Psycho-Babble On...

Open Seminar schedule at Essex

2011-01-19T13:43:00.001Z

Centre for Psychoanalytic Studies, University of Essex

Open Seminar Schedule – Colchester Campus

Spring Term 2011

2 February 2011: Memory, memorials, and the dynamics of the transmission of a cultural narrative: from the concentration camp to the gay pride parade
Dr Aaron Balick (Centre for Psychoanalytic Studies) and Prof. Rainer Schulze (Department of History) from University of Essex

23 February 2011: Roundtable Discussion on the State Regulation of Counselling and Psychotherapy (Colchester Campus) (Open Seminar)
Panellists: Michael Fischer, King’s College London & Consultant at South London & Maudsley NHS Trust; Malcolm Allen, Chief Executive of British Psychoanalytic Council (BPC); Andrew Samuels, University of Essex & Chair of UKCP

16 March 2011: Cyborgs and Entanglements A Psychoanalytic and Actor Network informed consultancy to a fertility clinic (Colchester Campus) (Open Seminar)
Dr Simon Western from Tavistock and Portman Clinic

The Open Seminars all take place in room 4N.6.1 from 5.00-6.30pm.

All Welcome

Centre for Psychoanalytic Studies, University of Essex
WWW: www.essex.ac.uk/centres/psycho

Open Seminar

2011-01-19T13:05:00.002Z

Centre for Psychoanalytic Studies

University of Essex

Friday 11 February 2011

Open Seminar (Southend Campus)

Emotional Development: Putting ‘Personality Disorder’ on the map (Rex Haigh)

Abstract: The talk will be an explanation of disturbance of emotional development – what is needed for normal and healthy ‘primary emotional development’, what can go wrong with that, and what we can do about it as therapy in ‘secondary emotional development’. I’ll use a ‘tube map’ we have developed at the Department of Health to illustrate it and explain how we are hoping to develop that into an online interactive tool, in partnership with service user organisations. If I have time I will propose some radical rethinking about the disputed territory between ‘complex PTSD’, ‘borderline personality disorder’ and ‘bipolar disorder’.

Rex Haigh is a consultant psychiatrist in Berkshire, clinical advisor to the National Personality Disorder Development Programme, and founder of the ‘Community of Communities’ quality network at the Royal College of Psychiatrists. He is involved with several 3rd sector organisations including Exclusion Link CIC, Emergence CIC, the Association of Therapeutic Communities, Community Housing and Therapy, the Society for Psychotherapy Research and the British and Irish Group for the Study of Personality Disorder. He has written and published numerous articles about therapeutic communities and personality disorder, and is co-editor of both the Jessica Kingsley “Community, Culture and Change” book series and the International Journal of Therapeutic Communities.

The Open Seminars all take place in Southend Lecture Room 5 at 5:30pm.

All Welcome

T 01206 873640 E cpsadmin@essex.ac.uk www.essex.ac.uk/centres/psycho

Open Seminar Announcement

2010-11-30T21:09:00.001Z

Centre for Psychoanalytic Studies

Wednesday 8 December 2010

Open Seminar (Colchester Campus)

Reverie in psycho-social research method (Wendy Hollway, Open University)

Abstract: Social science research is underpinned by a positivist, cognitive analytic epistemology. Psychoanalysis, especially in Bion's concept of reverie, is based on a different kind of knowing which is widely seen as central to clinical technique. How does reverie translate into psycho-social research methodology, with what effects? In this talk, I use examples from my research on the identity transition involved when women become mothers for the first time; examples that pertain to reflexive field notes, psychoanalytic observation, data analysis and writing cases. The direction of these methods is discussed in terms of subjectivity, objectivity, validity and ethics in research knowing.

Wendy Hollway is Professor in Psychology at the Open University. She is interested in applying psychoanalytic principles to theorising subjectivity, to methodology and to empirical research on identity. Her current ESRC-funded Fellowship 'Maternal Identities, Care and Intersubjectivity' uses previous data derived from free association narrative interview and psychoanalytic observation methods and develops epistemological and ethical, as well as ontological, implications. She is working on a book provisionally entitled 'Mothers' Knowing/ Knowing Mothers'.

Discussant: Professor R D Hinshelwood (Centre for Psychoanalytic Studies)

The Open Seminars all take place in room 4N.6.1 from 5.00-6.30pm

All Welcome

T 01206 873640 E cpsadmin@essex.ac.uk www.essex.ac.uk/centres/psycho

Seminar announcement

2010-11-24T14:14:00.000Z

Centre for Psychoanalytic Studies

Friday 26 November 2010

Open Seminar (Southend Campus)

Found objects and mirroring forms (Dr. Ken Wright)

Abstract: I use some comments of Henry Moore about his method of working to consider the relation between outer form and inner experience in the creation of a work of art. Moore valued his ‘found objects’ because they held the seeds of his sculptural ‘ideas’ and although he made no connection between such forms and the ‘forms of feeling’ (Langer), he still described his sculptures in living terms, as though they had an inner life. The idea that physical objects are able to contain ‘forms of feeling’ leads to Winnicott’s work on transitional objects, and a view of the baby’s bit of blanket as a first ‘found object’. I follow this theme through Winnicott’s later work on the mother’s face as the child’s first mirror, and Stern’s work on maternal attunement, and I use their ideas to throw light on aesthetic activity and the process of artistic creation.

