You recently completed your PhD at GCAS, while also training to become a psychoanalytic counselor. Can you talk to us about how theory and practice intersect for you and how these experiences inform each other?
To begin very generally, it seems as if theory and practice are approached as these warring entities, where the former is sequestered to books and academia while the latter is active and what really counts. Especially in these heavily polarized and politicized times, where everyone is urgently acting with or awaiting some kind of movement to swing this broken world in the direction they see fit. So practice seems to take precedence; we should all be in the streets or making changes in our lives.
However, I find this insufficient because it misunderstands the role of the theoretical. It’s not that we read books and then we can march in the streets, but rather, the knowledge with which we work determines the very practices that are allowed and those that are denied to us. Without theorizing our condition and our situation, we limit the very possibilities we have for practices in response to the ills of this world.
To bring this back to your question, I find psychoanalytic theory—primarily via Freud and Lacan, along with a smattering of others—one of the most rigorous and useful theories for approaching an ill world. Not only because the theory itself is useful, but because it gives us insight into why and how we are theorizing beings in the first place. In other words, psychoanalytic theory reveals in an interesting way that the human animal differentiates itself from the non-human animal through our ability to think, to theorize, to look back and reflect, and perhaps above all, to speak.
What it means to be a theorist is not merely to speak of theory widely or to recite the hundreds of books one has read, but to ask why one suffers, why one desires, why one repeats, why the world appears as it does, and, most importantly, to commit to sustaining the very space where these questions can continue to breathe life. And this latter point is also what the end of analysis amounts to for someone like Jacques Lacan: embracing the void. By this I mean maintaining the element of human life that exists as a remainder to certainty, never tying up a loose end, allowing us to continue the important work of thought and producing new ideas that shape and re-shape the very terrain where practice takes place. I can’t really say it better than Hegel did in 1808: “once the realm of representation [Vorstellung] is revolutionized, actuality [Wirklichkeit] will not hold out.” Or in other words (that I have stolen from Todd McGowan), if we change the world in theory, practice cannot hold on much longer.
But for me, psychoanalytic clinical work is the space, par excellence, where this kind of work can happen. Patients enter the clinic with symptoms that have entered their world without definitive meaning, and through analysis, new meaning can be made, allowing them to return to their lives in new and profoundly meaningful ways. It is not merely serendipitous that the split between theory and practice resembles the elongated couch on which the psychoanalytic patient may lie to reflect on their consciousness.
And so, theorizing is not the means to finality but the unremitting willingness to allow one’s coordinates of thought to be transformed.
After completing your PhD, you are now teaching at GCAS and supervising Year 1 PhD students. Can you talk about your approach to teaching and student mentorship? Any interesting learnings?
The most important aspect of working with anyone else in a collaborative effort, as I see it, is that no matter whether we are in a student-teacher, mentor-mentee, colleague, or friendly relationship, it is my duty never to fill the other’s space of desire. By that I mean I would be doing myself, the other, and most importantly, the work a disservice by trying to determine in advance what the other person should want, think, or become, rather than allowing them the space to discover and articulate those things for themselves.
For two (or more) to come together around a topic, project, idea, or whatever, we must maintain the space of potential creation between the individuals for that work to move forward. I have a very strong desire to not only share my knowledge and experiences with anyone I’m working with, but also a desire just as strong to learn from them, to take in their comments, questions, ideas, jokes, etc.
The classroom, as I enjoy it, is a shared space where we all bring our knowledge as well as our unknowing, and mix it all up together. I’ve always walked away more satisfied from classrooms that end with more questions than definitive answers.
Ultimately, I think the best teaching and mentorship is not about producing students who have the answers I have, but about creating the conditions in which they can develop questions, ideas, and ways of thinking that are genuinely their own and, ideally, ones that I could not have arrived at by myself.
Your research explores how psychoanalysis interacts with contemporary capitalism. Can you explain how you understand and elaborate this connection?
