ABSTRACT
The Catholic church had what was called a “playbook” to respond to accusations of sexual misconduct. Psychoanalysis, similarly, has their own playbook, one based on individualizing the problem in conceptualization, in intervention, and in prevention strategies. As #MeToo continues to highlight the frequencies of sexual harassment and violence for the cultural body, psychoanalytic training programs have held rigidly to the idea of what Muriel Dimen called the “bad apple,” where the accused or/and the identified victim are seen as the problem and exiled from the community. This chapter outlines what has appeared to be the psychoanalytic playbook around sexual misconduct. Shifting the dynamics of sexual violence to be seen as institutional acts enables an institutionally based response. This move to the institutional body requires a theory of agency focused on the more-than-human, where responsibility and accountability can be shared throughout the institutional body, to create a new transgressive “playbook,” focused on the dynamics of power and agency. Integrating ideas from posthumanism and new materialisms with psychoanalysis, this chapter proposes a multifaceted approach to sexual violations that attempts to work through our history of misconduct, silencing, amnesia, and bullying, shifting our collective habit of re-enacting “known secrets” to articulating and processing them.
