Echolocating Opacity

Here I cut the transcripts of Echolocation and Opacity: Practicing Psychoanalysis With/out the Internal World, a course I taught at the Psychosocial Foundation in April and May 2025, with signification to ward the density of the real. In the “blacklight” (da Silva) of paraontological psychoanalysis, “seeing through” (Moten), by way of “opacity” (Glissant, Bion), there are not “patient[s] who [are] difficult to reach” (Joseph). There are patients with whom inseparability is not “echolocat[ed]” (Gumbs, Alvarez). We are engaged in “the black hole of nonrelationship” (Tustin), in “non-object relations” (Merklin) that aren’t relations, because non-objects are separate “without separability” (da Silva). If “primary narcissism [is] non-object relatedness” (Tustin), autism is non-object non-relatedness. We are engaged in non-object non-relating, in echolocating and being echolocated by opacity, which has the potential, again, the possibility. There is promise, but nothing is promised.