Open Seminar Announcement

Centre for Psychoanalytic Studies
University of Essex

Wednesday 12th May 2010
Room 4N.6.1
5.00pm – 6:30pm

Dr Julia Borossa

‘The Extensibility of Psychoanalysis: colonialism, post-colonialism and hospitality’

Dr Julia Borossa is Principal Lecturer and Director of the Centre for Psychoanalysis at Middlesex University. She has published widely on the history of the psychoanalytic movement and on the politics and cultures of psychoanalysis. Most recently, she has edited (with Ivan Ward), a special issue of the journal Psychoanalysis and History entitled Psychoanalysis, Fascism, Fundamentalism (Edinburgh: Edinburgh U.P. 2009).

Abstract: Using a theoretical framework informed by both post-colonial theory and psychoanalysis, this paper will attempt to partially address the question as to whether or not psychoanalysis is promoting a form of subjectivity that is in line with certain political formations, and whether this is linked to its theoretical foundations or to its institutions. In this respect, a central theme of the paper will be the vicissitudes of the deployment of psychoanalysis beyond a Western context by specifically asking who, and what, is marginalised within the movement and why. What are the limits of the hospitality and the extensibility of psychoanalysis?

To illustrate these concerns, the paper will turn to the figure of the psychoanalyst Masud Khan, who emigrated to London from the Indian subcontinent in 1946 and became an important albeit controversial figure within the British Psychoanalytic Society. Khan is the subject of two recent biographies, and a widely discussed memoir by a former patient, the Cambridge economist Wynn Godley. His life and transgressive career, as well as the stories generated about him within the context of British psychoanalytic culture, will be used to raise the question of psychoanalysis’ theoretical difficulties in containing racial and cultural otherness.

ALL WELCOME

Childhood and Creativity: An Apprehension of the Symbolic

Day Conference Sat. 29th May 2010

Anna Freud Centre, London, NW3

What kind of 'creative act' is required to become an adult human being? Adult desires are formed within early attachments, forged on the body, shaped by social prohibitions and articulated through words. Childhood remains not as a residue of development but as a creative force throughout life. This conference explores the theory and practice of child psychoanalysis as an aspect of all psychoanalysis, drawing on the work of two significant figures: Françoise Dolto and Donald Winnicott.

A household name in France due to her many public broadcasts on child welfare, Françoise Dolto is little known in the English speaking world, with only two of her 30 books translated. A colleague of Jacques Lacan, she worked as one of the first child analysts in France, using her highly developed intuition to work with children who might otherwise have been dismissed as untreatable.

What makes Dolto so interesting is that she combines a variety of different psychodynamic therapeutic perspectives to enable the understanding of children and parents, rather than remaining in a conventional, analytically bounded framework. She calls upon psychosomatic understanding, and couple, family and group therapeutic resources within her work as a child psychoanalyst. She considers the consequences of transgenerational processes, suggesting, for example, that it took three generations to create a psychotic individual.

(from the introduction to Theory and Practice in Child Psychoanalysis: An introduction to the work of Françoise Dolto ed. Guy Hall, Françoise Hivernel, and Sian Morgan)

KEYNOTE SPEAKERS

Christopher Reeves (UK)
(Psychotherapist and chair of the Squiggle Foundation)
'Let's pretend …': exploring the links between imagination, creativity, play and interpretation

Sian Morgan (UK)
(Psychotherapist and author)
Separation and Creativity: when 'lets pretend' goes wrong and transitions fail

Sharon Kivland (UK & FR)
(Artist and lecturer)
It is only the first step that counts: Desire held in check in three works of art

Tamara Landau (FR)
(Psychoanalyst and sculpture)
Creativity and the symbolic structuring of time and desire in Winnicott and Dolto

Bice Benvenuto (IT)
(Psychoanalyst)
Little Sammy's magic face and the poetics of the unconscious

Ann Marie Canu (FR)
(Psychoanalyst and child psychiatrist)
Title TBC

Joan Raphael-Leff (UK)
(Psychoanalyst and author)
'Dreamers by daylight' - some childhood sources of creativity.

CHAIR:
Isobel Urquhart
(Psychotherapist and lecturer, Homerton College Cambridge)

REGISTRATION
£60 Full Price / £45 Students and Concs
(£5 discount for Friends of The Freud Museum)

For online registration, please click HERE

Or please send a cheque payable to 'The Freud Museum'. Please include your name, address, profession and contact phone number.

