politiques).
Toutefois, plusieurs des concepts de base freudiens se
pretent difcilement a` ces preoccupations: tel que
formule par Freud, linconscient est une sphe`re peu
susceptible a` la resignication culturelle puisquil
concoit lindividu comme etant sujet a` linertie et a` la
repetition autant qua` la transformation progressive.
Cet article demontre comment la geographie a
cherche a` apprivoiser la theorie psychanalytique en
camouant certains de ses aspects politiquement dou-
teux. A
`
travers cette critique, je propose que le temps
est venu de remettre ces aspects en lumie`re.
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312 Felicity Callard
Mots-clefs: Psychanalyse, tournant psychanalytique,
Freud, geographie culturelle, inconscient, resistance.
La doma del psicoanalisis en la geograf a
Durante la ultima decada la geograf a social y cul-
tural ha experimentado una vuelta psicologica: los
geografos hemos hecho uso de las ideas de Fre d,
Lacan, Klein, Winnicott y Kristeva entre otros con el
n de profundizar y re-orientar nuestro en-
tendimiento de la subjetividad y formaciones socio-
espaciales. En este papel sugiero que, en el proceso,
la geograf a psicoanal tica ha tendido a hacer que el
psicoanalisis sea compatible con los imperativos que
actualmente conducen la geograf a social y cultural
(por ejemplo la tendencia a teorizar la resistencia y
a desarrollar ideas espec cas de subjetividades y
espacialidades politizadas). Sin embargo, muchas de
las ideas fundadoras de Freud no concuerdan con
estos imperativos: la formulacion del inconsciente de
Freud, senala un campo no maleable en terminos de
resignicacion cultural, el cual considera que el indi-
viduo esta sujeto tanto a la inercia y la repeticion
como a la transformacion progresiva. El papel de-
muestra como la geograf a ha intentado domar la
teor a psicoanal tica por restarles importancia a los
aspectos pol ticamente mas dif ciles de aceptar.
Como resultado, sugiere que ya es hora de sacar
estos aspectos a la luz.
Palabras claves: Psicoanalisis, vuelta psicoanal tica,
Fre d, la geograf a cultural, inconsciente, Resisten-
cia.
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