When we hear the word ‘capitalism,’ I would wager that most people think of an economic model. Capitalism is a profit-driven, free-market, top-down model of organization. Of course, none of this is untrue. But capitalism is so much more than just that. When we begin to take what Freud brought to the world seriously—the third great insult to humanity: the ego is not master in its own house—we have to start questioning what the effects of such a proclamation are. Freud says this because he sees, again and again, both clinically and politically, people acting against their own best interests; folks with all the knowledge in the world yet still acting in ways that may deliver them directly to pain and misery. And capitalism, as I see it, is not an innocent bystander to this ego distortion, but instead takes advantage of it.
There is something uniquely alienating about the human condition, distanced from others without the security of being able to return to our own minds as safe havens. Capitalist societies provide us with 1,000,001 avenues to deal with this alienation: buy this product, this service. Find the perfect partner through this app, no, this one. Try this new therapy, and then this one, and don’t forget to sign up for bonuses. AI will recreate the God we have lost, and then we will never lack the answers we so desperately crave.
What capitalism sells us is not just junk, but junk branded as a lifestyle, as a life, as a means to reckon with our alienation. But what psychoanalysis makes impossible to ignore is that our attempts to resolve this alienation are themselves often structured by desires we do not fully understand. We can consume endlessly without ever arriving at the satisfaction we imagine consumption will provide, and our only recourse, seemingly, is to keep consuming, keep accumulating, keep attempting to climb the capital-lined ladder. In this sense, capitalism does not simply respond to our unconscious desires, it increasingly organizes itself around the idea of desire itself. It gives form to our constitutive alienation from ourselves and then offers us commodities and money as temporary solutions.
Psychoanalysis therefore gives us a critical vocabulary for understanding capitalism not merely as an economic system, but as a system that engages, exploits, and continually reproduces the very psychic divisions that make us susceptible to capitalism’s promises.
Your work tends to take a pessimistic view of the world at large. Would you agree with this characterization? Do you think there is any hope for us?
I am pessimistic, but I think this is precisely what we need in this time of overloaded optimism. One of the very first ‘political’ books I ever read was Mark Fisher’s Capitalism Realism. He says something in there that has always stuck with me: “Depression is usually characterized as a state of anhedonia, but the condition I’m referring to is constituted not by an inability to get pleasure so much as it by an inability to do anything else except pursue pleasure. There is a sense that ‘something is missing’ – but no appreciation that this mysterious, missing enjoyment can only be accessed beyond the pleasure principle.” I read this as a real indictment of our situation, where we are given more avenues than ever to solve our problems, fix our issues, heal ourselves, heal the world, or worse, ‘find’ ourselves. We are surrounded by optimism at every turn, yet the world around us is burning to the ground, figuratively and literally. In fact, we can only have this much optimism in the face of an ill society, as a response to it.
This is why what we need is not more optimism, but some real, serious pessimism—a pessimism that reckons with the shit storm that we reside in: economically, psychologically, spiritually, and the list goes on. But pessimism does not signal a white flag for our times, it may be the exact position that can liberate us into beautiful, radically new ways of life. I’m drawn to a thinker like Oxana Timofeeva who says very blatantly, “a messianic moment of hope, of believing in the future and in the idea that we are still full of life, puts us to sleep, lost in dreams. Only when already dead, and facing no future, do we really have nothing to lose.”
The question then is, what do we find on the other side of pessimism? Or rather, what can we find when we accept that we are all already dead, all already at the end of times? Here I defer to Jacques Lacan in his 8th seminar on love: “This is where we enter uncharted waters.”
Where can we follow your work, and what’s next for you?
My email is rishabnathan93 [at] gmail.com. Reach out to me, I love talking to people about my work and hearing about theirs. Maybe I’ll even give you my phone number or home address; you never know.
If you want to keep a more mediated relationship with me, follow me on Instagram. Or on Substack, where I try my best to write something thoughtful and useless.
I will continue writing, and continue attending conferences, because I love meeting and speaking with people. Starting January 2027, I will begin seeing patients in Columbus, OH.
