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A groundbreaking clinical and theoretical exploration of those dimensions of human subjectivity that transcend both the individual and social ties.
Every individual, Sigmund Freud claimed, "carries on a twofold existence: one to serve his own purposes and the other as a link in a chain, in which he serves against, or at any rate without, any volition of his own." What are the implications of this involuntary servitude for our understanding of human subjectivity? Drawing on classic and contemporary works by Freud, Jacques Lacan, and Willy Apollon, as well as the author's own experience as an analysand and an analyst, Links in a Chain explores the surprisingly transindividual character of the human subject to which psychoanalysis gives access, from Freud's early hypothesis of a "collective mind" sustained by affects to historical examples of unconscious inheritance and transmission such as we find in moments of revolution. Tracy McNulty pushes the boundaries of clinical practice by proposing that the end of an analysis is concerned at its core with the emergence and advancement of a quest of desire that transcends the individual.
"Impressively wide-ranging and highly readable, Links in a Chain significantly expands the conceptual resources of psychoanalysis for thinking the collective, the political, and the human. By returning to marginal yet decisive moments in Freud (Totem and Taboo, Moses and Monotheism) by way of Lacan and Apollon, McNulty theorizes a mode of identification that proceeds not through knowledge, representation, or conscious adherence but rather through affective and bodily transmission. This reconceptualization has important implications not only for psychoanalysis but also for political theory, allowing for a rigorous account of collective agency and peoplehood that avoids individualist reduction. The concluding engagement with C. L.R. James and The Black Jacobins is particularly significant in this regard, demonstrating how the book's framework can illuminate emancipatory struggles." — Pietro Bianchi, author of Jacques Lacan and Cinema: Imaginary, Gaze, Formalisation
Tracy McNulty is Professor of Comparative Literature and Romance Studies at Cornell University, an analyst of Gifric and of the Freudian School of Quebec, and a psychoanalyst in private practice in Ithaca, New York. She is the author of The Hostess: Hospitality, Femininity, and the Expropriation of Identity and Wrestling with the Angel: Experiments in Symbolic Life.