Julie Reshe is a Ukrainian-born philosopher and psychoanalyst and a visiting professor at University College Cork and University College Dublin. She is known for her works on negative psychoanalysis and is a Director of the Institute of Psychoanalysis at the Global Centre for Advanced Studies.
Julie Reshe advances a radically âÂÂnegativeâ alternative to contemporary therapeutic culture, which she sees as dominated by compulsory positivity, self-improvement, and the promise of healing. She rejects the assumption that suffering individuals are exceptional cases in need of cure and instead poses a provocative question: what if the entire social order is terminally ill? In this view, the widespread psychologization of societyâÂÂwhere personal growth, self-care, and emotional repair are treated as universal solutionsâÂÂbecomes a form of ideological management. It offers false hope, encourages âÂÂself-cure,â and ultimately sustains disappointment. Drawing on Lacanian psychoanalysis, Reshe challenges redemptive narratives in education and therapy. Like Jacques Lacan, she resists messianic positions that promise salvation, transformation, or harmony between individual and collective good. For her, the culture of positivityâÂÂâÂÂwishing people wellâÂÂâÂÂconceals a denial of structural lack and antagonism.
In education, she critiques developmental and progressive models that frame learning as continuous upward growth. While engaging with Catherine Malabou and her concept of plasticity, Reshe warns against reducing plasticity to flexibilityâÂÂwhere students appear active but are still shaped within predetermined frameworks. Even critical pedagogies risk becoming another form of managed transformation that sustains the fantasy of wholeness or self-realization. Instead, Reshe emphasizes âÂÂdestructive plasticityâÂÂ: the capacity not merely to be formed but to have form shattered. This negative orientation resists therapeutic redemption and refuses the promise that education, analysis, or self-work will deliver completeness. Her project ultimately insists on confronting lack, breakdown, and structural sickness rather than masking them with optimistic narratives of cure and progress.
Various authors have engaged with Reshe's work in their discussions of pessimism and pessimistic traditions, of negativity and feminist critique, and in the context of contemporary psychoanalytic theory.