Psychoanalytic interpretation is a pharmakon: remedy, poison, and scapegoat. What heals can also hurt; what enlightens can displace. This paper examines how psychoanalytic interpretation functions as a site of institutional power, both by legitimising bigotry and by shaping how harm is metabolised. We ask not whether such interpretations are ‘accurate’, but what they do, why they are seductive, and what they may foreclose. We pay particular attention to the interaction between psychoanalytic authority, epistemic trust, and institutional violence. What becomes sayable in the name of theory? And when does symbolic engagement substitute for material accountability?

Drawing on autoethnographic material from psychotherapy, psychodynamic training, and psychosocial academic spaces, we trace how psychoanalytic interpretation performs normative work in moments of harm. We examine both how psychoanalytic discourse authorises violent speech by rendering it theoretically legible, and how an over-attunement to intrapsychic and interpsychic dynamics can produce a fundamental misattunement to sociopolitical realities. Following Lara Sheehi (2023; 2026), we argue that this ideological misattunement, sustained through appeals to neutrality, cannot be treated as a benign technical position, and we heed her call to divest from the innocence of words.

Across these contexts, we explore our affective investments in interpretation and how our desire for ‘depth’ may function defensively by warding off feelings of impotence and providing comfort in the face of uncertainty. We argue that interpretive mastery is particularly seductive for trainees and junior scholars, and that trusting Theory can provide a sense of sophistication, reassurance, and belonging. We further reflect on how professional socialisation can ‘thin’ our perceptive and responsive capacities by shaping us toward institutionally rewarded forms of interpretive competence (Taylor & Downes, 2025). We conclude by asking how we might resist the lure of interpretive mastery and remain ‘indigestible’ to institutions (Saketopoulou, 2025).

This paper reflects on the recently published Palgrave Handbook of Psychosocial Studies through the conference theme of trust, mistrust, and community. At this conference last year, the “phantasm of gender” (Butler, 2024) was invoked during the opening plenary, briefly displacing attention from rising global authoritarianism and lingering colonial structures onto the imagined threat of trans subjects. That moment crystallised how trust and mistrust are not simply interpersonal or affective states, but are structured by power: who speaks with institutional authority, whose bodies are rendered suspect, and whose presence is framed as a risk to community.

Reading the Handbook in the context of this moment in psychosocial studies’ communal life, I ask, why should queer and trans people want to see the field of psychosocial studies grow and develop? I trace the tensions that the Handbook makes visible between an ethics of endurance and an ethics of refusal, and between psychosocial studies’ stated political commitments and its uneven engagement with transgender studies, trans embodiment, and the material conditions of life. I argue that transgender studies, a field that has existed at least as long as psychosocial studies, has the potential to reconfigure the moebius strip of the psycho-social into something more complex: a psyche-soma-social studies that takes seriously how structures of power operate through the body. Engaging more deeply with transgender studies can also increase the field’s capacity to respond to contemporary transphobia, including when it emerges within its own academic communities. I suggest that closer engagement with Black and trans analytics requires rethinking what trust means when it is demanded by powerful institutions, how mistrust can function as an ethical stance, and how community might be imagined otherwise, at a moment when the conditions of queer and trans livability are increasingly under threat.

It has been 47 years since Audre Lorde’s “The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House”, 38 since Gayatri Spivak’s “Can the Subaltern Speak?”, and 5 since Paul Preciado’s “Can the Monster Speak?”. In each of these pieces - only a selection from the now prolific genre of ‘Subalterns Begging Institutions to Stop Oppressing Them’ - a minoritarian person directly addressed an audience of predominantly white, bourgeois, cis men and women. Each highlighted how these supposedly progressive institutions continued to enact violence upon minoritarian psyches and bodies. In the case of Lorde and Preciado, they were effectively shouted at and laughed out of the room. And, like most non-white and gender-divergent people, all remain consigned to the periphery of academia and training programmes, often entirely supplemental rather than canonical.

This article explores the repetitive failures of the institution to listen to and be changed by the “speaking subaltern”. What can these repeated enactments teach us about how power functions within the institution (and within ourselves)? What do they reveal about our investments, about the affective economies of academia, about who is not only able to 'speak', but able to be 'heard' to the point in which their voice brings about tangible change? Who is capable of both being significant and enacting significant effects?

Who, in other words, is capable of mattering here? And how might these asymmetries - no doubt both subjective and material - be disrupted? How might majoritarian bodies (persons, institutions, etc.) ethically relate to minoritarian voices? How might we effectively bring about an ‘otherwise’ field which might properly disrupt dominant modes of imperial, colonial, cis-hetero-patriarchial, and capitalistic oppression?