The Freud Museum, 20 Maresfield Gardens, London NW3 5SX Tel: 020 7435 2002 Email: info@freud.org.uk

Freud Museum
20 Maresfield Gardens, London NW3 5SX
Tel: +44 (0)20 7435 2002
www.freud.org.uk

Sarah Pucill at the Freud Museum

Film screenings and discussion

Wednesday 21st April 2010 7pm

Sarah Pucill

Taking My Skin, 2006
16mm b&w, sound 35min
Fall in Frame, 2009
16mm b&w, sound 18min

The screening will be followed by discussion between Adriana Cerne and the filmmaker, chaired by Dr Margherita Sprio from University of Essex.

I’m not aware of you taking my skin’, says the artist’s mother to the camera as it zooms in on her eye as close as the lens will allow. Taking My Skin tracks a dialogue between the artist and her mother. Their exchange ranges from narrating the filming process ‘in the moment’ to relations in an earlier time – ‘how long do you think it takes for a child to become separate?’ Throughout the journey film spaces continuously dissolve and collapse only to separate again. Formally and thematically, the film is an exploration of closeness, of synching, and the threat this poses to the self.

Freudian themes will be explored in two of Sarah Pucill’s films using psychoanalytic tropes of Projection, Surface and Screen. Inspired by feminist post Freudian writing which has challenged the phallo-centrism in Freud, Pucill’s films give pride of place to the mother-daughter and 'other' female to female relationships. The films that will be screened and discussed include the award-winning Taking My Skin (35min, 2006) as well as her most recent film Fall In Frame, (18min, 2009).

Sarah Pucill’s films have been screened and won awards at major international film festivals, have been televised and screened internationally in galleries and museums. She lives and works in London and is a Senior Lecturer at University of Westminster.

Adriana Cerne is a Doctoral candidate at the University of Leeds, researching feminist counter-cinema films and filmmaking from the 1970s to the early 1980s, with a focus on the early work of Chantal Akerman. She contributed to the book Psychoanalysis and the Image: Transdisciplinary Perspectives, which forms part of Blackwell’s New Interventions in Art History series. She teaches Visual Culture and Theory at the University of the Arts London and at the Royal College of Art.

Dr Margherita Sprio is currently a lecturer in Art History and Film in the Department of Art History and Theory at University of Essex. She is currently writing a manuscript called Contemporary Art and Film that explores the continued relationship between art and film history and it addresses how film makers such as Sarah Pucill and John Maybury, (amongst others) navigate their own practice in relation to contemporary debates about visual culture.

Tickets: £8 / £5 Friends. Please pay on the door, but phone or email to secure a place.

Tel: 020 7435 2002 Email: info@freud.org.uk

Freud Museum
20 Maresfield Gardens, London NW3 5SX
Tel: +44 (0)20 7435 2002
www.freud.org.uk

The Freud Memorial Lecture and Reception

Thursday 6th May 2010 7pm

Leadership – Theory and Practice

Michael Brearley

How do leaders and leadership skills facilitate the functioning of a work group, a team or an organisation? How are groups constituted and what undermines them? What are the emotional bonds that bind people together in a common enterprise? And what are the functions of leadership?

These are some of the questions that Mike Brearley will address on the day of the general election in his Freud Memorial lecture, drawing on his diverse experience as former England cricket captain and (a far more dangerous undertaking) President of the British Psychoanalytical Society.

Mike Brearley is a psychoanalyst and sports journalist. He studied philosophy at Cambridge University at undergraduate and post-graduate level while pursuing a career as a County cricketer with Middlesex. As England captain he won 17 of 31 games, losing only 4, an outstanding record that has never been bettered. He was awarded the OBE in 1978 and published The Art of Captaincy in 1985. He works in private practice in London, and teaches and writes on psychoanalysis.

Venue: The Anna Freud Centre, Maresfield Gardens NW3, followed by a reception at the Freud Museum.

£25 / £20 Friends and students. Booking essential.

For online booking click here or please send a cheque payable to 'The Freud Museum London' :

The Freud Museum, 20 Maresfield Gardens, London NW3 5SX.
Please include your name and address and a contact telephone number.

This is a fundraising evening, and all proceeds from the talk will go towards the conservation, research and educational work of the Freud Museum.

