First World Problems and Gated Communities of the Mind: An Ethics of Place in Psychoanalysis

Using the social meme of "first world problems" as an opening, this paper articulates a continuous field of psychoanalysis which extends from the individual to the social, and is demarcated by an ethics of place. Psychoanalytic processes are seen as taking place in a number of possible material settings, delimited by structures of framing which necessarily must exclude significant elements in order to make process accessible for work. This view is dependent on understanding that the unconscious operates within the heterologous and distinct registers of the collective as well as of the individual. Clinical examples help illustrate these ideas.