Dr. Ken Wright is a member of the British Psychoanalytic Society, Tavistock Society of Psychotherapists and Society of Couple Psychoanalytic Psychotherapists. He is also Patron of the Squiggle Foundation. At different times a general psychiatrist and GP, he now works exclusively as psychoanalyst/psychoanalytic psychotherapist in private practice. He has published many papers and articles from a Winnicottian perspective but is best known for his book Vision and Separation - Between Mother and Baby which was published by Free Association Books, 1991 and awarded the Margaret Mahler Literature prize in 1992. His second book, Mirroring and Attunement: Self-realization in Psychoanalysis and Art, was published last year by Routledge.

The Open Seminars all take place in Southend Lecture Room 5 at 5:30pm.

All Welcome

T 01206 873640 E cpsadmin@essex.ac.uk www.essex.ac.uk/centres/psycho

Remote Control: Psychoanalysis and Television

2010-10-25T17:49:00.002+01:00

LAST CHANCE TO BOOK - REMOTE CONTROL: PSYCHOANALYSIS AND TELEVISION

Saturday 30 October 2010

Day Conference at the Anna Freud Centre

Psychotherapists, psychoanalysts, academics, programme makers and presenters discuss the emotional function and ethics of TV in the modern world.

SATURDAY 30TH OCTOBER 9.30am - 5.00pm

Candida Yates (Introduction)
'Staging the Debate: Remote Control: Television, Media and the Inner World'

Panel 1: Television from both sides of the couch
How does TV culture infiltrate the therapeutic space, and how is psychotherapy represented on TV?

Brett Kahr: Television as Rorschach
Caroline Bainbridge: Psychotherapy on the Couch: Exploring the Fantasies of In Treatment

Chair and respondent: Dan Chambers (Independent producer and former director of Programmes for Ch 5)

Panel 2: Ethics and Therapy on TV
The ethical dilemmas of putting real lives on TV

Richard McKerrow (producer) discusses his Marchioness Documentary;
Oliver James discusses his TV programmes including Under Fives; Room 113 and Men on Violence.

Chair and Respondent: Valerie Sinason (Psychoanalyst)

Panel 3: Watercooler Moments: TV as Transitional Object
TV offers the possibility of shared cultural experiences. Does it also have therapeutic potential?

Tom Sutcliffe (presenter and journalist)
Sue Vice (Professor of English)
Carol Leader (psychotherapist; former presenter and actor)

Chair: Sara Ramsden (Consultant executive producer for the BBC)

Panel 4: Roundtable discussion
Barry Richards - summary and reflections with speakers from the day

This conference is organised in conjunction with Media and the Inner World http://www.miwnet.org/

FRIDAY 29 OCTOBER
The Saturday Conference is preceded by an 'in conversation' with award-winning television scriptwriter Laurence Marks and psychoanalyst Valerie Sinason.

Laurence Marks is a Bafta award winning writer and producer of shows and plays for stage and screen; he is well known for his collaborative writing work with Maurice Gran. His TV work includes a number of highly successful comedy sitcoms, including: Shine on Harvey Moon (1982), Birds of a Feather (1989-1998), The New Statesman (1987-1992), Goodnight Sweetheart (1993-99) and Love Hurts (1992-94). He has also written for the theatre, including the acclaimed play Dr. Freud Will See You Now Mrs. Hitler (BBC Radio 4, and Tricycle Theatre, 2007) and the West End Musical Dreamboats and Petticoats (nominated for a Lawrence Olivier Award for 'Best New Musical', 2010).

Registration:

FRIDAY EVENING: £12 or £10 for Friends of the Freud Museum

SATURDAY: £50 Full Price; £35 Students and unwaged (£5 discount for Friends)

Please click here for online booking http://www.freud.org.uk/shop/CONFERENCE__REMOTE_CONTROL__PSYCHOANALYSIS_AND_TELEVISION.html

Or please send a cheque payable to 'The Freud Museum', including your name, address, telephone number and profession.

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

Open Seminar Schedule

2010-09-28T12:32:00.002+01:00

from the Centre for Psychoanalytic Studies, University of Essex (Colchester Campus)

27 October 2010:

Terrors of Growing Old – Ageism in Therapeutic Care with Older People (Paul Terry)

Paul Terry is a Consultant Clinical Psychologist and Specialty Lead for Older People in a Specialist Mental Health Team for Older People in Hertfordshire Partnership NHS Foundation Trust.

17 November 2010:

Found objects and mirroring forms (Dr Ken Wright)

Dr. Ken Wright is a member of the British Psychoanalytic Society, Tavistock Society of Psychotherapists and Society of Couple Psychoanalytic Psychotherapists. He is also Patron of the Squiggle Foundation.

08 December 2010:

Reverie in psycho-social research method (Wendy Hollway)

Wendy Hollway is Professor in Psychology at the Open University.