Tel: +44 (0) 20 7435 2002 Email: info@freud.org.uk

Freud Museum
20 Maresfield Gardens, London NW3 5SX
Tel: +44 (0)20 7435 2002
www.freud.org.uk

Lecturer Post

The Centre for Psychoanalytic Studies is seeking to appoint a Lecturer/ Senior Lecturer/ Reader to teach on and play a major role in the development of its new Foundation Degree (and BA Hons) in Therapeutic Communication and Therapeutic Organisations aimed at those working with troubled, challenging, or vulnerable adults. The successful applicant will take an active part in teaching and developing this programme working closely with the team staffing a parallel programme for those working with children.

Applicants must be a member of the BPC, UKCP, or equivalent, must have a relevant MA/MSc or equivalent professional qualification, and must have experience of working with adults in a therapeutic or caring context. Experience in relevant teaching or demonstrable potential to achieve this is applicable for Lecturer level appointments. For senior lecturer appointments substantial experience in teaching and academic leadership is essential. The post is available either full-time or half-time (with proportionate duties) to suit the needs of different applicants; we aim to appoint the strongest applicant on whichever basis. This post will be worked between both the Colchester and the Southend campuses.

Please use the link below for a full job description, person specification and further information relating to this post. Please read this information carefully before applying for this post as it contains details of documents that must be attached to your application. Applications should be made on-line, but if you would like advice or help in making an application, or need information in a different format, please telephone (01206 874588/873521).

Applications can be made via the University HR website http://www.essex.ac.uk/vacancies/.

Sigmund Freud's Dora: A case of mistaken identity - Film Screening and Discussion

Wednesday 14th April 2010, 7pm

Anthony McCall, Claire Pajaczkowska, Andrew Tyndall, Jane Weinstock and Ivan Ward
1979, 16mm colour, 40min

Screening followed by discussion with two of the film makers, Claire Pajaczkowska and Ivan Ward

30 years after it was made, the position of Sigmund Freud's Dora: A case of mistaken identity within the world of independent film is assured. In 2008 it was shown at Tate Modern for the 50th anniversary celebrations for the film theory journal Screen, and in 2009 it inaugurated the new Whitechapel Gallery film programme, screened four times with other works and public discussions. But the film is not just an 'art house' film. It is above all the reading of a text, Freud's 'Dora' case, what it shows us about Freud's work and what we can learn from it today.

In 1899, Sigmund Freud began treatment with an 18-year-old girl who was brought to him for analysis by her father after she had written a suicide note. Freud was eager to use this case to demonstrate the hypotheses laid out in his Interpretation of Dreams but after only three months of treatment the young woman walked out, without being cured.

Five years later Freud published an account of this failed treatment, calling it a “Fragment of an Analysis” and giving his patient the name Dora – that of a servant in his household.

Dora has been a focus for the appropriation of psychoanalysis by feminist theory. Questions about the exchange of women, the representation of female sexuality, and the marginal or contradictory position of women in language, have been discovered in her story.

But the descriptions Freud gives of Dora are not innocent documentary facts. Freud constructs her as a character in the structure of his “novella”, as a recollection of the words he remembers her having spoken, as an object of his scientific detective-work. Thus the presentation of her sexuality is also a function of these analytic and narrative processes.

The psychoanalytic method itself is a process of reading the language and symptoms of the patient; Freud’s written case history is a reading of that reading, which we in turn read.

The film, Sigmund Freud’s Dora starts from the position that these processes of representation are not only a factor in psychoanalytic texts. They exist no less in the conventions of film editing than they do in advertising; no less in the iconography of the mother than they do in pornography.

Claire Pajaczkowska is a senior lecturer at the Royal College of Art. She is the author of Perversion in the Ideas in Psychoanalysis series, and co-editor, with Ivan Ward, of Shame and Sexuality: Psychoanalysis and Visual Culture (2009)

Ivan Ward is director of education at the Freud Museum. He is the author of Introducing Psychoanalysis (Icon Books) and Phobia and Castration in the Ideas in Psychoanalysis series, which he edits.

Copies of the book The presentation of case material in clinical discourse (ed. Ivan Ward; Karnac Books) will be available on the night.

Tickets: £8 / £5 Friends. Please pay on the door, but phone or email to secure a place.

Tel: 020 7435 2002 Email: info@freud.org.uk

Freud Museum
20 Maresfield Gardens, London NW3 5SX
Tel: +44 (0)20 7435 2002
www.freud.org.uk