ABSTRACT
Tackling the phenomenon of exclusion from a psychoanalytic viewpoint presents scholars with many difficulties. Ethically, it is a very compelling subject wherein any step taken and felt to be correct immediately turns out to be an insufficient account of the problem. The problem is: how to choose what to include and what to exclude from what is said. This is precisely the question I pose, not only to myself when being in a state of perplexity, but in the light of the present psychoanalytic investigation. I will take a preliminary detour into French psychoanalytic thinking with Piera Aulagnier’s “metapsychology” in order to find the necessary discourse to find the way through this thorny subject. First I will explore her metapsychology, and then by bowing to French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan and Greek philosopher and psychoanalyst Cornelius Castoriadis, I will explore the notions of exclusion and violence. I will do so by looking at them as they appear from three distinct perspectives. First, I will explore them as they appear in the act of representation; second, in the closure of meaning in social institutions; and third, I will attempt to describe the metapsychological dynamics of exclusion and violence from an intrapsychic perspective as they may unfold in an inter-subjective situation. This threefold perspective replicates the movement of the analysis
from the representational to the social and from thence to situating the “subjective”.