The Open Seminars all take place in room 4N.6.1 from 5.00-6.30pm

All Welcome

T 01206 873640 E cpsadmin@essex.ac.uk www.essex.ac.uk/centres/psycho

Conference Announcement

2010-07-28T16:56:00.002+01:00

The Centre for Psychoanalytic Studies
University of Essex, Colchester

Presents a One-day Conference

Why the Mainstream Needs its Margins: The Function
of the Marginalised in Psyche and Society

Saturday, 13 November 2010

For decades sociologists, politicians, historians and identity theorists have been concerned to reintegrate invisible and discarded groups from the margins of society. We have learned to listen for voices beyond the boundaries of dominant groupings – regarding ethnic or gender identities; the criminalised and disenfranchised; the migrant and the underclass. But the margins are at the same time some of the most highly visible aspects of society. Daily the media turn their lens on immigrants, on anti-social youths, on gays, on ethnic minorities, and on the mentally ill. The engendering of moral panic over those who exist on the margins is central to the way non-marginal and mainstream identities function. This one-day conference brings together sociological, historical and psychoanalytic perspectives to examine the margins as a symptom of so-called ‘normal’ identity. What do we project onto the margins, how are they identified with, how do they operate as part of the psychic economy of the mainstream? Could a centre exist without its margins?

Panels on:

What Happened to Deviance?
Immigration: Fantasies and Realities
Panic, Trauma and Making Enemies
Marginalising the Fear of Madness

Speakers include:

Simon Clarke (UwE), Colin Samson (Essex), Karl Figlio (Essex), Jeffrey Murer (St Andrews), Eamonn Carrabine (Essex), Tim Dartington (Tavistock Institute), Joan Busfield (Essex), Aaron Balick (Essex)

Cost: £55 for the day (£35 students/unwaged)

For booking and registration see attached booking form, or contact Debbie Stewart: Centre for Psychoanalytic Studies, University of Essex, Wivenhoe Park, Colchester C04 3SQ Tel: 01206 873640; Fax: 01206 872746; cpsadmin@essex.ac.uk

Open Seminar

2010-05-13T11:21:00.002+01:00

Centre for Psychoanalytic Studies
University of Essex

Wednesday 2nd June 2010

Room 4N.6.1

5.00pm – 6:30pm

Dr Leon Burnett

‘The Construction of a Fantasia: Dostoevsky’s Meek Girl and Two Russian Suicides’

Dr Leon Burnett is a Reader in Literature and Dean of the Faculty of Humanities and Comparative Studies at the University of Essex. His publications are mainly in Comparative Literature. Research areas of particular interest include modern European poetry, literary translation, myth in modern culture, and Russian literature. He has edited F. M. Dostoevsky (1821-1881): A Centenary Collection (1981) and Word in Time: Poetry, Narrative, Translation (1997), and is currently co-editing The Art of Accommodation: Literary Translation in Russia (publication expected later this year). From 1992 to 2000 he was the main editor of New Comparison: a Journal of Comparative and General Literary Studies.

Abstract: In A Writer’s Diary (October, 1876), Dostoevsky juxtaposed two reports of recent and contrasting female suicides, concluding with the question “which of these two souls bore more torment on earth”? The next instalment of the journal (November, 1876) contained a single piece of writing, “The Meek Girl: A Fantastic Story”, clearly based on the second of the two contemporary cases. The suicides served to bring together in Dostoevsky’s mind concepts that he had previously treated separately and, in his view, unsuccessfully: effacement (in The Double) and enigma (in The Idiot). Stimulated by a desire to comprehend the “psychological sequence” of events leading up to the act of suicide, Dostoevsky returned in “The Meek Girl” to these concepts, transferring the focus from male protagonists to an unnamed female character. I shall be looking at how, in this late work, he took up the challenge of finding an appropriate form to express an impenetrable theme.

ALL WELCOME

Details of all our Open Seminars can be found at:

http://www.essex.ac.uk/centres/psycho/news_and_seminars/seminars.aspx

For further information, or if you are interested in presenting an Open Seminar, please contact:

Tel: 01206 873075 / Email: cpsadmin@essex.ac.uk

Open Seminar Announcement

2010-04-29T11:25:00.001+01:00

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

2010-04-19T11:28:00.001+01:00

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

2010-04-13T14:20:00.001+01:00

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

2010-04-08T20:47:00.001+01:00

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

2010-04-02T14:23:00.000+01:00

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

2010-04-01T10:53:00.001+01:00

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

Open Seminar Announcement

2010-03-30T10:57:00.001+01:00

Centre for Psychoanalytic Studies
University of Essex

Wednesday 28th April 2010

Professor John Clarke

‘Psyche and Cosmos: The Emergence of Order out of Chaos’

John Clarke is Professor Emeritus in the History of Ideas at Kingston University, London. He studied philosophy at UCL and Birkbeck College, and has lectured in philosophy at McGill University, Montreal, the University of Singapore, and Kingston University. His publications include In Search of Jung: Historical and Philosophical Enquiries and Jung and Eastern Thought: a Dialogue with the Orient. He is currently writing a book on emergence theory.

Abstract: Recent developments in the fields of complexity, self-organising systems and cosmogenesis have revived interest in the anti-reductionist idea of emergence, and this paper will examine some of the implications of this idea for our understanding of the human psyche, with particular reference to Jungian thinking.

