—-There are girl-boys, and boy-girls. I am a girl-boy, and you are a boy-girl——

—No. Absolutely no, I am not a boy-girl. You may be a girl-boy, but I am not a boy-girl.——

Here we see that categories about gender are much more complicated than they were at the time of Freud’s œdipus complex. You can see a kind of multiplication of names, which are referring to new——I wouldn’t say a new position, we shall see——but at least intend to introduce a variety where there were only two signifiers: man and women, or boy, girl. There are a lot more categories, and as sexual gender has always been part of social identity-—a very strong one—-and still is—it appears more and more that it is not sufficient to define, sexually, the position you are in in today’s discourse. Girls have changed, and heroines too.

I must say something to you because I’m going to use it. Maybe you think I’m going to be rude, and maybe I am. But I have a feeling about the United States of America. It’s a feeling that psychoanalysis as such, be it Freudian or Lacanian, when entering American master’s discourses, falls flat like a soufflé.

It never could function in the States as a disease as Freud wanted, or as a symptom as Lacan wanted. Except——and this is my thesis——except in the world of art. I mean movies, television, painting, writing, all that. There psychoanalysis is absolutely alive. And what I mean by alive, is with its subversive power. I could make a demonstration of that easily. I could take, for instance, one of the most recent Tim Burton movies, be it Willy Wonka or be it Alice, and show you that this is the unconscious at work there exactly the way Lacan defined it in terms of signifier. For example the main anecdote that built the story of Willy Wonka——I know that it’s adapted from the novel, but...—-is an equivoke on hair: hair, hairdresser and heir, legacy. The whole movie is based on that equivoke. That’s what I mean when I say that the movies, the films and the directors, are really inspired by true psychoanalysis—-that is to the Lacanian one—-as they were inspired by true Freudian psychoanalysis in the past. I think that as in the social order, be it mental health order, educational order, therapeutical orientation, etc., psychoanalysis is transformed into a process. The form is dead.[...]

art: Wolfgang Tillmans,young man, Jeddah, b 2012.