The Blockage and the Blockade
The editors
Here’s a schema for the individual: bad things happen and, through the sublime triumph of experience over understanding, the psyche, unable to cognize the traumatic impression into its component parts, exiles this content beyond the remit of conscious thought. The mind, wishing not to know, keeps this stranger at the gate. But repression—the effort to resist this knowledge—is a bad bouncer: the unthought changes clothes and enters as a symptom. What makes this process available to analysis is not its exclusivity to the individual psyche, but the fact that it punishes the one who wishes not to know. The one who represses suffers in direct measure. The blocker and the blocked enter together into the clinic.
Psychoanalytic resistance takes the form not of the barricade but of the stoppage—the kind that dams up desire and obstructs traumatic knowledge. In this form, resistance in the psyche constitutes a kind of formal antipode to political resistance: it is conservative, allergic to change, and aims for the kind of frictionless normativity against which the unconscious drives rail. Meanwhile, we associate political resistance with change itself, with a blockade that pushes for revolution rather than a blockage that censors its very possibility.
Freud set in motion this confusion in terms, if not tongues. In 1911, Freud addressed his followers gathered at Nuremberg. There, he restated the import of his practice, now more firmly established: “the task of psychoanalysis lies not at all in the discovering of complexes, but in the dissolving of resistances.” We might read Freud here as urging his followers to help patients traverse and transgress their resistances, acquiring rather than anesthetizing the pain of being in relation and thus being fully alive. Indeed, he would write, “The action undertaken to protect repression is observable in analytic treatment as resistance.” To approach freedom, we must, paradoxically, cease to resist. We must face our repressive impulses and work through them, grasp for something beyond them. Yet resistance is also the registration, in both psychical and political realms, of a bit of history—history that insists on making its mark felt, that refuses to be tidied away, that asks for its due.
Importantly, blockage is not only a psychic architecture. It is also the border, the border agent, the checkpoint, the violent obstruction of movement that conspires to produce immobility through defeat and exhaustion. What’s inside and what’s outside rhyme, and Freud knew this: the self-censor he discovered inside was inspired by the thousands of state censors redacting his own letters.
“To approach freedom, we must, paradoxically, cease to resist. Yet resistance is also the registration, in both psychical and political realms, of history that insists on making its mark felt, that refuses to be tidied away, that asks for its due.”
While the blockade interrupts the traffic of power, the blockage clogs a thoroughfare of consciousness—shunting perceived threat beyond the limits of recognition. But the signifying activity of this content is not diminished by its deportation to the unconscious, and the truth about fascism and imperial capitalism does not disappear by shipping protestors to detention centers. The pain (in the first instance) and violence (in the second) only grow with each disavowal of reality.
When Ghassan Kanafani was killed by the Mossad in 1972, and when Mahmoud Khalil was detained by ICE in 2025, it was, one could say, a resistance to resistance—an effort made by the psychic life of empire to destroy or eliminate opposition, to repress the refusal of repression. This is a kind of resistance that psychoanalysis can actually address. Unlike the first schema, this one divides the subject and object. Instead of repressing a memory or event or feeling, empire seeks to eliminate the populations it wishes not to recognize. But even as resistance splits its loyalty to liberation in the frameworks of psychoanalysis and revolutionary politics, the hard line remains the same: repression is not a solution; it is the cause of a more painful symptom.
Global inaction in the face of a mediatized genocide recalls the structure of a third kind of resistance, the kind of resistance the body builds to antibiotics, or allergens, or disease. Another word for this kind of resistance is desensitization, and this one functions, like Freud’s, in service of repression when reality has become inescapable—when we know that another hospital has been bombed, another university has been reduced to dust, another strike has cleared human life to make room for colonial real estate. For those who can no longer escape what Freud called “unwanted truths,” this third resistance is a final defense against converting truth into knowledge.
A blockade is a refusal of not knowing as a social and political principle: the interruption of trade routes by militant resistance groups, limbs linked and caked in plaster, bodies before a boarding dock. It is the refusal to treat violence as a site-specific injury, a pin driven into the mythic bubble that isolates here from there. The blockade insists on making explicit how the apparent placidity of here depends upon the brutalization of there. The blockage insists that here remain insulated against whatever happens there. It is the wish not to know, often asserted as a right.
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The psychoanalyst must analyze this wish and help the patient recognize their difference, their constitutive division. After all, psychoanalysis gives us a framework for linking this ill-fated attempt at escape with seemingly deracinated pains through the return of the repressed, the theory of the symptom. As fascism has compressed the wildness of our political present through the repressive mechanism of reactionary policy, we are left to look for the tics, phobias, and secondary gains of a population clinging to its symptoms, believing this dissimulation of truth to be a workable obviation of its ultimate confrontation. What makes this kind of repression different is that the ones who suffer are not the ones who wish not to know, but the ones whom power wishes not to know—the ones whom power wishes to repress, to obliterate from view. They are kept at the gates of recognition.
Conceived in this way, psychoanalysis is a project on the side of material and political reality, bringing patients out of isolation and into social struggles. More frequently, however, it is glossed in reverse: as one of isolated amelioration for the stubborn and incorrigible individual. It is both a political and clinically technical question whether psychoanalysis exists only in the closed circuit of an individual’s singular suffering or whether it is a social-scientific practice of enlarging the scope of a person’s world. Either way, the wish not to know is the mechanism by which political and psychical resistance often work at cross-purposes, historically splitting psychoanalytic institutions in their aims.
