GCAS: You are a practising psychoanalytic psychotherapist and a PhD researcher at GCAS. What prompted you to begin your PhD journey as an established professional, and what has your experience been so far?
Gabriella Hiatt: My interest in doing a PhD really gathered as I was settling into private practice and craving a continuation of learning. I realized pretty quickly that to be in private practice can be just that—private. I had finished a postgraduate fellowship, and suddenly I was without those forums for reading and thinking with other people.
And I think I was looking for a place where what I was encountering in the clinic could continue to be thought about. The things I was reading weren’t abstract to me. They were ideas that helped me make sense of the people I was seeing every week, and the people I was seeing every week were also constantly complicating the ideas I was reading.
So the PhD grew out of a desire for more learning, but also for a kind of intellectual company. I wanted my clinical work to interpenetrate with the ideas and theories of other people, rather than having those things exist in separate compartments.
And my experience at GCAS so far has given me that. I’ve met colleagues and students from all over the world, both through the classes I teach and through the yearly seminars. There’s something very rewarding about being part of a community where people think seriously and not-so-seriously together.
GCAS: Can you tell us more about the line of enquiry in your PhD research?
Gabriella Hiatt: I’m interested in language and the body, and in particular how we came to think of them as separate. My research was stirred up by something I kept encountering in psychotherapy: the tendency to treat talking and the body as if they belong to different domains. Psychoanalysis can sometimes seem to privilege language while forgetting that speech is something a body does. And some somatic approaches, in their effort to correct that imbalance, can end up treating language as though it were somehow the problem—as though the body were the more authentic site of experience and words merely get in the way. I don’t think either position quite captures what’s happening in bodies that speak.
So I’m interested in the history of that split and in what happens to psychoanalysis when we take seriously the fact that speech is embodied and that language doesn’t arrive from somewhere outside the body. And in the other direction, when approaching the body, say in the phrase “What are you feeling in your body?” we cannot escape language to make sense of things. We resort to metaphor, interpretation, and narrative to answer that question. Language is woven through our bodies, not seamlessly and without complication.
A lot of the research has taken me through philosophy, psychoanalysis, the history of psychiatry, and questions about anatomy and the senses. I’m interested in the ways certain bodily openings—mouth, ear, eye, genitals—have been theorized as sites where the body and language meet, or fail to meet.
GCAS: You have once mentioned that your research emerged out of “vexing irritation”. What do you see as the main blind spots or misconceptions in psychoanalysis today?
Gabriella Hiatt: There have always been blind spots in psychoanalysis, as there are in any discipline. And I don’t necessarily think the blind spots disappear, just as our unconscious can never become fully available to any of us. But the blind spots, the little black holes in the field of psychoanalysis’ vision, do tend to take on new forms.
One ongoing one I see in psychoanalysis is the tendency to turn concepts that are meant to illuminate psychic life into explanations that obscure the social and material conditions in which that psychic life takes place. Lara Sheehi’s critique of the use of “splitting” has been important for me here. Psychoanalysis can sometimes describe a person’s refusal, anger, or inability to accept oppressive realities as evidence of psychic splitting, when what looks like “splitting” may actually be an intelligible response to horrific situations, say apartheid or genocide, to throw out a couple of examples. In that case, the analyst risks locating the problem in the patient rather than asking what in the patient’s world might make that response meaningful.
What I find unfortunate is that the analyst can then reproduce the very split they are diagnosing between the psyche and the social world. For me, that raises a broader question about psychoanalysis. When does our theoretical language help us hear something that would otherwise remain unconscious, and when does it become a way of not hearing what is actually there? I think that is one of the ongoing challenges of psychoanalytic practice—to remain attentive to the concepts we inherit without allowing them to become reflexive blinders.
So, yes, “vexing irritation” is probably a pretty accurate description of what gets me going. It’s a theme in my life that starts with being perturbed and then I set about figuring out what is bothering me so much and sometimes it’s a fruitful process. Don’t ask me about when it’s not!
GCAS: How has your experience at GCAS informed your professional practice?
Gabriella Hiatt: GCAS has given me more occasions to think about the people I see in the clinic, but also to return to the case studies and clinical writings of other analysts. I read Freud, Lacan, Ella Sharpe, Ferenczi, Winnicott, and others trying to make sense of how they dealt with their patients’ symptoms and suffering, and I’m often baffled by what I encounter. Sometimes I’m struck by the brilliance of an interpretation; other times I find myself wondering how on earth they arrived at it, or what might be getting missed.
