Fucking with the Psychoanalytic Ancestors: Epistemological Insubordination and Failed Fabulation as Queer Pedagogies in Psychoanalytic Training

This article responds to Paul B. Preciado’s call for the ‘depatriarchalization, deheterosexualization and decolonization’ (2021, 76) of psychoanalysis by developing a method of epistemological insubordination for reading the psychoanalytic archive. Historic texts, still taught in contemporary trainings, mobilise powerful affective responses in trainees yet remain largely unexamined as transferential objects within training institutions. Situating psychoanalytic writing as a Derridean archive, I perform a queer phenomenological historiographic reading of Helene Deutsch’s writings on female homosexuality for “straight lines,” “straightening devices,” and “queer angles”, tracing shifts in psychoanalytic attitudes between 1930s Vienna and 1940s Boston. I then extend this method by working with my own fabulative responses to these difficult texts, developing a technique of failed fabulation that mobilises the rigid, mythosymbolic structures of the ego through playfully fucking with the psychoanalytic ancestors. Finally, I consider how these methods might support pedagogy in psychoanalytic training courses, while attending to the unevenly distributed risks of this approach. The article contributes to debates within queer medical humanities about how clinical education can reckon with its colonial, cis-heteronormative legacies.