ALL WELCOME

Venue: Room 4N.6.1
Time: 5.00pm – 6:30pm

Details of all our Open Seminars can be found at:
http://www.essex.ac.uk/centres/psycho/news_and_seminars/seminars.aspx

For further information or if you are interested in presenting an Open Seminar
please contact: Chris Nicholson, Centre for Psychoanalytic Studies, University of Essex
Tel: 01206 873075 / Email: cpsugrad@essex.ac.uk

Freud: The Secret Passion and IPA Conference

2010-03-26T11:00:00.000Z

"Freud: The Secret Passion"
screening introduced by Andrea Sabbadini.

30 March 2010
6.30pm - 9.00pm

To coincide with Andreas Hofer's exhibition at the Freud Museum, which includes a series of portraits of Montgomery Clift as Freud, we are pleased to show the rarely seen 1962 John Huston film on which the portraits are based: "Freud: The Secret Passion". The film will be introduced by Andrea Sabbadini, psychoanalyst and founder of the International Psychoanalytic Film Festival.

Please note that the film is 138 mins and in black and white. Only dedicated film buffs should apply!

Suggested donation: £8 / £5 concs. Please pay at the door but phone or email to secure a place.

The Freud Museum, 20 Maresfield Gardens, London NW3 5SX

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

Stay tuned for our next film screenings!

IPA Anniversary Celebration – ‘Contemporary Perspectives on Psychoanalysis’ - March 27, 2010

Celebrating the IPA’s Centenary
The IPA is the world’s primary accrediting and regulatory body for psychoanalysis. It was created in 1910 at the 2nd International Psychoanalytical Congress in Nuremberg. Its mission is to assure the continued vigour and development of psychoanalysis for the benefit of psychoanalytic patients.

Major European event for the Centenary
The major European event for the Centenary of the IPA is in London, UK, in conjunction with the annual EPF Conference.

We invite mental health professionals, scientists and students of medicine, psychology, psychotherapy and cultural disciplines to attend.

Venue:
Sandringham Suite
Hilton London Metropole
255 Edgware Road
London W2 1JU

Participation: Participation is free, but registration is necessary.

Click here for the invitation.

Music, Meaning and Emotion

2010-03-08T10:19:00.000Z

Tuesday 23rd March 2010 7:00pm

Three talks about what music 'means', and how and why it affects us so profoundly.

Programme:

Kalu Singh
Affects on the track: How do we find words for the meaning of music?
Almost everybody learns some basic terms to appraise literature. So why so few, for most of us, about music? Is it impossible to get past the fundamental fact that instrumental music has no nameable referent, and the emotional puzzle this generates?

Sebastian Skeaping
Music and emotion: A personal inheritance
Do you have to 'know' about music to really appreciate it? What is the importance of musical heritage in musical appreciation? Do words constrict musical feeling?

Roddy Skeaping
Music, Meaning and Emotion .... For People with Dementia
What are the 'affective meanings' and 'meaningful affects' that music articulates and evokes? How does music orchestrate emotions and sediment memories?

Presenters:
Kalu Singh is a former university counsellor: now a civil-servant and freelance writer. His first book Guilt (Icon Ideas in Psychoanalysis) was a Guardian Book of the Year. Innovative essays on Shakespeare, Keats, Dante, Solaris & Gradiva appear on his website: www.philosophykal.co.uk. Over the past decade, he has helped coordinate Freud Museum Conferences on Crying, Midwifery, The Therapist's Body, and on Matte Blanco. He joined the Talking Bob Dylan Society, Cambridge in 1986.

Sebastian Skeaping was born into a family with a rich musical heritage (Roddy Skeaping is his uncle). He obtained a PhD at Cambridge University in 2003 and now runs Thornhill Pianos. His work has taken him to all the major recording studios, concert venues and opera houses in London.

Roddy Skeaping is a performer, instrumental teacher, composer and Nordoff-Robbins music therapist currently working with people with dementia.

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

Postgraduate Conference - Psychoanalysis, Culture and Society

2010-03-01T13:58:00.003Z

CALL FOR PAPERS

PSYCHOANALYSIS, CULTURE AND SOCIETY

A POSTGRADUATE CONFERENCE

CENTRE FOR PSYCHOANALYSIS
MIDDLESEX UNIVERSITY
LONDON

Saturday, 5TH June, 2010

We are pleased to announce Psychoanalysis, Culture and Society: A
Postgraduate Conference.

We invite postgraduate students and research fellows to submit proposals for papers on psychoanalysis or psychoanalytically informed research. Papers may be from any academic discipline, including psychology, sociology, cultural studies, psychosocial studies, history, literature, art, religious studies or philosophy.

This one-day conference is designed to give postgraduate students from all disciplines who are interested in psychoanalysis an opportunity to present and discuss their research in an informal and intellectually stimulating setting.

The conference takes place at the Hendon Campus of Middlesex University (30 minutes from central London) between 9:30 and 5:30 on Saturday, 5th June, 2009. Tea, coffee and a light lunch will be provided. The conference fee is £30 for presenters and attendees.

Submitting an abstract

Abstracts of 300 words (maximum) should include a title, the name of your university or institution and a telephone number. Papers should be no more than 20 minutes long. A further 10 minutes will be allowed for discussion. Sessions of 1½ hours will have space for three
papers. There will be concurrent panels to accommodate as many papers as possible. The day will end with a plenary.