I’m skeptical of any one approach that claims to have the answer. I think my skepticism is generative. I don’t imagine that someone knows, at least not in any final sense. But I take real pleasure in mulling things over, finding my own bungled way through a clinical question, and sometimes sharing that with other people.
There’s something important about having to contend with the presence of other people. That’s part of what GCAS has given me. Other people get inside your thinking. You have to respond to things you wouldn’t have encountered sitting alone with your books. And that has been very useful to me clinically. It has made me more attentive to the ways that thinking itself happens between people, rather than simply being something one person produces in isolation.
GCAS: Alongside your own research, you also lecture on the GCAS MA Psychoanalysis programme. What is your approach to teaching psychoanalysis, and which themes and approaches do you centre?
Gabriella Hiatt: I enjoy teaching what I’m interested in learning about myself. It makes teaching more lively, that’s for sure, but it also means I get to learn from the students, since I’m thirsty to learn more and I’m not settled in my knowing. Students contribute so much to the way I think about a subject.
My last course was Language and the Body, and the one I’m about to teach is The Devocalization of Logos. Language and the Body was fairly broad and touched on many dimensions of the subject. This one is narrower. We’re going to stay with a particular text by Adriana Cavarero. It follows my interest in the genealogy of the separation between mind and body in Western thought. I’m interested in some of the earlier moments when thought begins to be imagined as something that can happen apart from the voice and, in some sense, apart from the body. You can see important beginnings of this in Plato, where thought becomes the soul’s silent conversation with itself.
That may sound like a small shift, but it has enormous consequences. Once thought can happen silently inside the soul, speech can begin to look like something secondary: an outward expression of an interior thought that was already complete. And I think that has a long afterlife in how we understand the relationship between mind, language, and the body.
So the course is partly a genealogy of that separation, but it’s also an attempt to ask what happens when we start questioning it. What do we lose when we imagine thought as fundamentally silent and interior? What happens to the voice, to the body, and to the presence of other people? Those are the types of questions I expect we’ll be turning over in the course.
GCAS: In your recent paper “Just Talking: On the Separation of Speech from Soma”, published in the International Body Psychotherapy Journal: The Art and Science of Somatic Praxis, you argue that the split between speech and the body goes back to Enlightenment mind–body dualism. What do you think is lost when therapy treats talking as separate from the body?
Gabriella Hiatt: On one side, we can be fed the idea that talk is an outgrowth of the mind, that there’s a disembodied mental process that then gets translated into words. On the other, particularly in some forms of somatic psychotherapy, we can get the opposite idea: that the body is where the real experience is and language is somehow secondary, intellectualized, or a defense against bodily truth.
I think something is lost in both of these divisions: the effects of their interplay and the involvement of other people. Bourdieu writes about how bodies always pass through the “sieve of culture.” We don’t have unmediated access to the body any more than we have unmediated access to experience through language.
What interests me are the hiccups and interruptions in between: the linguistic and bodily gaffes, the things that come out wrong, the moments when the body does something language can’t quite account for, or language does something the body seems to contradict. Those aren’t simply obstacles to some underlying truth. They’re part of how experience takes shape.
I think this matters clinically. I’m wary of treating a symptom as either a purely bodily event or a message in disguise that simply needs to be translated into language. A symptom emerges somewhere in between—in a history of bodily experience, language, and our relations with other people. We don’t always need to decode it. Sometimes we need to pay attention to how it is taking shape.
GCAS: What will your research focus on going forward, and which themes do you find most urgent to explore?
Gabriella Hiatt: I’m increasingly interested in the bodily openings as sites where these questions become especially difficult.
The mouth is an obvious one because it’s where voice, breath, eating, sexuality and language all converge. The ear raises a different problem because hearing is never simply receiving information; we’re affected by what we hear before we necessarily know what we’ve heard. The eye brings in questions of looking, being seen, the gaze, and the strange split between seeing and being seen.
And then there are the genital orifices, which introduce an enormous history of anxiety around sexuality, pleasure, contamination, and the boundaries of the body.
What happens if we don’t treat these simply as anatomical objects, but ask how they have been made meaningful—medically, politically, philosophically, religiously, psychoanalytically. That’s what I’m into right now in my research and writing.
Gabriella Hiatt teaches in the GCAS MA Psychoanalysis. Visit Gabriella’s psychoanalytic psychotherapy website.