Realizing Our Own Perpetual Emergence: Liminality in Psychoanalytic and Photographic Frames

Liminality is explicated for what it illuminates about the psychoanalytic setting, the dream-like, old-new photography of Maggie Taylor and its correspondence with the psychoanalytic project, and a persistent tension between finitude and the wish to be infinite that is inherent in the human condition. We regularly manage to dissociatively eschew curiosity to avoid the anxieties associated with encountering the new and the unfamiliar because we prefer to know what’s coming rather than to experience the unfamiliar as it comes. Psychoanalysis aspires to be a necessarily strange situation in which defenses against emergent experience can recede, allowing for potentially generative “losing” of what has been, while simultaneously encountering what might be next.