Our panel asks: What genres, objects, forms, methods, mediations, and platforms register psychic crises at the formal, platformal, or infrastructural levels? How are the ambivalences, anxieties, and projective identifications of our politics mediated through literary and aesthetic form? At a time when student mental health services are overwhelmed, when suicidal ideation in preteens has skyrocketed, when authoritarian, nativist, and frankly fascist politics are on the rise, this panel will offer psychoanalytic critique as a crucial explanatory resource for the interrelated polycrises of the present.

Anna Kornbluh, author of Immediacy: or, The Style of Too Late Capitalism (2023), takes up the question of how to respond to “omnicrisis” through the work of an underappreciated psychoanalytic thinker: Fredric Jameson. In “Jameson and Psychoanalysis: Dialectical Criticism in Omnicrisis,” Kornbluh identifies Jameson as an unacknowledged psychoanalytic critic. She argues for the centrality of psychoanalytic method for the project of dialectical critique. Kornbluh examines the lag or disconnect between the noted contemporary clinical renaissance of psychoanalysis, precisely in response to omnicrisis, and the opportunity for a renewed psychoanalytic aesthetic criticism.

Jennifer Spitzer, author of Secret Sharers: The Intimate Rivalries of Modernism and Psychoanalysis (2023), examines in “Virginia Woolf, Ling Ma, and Pandemic Melancholia” the post-pandemic polycrisis through Freud’s concept of melancholia as read through two novels separated by a century: Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse (1927) and Ling Ma’s Severance (2018). Spitzer investigates how pandemic melancholia is exacerbated by conditions of lockdown, social distancing, and loss at a distance—in which proximity to the loved one and rituals of mourning are suspended.

Noëlle McAfee, author of Fear of Breakdown: Politics and Psychoanalysis (2019), interrogates political authoritarianism under polycrisis through the doubling of Oedipus in Sophocles and Freud. In “Authority and the Vicissitudes of Oedipus,” McAfee uses this doubled Oedipus to propose an alternative to ready-made authoritarian certainties of nativist identity and brute patriarchal power. She examines the vicissitudes of Oedipus and authority in order to articulate a notion of political authority that honors the singularity of each person, giving each the scope to make meaning of their own lives without falling back onto cultural givens. Her project invites us to tarry with ambiguity and possibility, to become authoritatively anti-authoritarian: newcomers working in concert with others to build new worlds.

Anna Mukamal, scholar of digital media and culture and author of a book in progress, The Therapeutic Encounter, investigates the current mental health crisis as symptomatic of broader polycrises through a critical examination of AI “companions.” In “AI Companions: Therapeutic Promise and Peril,” Mukamal focuses on Replika, a personalized chatbot based on users’ writing data, branded as “the AI companion who cares” who is “always here to listen and talk” and “always on your side.” She asks to what extent one might have therapeutic encounters with interlocutors who do not hold embodied knowledge. How does the fantasy of using AI to dialogue with “oneself” query theories of projection, transference, and countertransference? What if AI companions only tell us exactly what we want to hear about ourselves? While users who face barriers to accessing professional therapy gain much-needed interlocutors, what do we all lose in the platformification of mental healthcare? From Freud’s vision of looking at oneself in the “high light of noon” to blue light halos at 2am, the use of AI chatbots for therapeutic purposes poses existential questions for psychoanalytic theory and practice now.

These papers show that the revival of psychoanalytic therapeutic practice now underway must be complemented by a rigorously theorized and carefully historicized practice of psychoanalytic critique and criticism. Thinking psychic life under polycrisis requires psychoanalysis, just as psychoanalytic criticism and practice requires a social, political, and theoretical grasp of the dimensions of contemporary polycrisis. Panelists will deliver short, provocative 12-minute papers that articulate a clear set of positions on our key questions, and then open up space for 25 minutes of questions and open dialogue with the audience.