A good way to think of a psychoanalytic autopsy is as an “after-death” analysis of a subject’s psychic life — not literally a medical dissection, but an interpretive reconstruction of how unconscious dynamics, traumas, defenses, and transfers were structured in a person or in a historical situation. It borrows the metaphor of autopsy (opening the body to see what was hidden) but applies it to the symbolic, narrative, and affective life of the subject.
Here’s a way to proceed:
1. Clarify the Object of the Autopsy
- Is the focus on a person (e.g. a deceased writer, political leader, or patient whose case history ended)?
- Or on a text/event (e.g. the “death” of a social movement, a cultural artifact, or a failed analysis)?
This determines whether you are reconstructing the unconscious life of an individual, or of a discourse/community.
2. Gather the Remains (the “material evidence”)
- Letters, diaries, case notes, dreams, symptoms, slips of the tongue, creative works.
- For collective objects: archives, myths, cultural productions, institutional records.
These fragments serve as the psychic “organs” laid out for examination.
3. Trace the Symptom-Formation
- Look for repetition patterns (compulsions, returns of the same).
- Identify splits (what was spoken, what was silenced).
- Note defenses (disavowal, projection, idealization, negation).
This is the equivalent of noting where the tissue shows lesions, scars, or foreign bodies.
4. Reconstruct the Transferential Scene
- Ask: who was the Other for this subject?
- What demands, expectations, or prohibitions structured their psychic economy?
- Where was love, hatred, guilt, or desire located?
This gives you the intersubjective “circulation of libidinal blood.”
5. Situate the Trauma
- Was there an originary wound, a scene that became the unconscious kernel?
- How was it repeated, displaced, or symbolized?
- What was never integrated (the “foreign body” in Freud’s sense)?
This is like locating the cause of death: what event the subject could not metabolize.
6. Read Against the Grain
- Remember that much of the unconscious appears in gaps, contradictions, and silences.
- The psychoanalytic autopsy is not about harmonizing, but about respecting the fragments.
- Sometimes what remains incoherent is the most revealing.
7. Write the Autopsy Report
- Your “report” is not a verdict but a narrative reconstruction: how a psychic life was shaped, how it succumbed, what survives in symptom, work, or trace.
- Tone: not judgmental, but interpretive, respectful of the opacity of the unconscious.
In short:
A psychoanalytic autopsy is a posthumous listening. It is not about “explaining everything,” but about letting the traces of desire, trauma, and relation speak — as if you were holding one last session with someone who can no longer answer, yet whose silence and remains continue to address you.
Would you like me to illustrate this with a concrete example (say, Kafka, Marilyn Monroe, or even a collapsed social movement) — so that the method comes alive?