The deadline for submission of abstracts is Friday, 25th May, 2009. Early submission is appreciated. Abstracts and queries should be sent to: David Henderson, d.henderson@mdx.ac.uk

Centre for Psychoanalysis
Psychology Department
Middlesex University
The Burroughs
Hendon
London
NW4 4BT

Perspectives on Creativity 2010

2010-02-18T11:34:00.001Z

an interdisciplinary conference exploring creativity. This year's conference features 15 speakers and a keynote address by Dr. Mark Runco, the Torrance Professor of Creative Studies and director of the Torrance Center.

The conference will be held at Holy Family University in Philadelphia on March 20, 2010. More information, including instructions on how to register for the conference, can be found at
www.holyfamily.edu/sas/creativity

Lynn DellaPietra, Ph.D.
Chair, Social & Behavioral Sciences
Professor, Psychology
Holy Family University
267-341-3328

A.P.P.A.C. International Conference

2010-01-26T17:15:00.000Z

in ATHENS, GREECE

May 4 – 7, 2010 the Athens Hilton Hotel, GREECE

Honorary Presidents: Prof. G. Lyketsos (GR), Prof. Ch. Ierodiakonou (GR) and Prof. Ph. Mazet (FR)

Neuropsychiatric, Psychological and Social Sciences Today

Call for Abstracts!

Dear Colleagues,

Continuing your information on the 15th International Conference of the Association of Psychology & Psychiatry for Adults & Children (A.P.P.A.C.) on May 4 - 7, 2010 at the Athens Hilton Hotel, we would like to inform you on the NEW ABSTRACT SUBMISSION DEADLINE, which is on February 15, 2010.

The theme of the Conference is: “Neuropsychiatric, Psychological and Social Sciences Today”.

We are happy to present to you our brand NEW WEBSITE www.appac.gr (still under construction, but it contains most conference-related information).

We remain at your disposal for any further information you may need.

Sincerely,

The A.P.P.A.C. Secretariat

18 Aigialias str., 15125 Maroussi GREECE
Tel: +30 210 6842 663
Fax: +30 210 6842 079
Conference Secretariat E-mail (1): appachellas@yahoo.gr
Conference Secretariat E-mail (2): congress@appac.gr
Conference Website: www.appac.gr

Psychoanalysis and Modern Music in Freud's Vienna

2010-01-25T17:11:00.001Z

While Freud famously claimed that he could derive no pleasure from music, and was reputed to have been tone deaf and largely indifferent to the fecund musical culture surrounding him, it is nonetheless indisputable that Freud and psychoanalysis influenced the music and musicians of his Vienna. It is well known that Freud treated a number of Viennese musical luminaries, including Gustav Mahler and Bruno Walter; what is less well known and understood is that Freud's literature and pool of patients made direct and meaningful contact with the composer Arnold Schoenberg and his milieu. Schoenberg, one of the most important composers of the 20th century and the putative father of musical modernism, began to articulate what must be considered a psychoanalytic compositional ethos in the first decade of the 20th century; by 1909, he had composed the ephocal monodrama Erwartung, arguably the first psychoanalytic opera. This talk examines the extent to which Freud's early case histories--especially "Dora"--and texts like The Interpretation of Dreams shaped the advent of modern atonal music in Vienna.

This is the first of three evening talks about music and psychoanalysis. Further information forthcoming.

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

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

Call for Papers

2010-01-19T10:53:00.003Z

MYTH, LITERATURE, AND THE UNCONSCIOUS

Date: 2-4 September, 2010

Venue: Wivenhoe Park Campus, University of Essex, Colchester, UK

An international conference organized by the Centre for Myth Studies at the University of Essex, supported by the Department of Literature, Film, and Theatre Studies and the Centre for Psychoanalytic Studies

The Centre for Myth Studies at the University of Essex is pleased to announce an international conference on “Myth, Literature, and the Unconscious” to be held at the Wivenhoe Park campus, 2-4 September, 2010. We invite proposals for papers (of 20 minutes duration), or panel sessions, dealing with the conjunction of myth, psychoanalysis, and literary-artistic activity. While proposals on any aspect of myth, literary, and psychoanalytic studies are very welcome, the organisers would particularly encourage interdisciplinary contributions. The topics might include, but will not be confined to:
Literary re-inscriptions of myths and mythic patterns
Literature as mythmaking
The significance and meaning of myths in psychoanalytic theory
Myth as the language of the unconscious
Archetypes, symbols, and metamorphoses
Myths in the inner and outer worlds
Dreams, visions, myths
Myth and re-enchantment
The role of myth in medical practice
William Blake and myth
Time, space and the primordial
Myth and modernism

A selection of papers from the conference will be published.

The deadline for proposals is 28 February, 2010. Proposals should take the form of a title for the paper and a 250-word abstract, accompanied by a brief biographical note, including institutional affiliation where appropriate. To submit a proposal, or for more information, please write to Dr Sanja Bahun, Department of Literature, Film, and Theatre Studies, University of Essex, Wivenhoe Park, Colchester, Essex CO4 3SQ or, by e-mail, to mythic@essex.ac.uk.

Note: Thanks to the generosity of the Bean Trust, a limited number of bursaries will be made available to speakers contributing specifically to a panel session on the place that William Blake’s work occupies in the field of myth, literature, and the unconscious. If you are interested in applying for one of these bursaries, please indicate this in your proposal.