“What makes this kind of repression different is that the ones who suffer are not the ones who wish not to know, but the ones whom power wishes not to know—the ones whom power wishes to repress, to obliterate from view. They are kept at the gates of recognition.”
Should psychoanalysis only succeed at rendering patients compliant in their cure, bringing them into the zone where ordinary unhappiness may be purchased? If so, Freud’s pithy edict for the aim of psychoanalysis is now but an epitaph. For over a hundred years, psychoanalysis has been critiqued— often rightly—as a tool for nullifying political resistance or, worse, for offering a slew of new diagnoses that capture and repress political actors. Going against resistance, psychoanalysts got turned around. They went from being those who study and confront repression’s “no” to being the doctors of the normative. Psychoanalysis became repressive itself. By virtue of resistance, it has seemed to escape the notice of psychological institutions that this anti-social method and aim is itself a political decision.
Part of this slippage—from the real to its repression, from militancy to delusion—lies in the fact that many of the terms from the clinic can be made to rhyme with a lexicon of the left (alienation, repair, enactment). Most obvious perhaps is the term resistance itself, that thing individuals and collectives do to reject the state of the world, collapsed with that thing patients do, mobilizing anything to impede the work of psychoanalysis, especially analytical process and progress. We can hear this not just in English but in French: Manifestation means both symptom and protest. Between resistance and manifestation, in their doubleness, their duplicity, Freud and the vanguard of left clinicians have named our symptoms—whether pedestrian or extreme—as being from this world. We are sick with it and we are sick of it. That we are sick of it is not the sickness itself.
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Despite its initial project to traverse psychical resistances, psychoanalysis is now all too frequently a party to the project of delimiting the other resistance—political resistance—siding with the very repressive instincts it used to meet in battle. We see a passage from the aim of piercing the blockage to one of breaking the blockade. It seems, at times, that psychoanalysis is no longer on the side of the unconscious, on the side of desire and of tarrying with traumatic knowledge incompatible with structures of psychosocial repression.
As psychoanalytic and psychological institutions capitulate to the project of fascism once more, we hear a chorus calling resistance an epistemic break rather than a response to one. We can see this in the neat pathologies that have been circulated and applied to Palestinian militants—as psychotic—and we also see it in the hiving off of anti-Zionist Jews as self-hating. We see it in the very premise that to work to know the world as it is is anti-psychoanalytic; an insult hurled for a hundred years from the right flank of the practice towards the left.
It would be easy then to give up the ghost, to let psychoanalysis go. But why should psychoanalysis retreat from collective symptoms back into the consulting room for individual treatment—its limited sanctuary for lone individuals—away from strikes, riots, and uprisings, and toward complacency and normativity, if not quite literally marriage and babies?
This contest over what psychoanalysis attends to and to whom it attends is being restaged now, between psychoanalysis as resistance to the annihilation of difference and a psychoanalysis resistant to the world. As Juliet Mitchell reminds us, “To be human is to be subjected to a law which decenters and divides: sexuality is created in a division, the subject is split; but an ideological world conceals this from the conscious subject who is supposed to feel whole and certain of a sexual identity. Psychoanalysis should aim at a destruction of this concealment and at a reconstruction of the subject’s construction in all its splits.” She continues, “This may be an accurate theory, it is certainly a precarious project.” In the intervening years since Mitchell first addressed the feminists who mistook Freud, it has only become more so.
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So the accusation of non-psychoanalysis comes, from the analyst, at the moment the clinic dares to be of the world. So the accusation of madness comes the minute the militant acts.
And we find ourselves remote-witnessing moments like these in the endless barrage of images and text. They wrench apart the borders of the blockage imposed between us and the world by those who wish us not to see, confronting us instead with the urgent demand to be of and in the world—to act—whether or not we live up to the call.
There’s a presumptive route towards what we might describe as empathetic action: the kind of collective galvanization whose tide crests out of boiled blood, a lovingly directed rage animated by a shared conception of humanity and a claim to life, safety, liberty, and individual–communal sovereignty. Yet, we need new psychosocial models for what it takes to turn knowledge into action—ones that grapple with the persistence and immediacy with which we witness global suffering. Records of destroyed lifeworlds are contained in our pockets. Such atrocity images produce a multiplicity of contradictory responses: demands for peace and ceasefire, justification for annihilation, evidence (for juridical assessment or for the court of public opinion) of atrocity, denialist and conspiratorial doubts about veracity. These reactions illustrate the spectrum of impulses that violence-as-spectacle can elicit: from the urge to consume and obliterate the Other to the urgency to defend and act in solidarity with the Other.
Somewhere along the way, though, a constant state of compassionate helplessness breeds inertia. There’s something about the atrocity image, as John Berger argues, that leads to an incapacitating arrest of the viewer: a moment of virtual engulfment into people’s suffering that we struggle to assimilate into our days, into our lives. The distance between the purportedly ethical act of witnessing (knowledge, awareness, empathic seeing) and our capacity to mobilize towards an emancipatory horizon reveals the presence (or absence) of the psychoanalytic animator in which resistance becomes a conceivable and claimable thing—the perpetually beautiful struggle to radically, dramatically reconstitute the “we.”
This, then, is our work. In a moment when resistance is contested, try as they might to shut us down and shut us out, and when we must ask who now dictates the strike and the riot, Joshua Clover reminds us, “Thoroughfare, public square, pipeline, railway, dockside, airport, border, these will be our places.” See you there.