Seminar announcement, University of Essex

2010-01-15T12:08:00.001Z

OPEN SEMINAR

Wednesday 3rd February 2010

David Millar:

'The Manualisation of Persons
vs
The Personalisation of Manuals'

David Millar is a Consultant Child & Adolescent Psychotherapist in the North Essex Partnership (NHS) Trust and Honorary Senior Lecturer in the Centre for Psychoanalytic Studies, University of Essex

Abstract: Mental Health Services are increasingly being depersonalised in a variety of different ways from anonymous internet sites that give formulaic advice to the public to heavily researched treatment manuals that give advice to professionals on how to administer closely defined and proscribed 'therapies'. This paper attempts to look at why such movements are seen as 'progress' and whether and how they should be challenged.

ALL WELCOME

Venue: Room 4N.6.1
Time: 5.00pm – 6:30pm

Information about our Open Seminars can be found at:
http://www.essex.ac.uk/centres/psycho/news_and_seminars/seminars.aspx

For further information or if you are interested in presenting an Open Seminar
please contact:
Chris Nicholson or Alison Evans, Centre for Psychoanalytic Studies, University of Essex
Tel: 01206 873958 / Email: cpsugrad@essex.ac.uk

Win Hearts and Minds at the Freud Museum

2010-01-14T14:26:00.000Z

Love is in the air...

With Valentine's Day hoving in to view and fluffy teddies and spangly cards popping up at every turn, we recommend you escape the naff and the nauseous and make your way to the Freud Museum to explore love through a Freudian lens!

With music and games in Freud's extraordinary house, you never know, you just might meet someone interesting...

The event on 11 February will be the first in the series, Lessons in Love, marking the 100th anniversary of Freud's 'Contributions to the Psychology of Love'.

This event has been produced in collaboration with Past Caring, an innovative partnership of museums, archives, and higher education organisations. Follow the link to find out about other mind-expanding events across London.

BOOKING INFORMATION for HEARTS & MINDS

Date: 11 Febuary 2010

Time: 7.30pm - 10.30pm

Venue: Freud Museum, 20 Maresfield Gardens, London, NW3 5SX

Tickets: £10 to include a drink on arrival.
Discount: Friends of the Museum and group bookings of 3 or more: £8

To book: email marion@freud.org.uk, or call ++44 (0)20 7435 2002

Lecturing Post at University of Essex

2010-01-13T11:11:00.000Z

The Centre for Psychoanalytic Studies is seeking to appoint a Lecturer or 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 help develop a staff team for this programme and work 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. Possession of a doctorate or equivalent level qualification is desirable. The successful applicant will also be expected to contribute to the research profile of the Centre. 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.

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).

http://gs12.globalsuccessor.com/fe/tpl_essex01.asp?newms=jj&id=47835

Can Group Psychotherapy survive NICE?

2009-11-30T13:58:00.000Z

At a conference hosted jointly by the Institute of Group Analysis and Group Analytic Society, Glenys Parry and myself (Chris Blackmore) will be presenting the results of the systematic review of group psychotherapy commissioned by IGA/GAS and undertaken by the Centre for Psychological Services Research here in Sheffield. Speakers include Prof Anthony Bateman and Dr Chris Mace.

The conference takes place on Friday 29th January 2010 at the Tavistock Centre, 120 Belsize Lane, London NW3 5BA. Contact IGA for details.

Claude Lévi-Strauss, Anthropologist, Dies at 100

2009-11-03T21:46:00.005Z

Not a big fan of structuralism (or psycho-structuralism) myself, but this is sad news. Surely this marks the end of an era?

Claude Lévi-Strauss, the French anthropologist who transformed Western understanding of what was once called “primitive man” and who towered over the French intellectual scene in the 1960s and ’70s, has died at 100.
[...]
A powerful thinker, Mr. Lévi-Strauss was an avatar of “structuralism,” a school of thought in which universal “structures” were believed to underlie all human activity, giving shape to seemingly disparate cultures and creations. His work was a profound influence even on his critics, of whom there were many. There has been no comparable successor to him in France. And his writing — a mixture of the pedantic and the poetic, full of daring juxtapositions, intricate argument and elaborate metaphors — resembles little that had come before in anthropology.
[...]
His legacy is imposing. “Mythologiques,” his four-volume work about the structure of native mythology in the Americas, attempts nothing less than an interpretation of the world of culture and custom, shaped by analysis of several hundred myths of little-known tribes and traditions. The volumes — “The Raw and the Cooked,” “From Honey to Ashes,” “The Origin of Table Manners” and “The Naked Man,” published from 1964 to 1971 — challenge the reader with their complex interweaving of theme and detail.

The rest you can find here.

Call For Papers

2009-11-03T10:00:00.000Z

JEP - European Journal of Psychoanalysis, a semiannual journal (www.psychomedia.it/jep), is planning a future issue on the topic

THE END

We welcome papers from a psychoanalytic perspective, although we will consider contributions from other fields that can enlighten the topic. We can consider papers submitted in French, Italian or German, however, once accepted for publication, it will be the responsibility of the author to provide the text of the paper in English.

We are especially interested in receiving contributions on:

- End as ethics
- End as a limit, and End as an aim
- Death, death-drive, Eros & Thanatos
- Emergence of death issues during the analytic cure
- Limits, borders, "terms" (both as words and time limits)
- Eschatological end

All submitted papers will be peer reviewed.

JEP editors
Sergio Benvenuto
Cristiana Cimino
Antonello Correale

Exhibit at the Freud Museum

2009-11-02T09:00:00.001Z

MAT COLLISHAW - HYSTERIA

7 October - 13 December

Curated by James Putnam

HYSTERIA is an extraordinary exhibition of new works by British-born artist Mat Collishaw. The title relates to the print above Freud’s iconic psychoanalytic couch, depicting the French neurologist Jean Martin Charcot showing his students a woman in a hysterical fit. Charcot (1825-1893) used hypnotism to study hysteria and other abnormal mental conditions and he had a profound influence on the young Freud. Collishaw has made a new anamorphosis work inspired by this picture and a series of ghostly projections based on Charcot’s original photographic case studies.

In the room of Anna Freud, the founder of child psychoanalysis, he has installed a new zoetrope sculpture with animated figures of implike boys smashing eggs, spearing snails and tormenting butterflies. Both Freud and his daughter Anna investigated the development of cruelty in childhood, and its link to sexuality in children’s ‘beating phantasies’.

In Freud’s study Collishaw has installed a series of intriguing tree stump sculptures that incorporate record decks emitting evocative birdsongs. The ‘outside world’ enters Freud’s study, and in doing so alludes to theories of repression, loss and the nature of memory developed by Freud himself. The exhibition is completed by the enormous, beautiful and ultimately disturbing ‘insecticide’ photographs in the stairwell and balcony.

Mat Collishaw (b. Nottingham, 1966) lives and works in London and has exhibited widely internationally. In 1986-7 he attended Goldsmiths College alongside Damien Hirst, Sarah Lucas and Tracey Emin, among others, participating in the now legendary shows Freeze (1989) and Sensation (1997). Collishaw has developed a distinctive practice using digitally modified photography and video often combining 19th century illusionistic devices with contemporary technologies. His work is characterized by appropriating imagery that is often shocking yet strangely beautiful.

HYSTERIA is the latest in the critically acclaimed ongoing series of Freud Museum exhibitions curated by James Putnam that have included projects by Sophie Calle, Sarah Lucas, Ellen Gallagher, Tim Noble & Sue Webster and Oliver Clegg. The exhibition also coincides with the launch of Collishaw’s new publication entitled ‘Insecticides’.

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

Buy Freud!

2009-10-31T11:30:00.003Z

The long-awaited FREUD MUSEUM 2010 CALENDAR is now hot off the press!

The new calendar brings you an English Freud. Follow him month by month through his love of English science and literature. This colourful new calendar is illustrated by photos from his family albums and documented by books from his own library. We see Freud at each stage of his life, encountering Shakespeare or Byron, Darwin or Dickens, Virginia Woolf or H.G. Wells.

Don't miss our Calendar Offer of 15% off online orders until 15 November! (Usual price: £8.50).

Freud and Detective Fiction

2009-10-15T14:12:00.001+01:00

Tuesday 20 October 7pm
Frank Tallis
The Interpretation of Screams: Freud and Detective Fiction

Freud was an avid reader of Sherlock Holmes (his daughter read Dorothy Sayers) and the work of psychoanalysis has often been compared to the process of detection. Post-Freud crime writers and film directors enthusiastically adopted the ideas of psychoanalysis. In this evening talk at the Freud Museum, detective fiction writer and clinical psychologist Frank Tallis examines the enduring appeal of the genre and discusses his own novels.

Dr. Frank Tallis is an award winning writer and clinical psychologist who has held posts in clinical psychology and neuroscience at the Institute of Psychiatry and King’s College, London. He has written many books on psychology and over thirty academic papers. His novels are: KILLING TIME, SENSING OTHERS, MORTAL MISCHIEF, VIENNA BLOOD, FATAL LIES, and DARKNESS RISING. DEADLY COMMUNION, the fifth volume of the Liebermann Papers, set in Freud’s Vienna, will be published in 2010.

Tickets: £8 / £5 Friends.
(Pay on the door but phone or email to secure a place)

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

Evening Performance at The Freud Museum

2009-10-08T16:00:00.001+01:00

Tuesday 13 October 2009 7.15pm
Gerald Davidson
Being Good: Aichhorn and Anna - A performance presentation

Actor and researcher Gerald Davidson returns to the Freud Museum after his brilliant presentations on Otto Gross and Herbert Graf ('Little Hans'), to commemorate the 60th anniversary of the death of August Aichhorn, Austrian educator and pioneering psychoanalyst in work with delinquent and troubled adolescents.

“Aichhorn’s death is a kind of full stop at the end of a great chapter in psychoanalysis...” Anna Freud, November 1949.

Tickets: £8 / £5 Friends.
(Pay on the door but phone or email to secure a place)

Please join us for a pre-performance glass of wine from 6.30pm.

Aichhorn and Anna
"The re-educator's double allegiance and identification with society on the one hand and the world of the delinquent on the other hand, is a fascinating problem, Mr Aichhorn..."

"In the original intake at the home for delinquent boys that I founded in the devastation of an abandoned refugee camp as our old Imperial world fell apart I was confronted with twelve adolescents who were considered completely beyond the pale. Even the majority of my idealistic co-workers felt these lads could be brought to heel only by the strictest discipline and the hardest physical labour. So I decided to take charge of these boys myself and I proceeded to allow their aggression full reign..."

"The Austrian Psychoanalytic Society was officially dissolved on August 25,1938. There was officially now only a study group and a training group affiliated to the Goring Institute in Berlin. My son,Thomas had been detained in Dachau for anti-German activity. And my wife was unwell. So I stayed on, alone..."

"I don't know if you have realised, Miss Freud, that since you left Vienna and I stayed on alone, all my activities were dedicated to your father..."

August Aichhorn and Anna Freud, reunited in Lausanne in 1948.

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

Open Seminar Announcement

2009-10-08T15:14:00.003+01:00

at the University of Essex, Centre for Psychoanalytic Studies

28th October 2009

Lisa Ruddick: Academic Cool and the Shaming of the Inner World

Lisa Ruddick is Associate Professor of English at the University of Chicago. She is the author of Reading Gertrude Stein: Body, Text, Gnosis (Cornell, 1990), and has published articles on the intellectual life of the humanities in the United States. This is the subject of her book in progress, Intuition and Brutality in Academic Life.

Abstract: Since the 1980s, U.S. literary scholarship has been guided by poststructuralist theories that cast doubt on the value of the "self" and the "inner life." As practicing psychoanalysts on both sides of the Atlantic know, these are not the only sophisticated theories available for describing subjectivity. Why, then, have they enjoyed such dominance in the milieu of higher learning? The theories are valued because they serve to enforce group discipline in what has become an insular and paranoid academic subculture. They chip away at member’s faith in their own inner worlds, capturing them for the profession itself and its agendas.

For more details on this and future seminars, see the Centre for Psychoanalytic Studies website.

Lecture Announcement

2009-07-16T16:35:00.003+01:00

Curator's Talk

Resonance: Overlay: Interweave
What has Bracha Ettinger created in the Freudian Space of Memory and Migration?

2.30-4.00pm Sunday 26 July
(No charge or booking)

Why install art in the Freud Museum already so rich with artefacts and images?

Why place the works of this artist in this museum of psychoanalysis?

Is it an exhibition in the museum, or an installation that is in dialogue with the memories held in this space?

This talk will explore what the painter Bracha Ettinger has 'done' by creating a unique, multi-faceted installation which is much more than a mere exhibition in these spaces. It will ask: what is brought to light in this encounter between the varied works of a contemporary artist who is herself so deeply engaged with psychoanalysis and the freighted spaces the last home and archives of the exiles a father and his daughter, one a collector of antiquities, the other a weaver.

Bracha Ettinger has created an installation that weaves many strings between her own history and memory and the world from which the Freuds fled. It treats of European pasts and present struggles for futures despite the freight of traumatic memory. Through allusion and translation into artworking, Ettinger's work explores aspects of Freud's own practice and theory especially in relation to the feminine and the obscured mother.

Another contribution to the tradition of the many extraordinary exhibitions by contemporary artists at the museum, Bracha Ettinger's work, however, holds a special place because this was an installation waiting to happen: in both her own artwork between aesthetics, psychoanalysis and history and in the museum's own relations through images and things, objects and books to history, memory and above all, the family.

The curator, distinguished art historian and cultural theorist, Griselda Pollock will present a double reading of the exhibition as a conversation between both Anna and Sigmund Freud and Bracha Ettinger's work, linking Freud's last great work Moses and Monothesism (1939) and his own diary (1929-39) with Ettinger's notebooks and those of her father (1942-45), Freud's objects and her mother's spoon, the Freudian family albums and hers, Freud's texts and hers. As the exhibition closes, this is a last chance of engage with the materiality, affects and insights created in the installation as poetic event.

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

Conference Announcement: Psychoanalysis, Money and the Economy

2009-07-09T15:16:00.001+01:00

Psychoanalysis, Money and the Economy
a conference convened for the London Freud Museum
by Prof. David Bennett and Dr. Ivan Ward
2nd-4th July, 2010.

Freud once warned his fellow analysts that there were two subjects that “civilized people” will always treat “with the same inconsistency, prudishness and hypocrisy” and about which psychoanalysts must insist on speaking with “the same matter-of-fact frankness”, namely: “money matters” and “sexual matters”. Yet the psychoanalytic profession has often followed Freud’s own example in decoding “money matters” as symbolic displacements of “sexual matters”. What would speaking “frankly” about money and psychoanalysis entail? This conference, and the volume of essays that will result from it, aims to explore all aspects of the nexus between psychoanalysis, money and the economy, including, but not limited to:

• psychoanalytic interpretations of economic behaviour, including the psychology of financial risk-taking and gambling, stock-market booms and busts, the ‘highs’ and ‘depressions’ of economies, financial traders and investors

• the roles of money and economic models in psychoanalytic theory and case histories

• the history of attempts to fuse psychoanalytic with economic explanations of social and cultural processes, as in the Freudo-Marxist tradition and its critiques of liberal economics’ theories of ‘Homo oeconomicus’

• the roles of money in the analyst–analysand relationship, or the psychotherapeutic encounter.

• psychoanalytic interpretations of monetary transactions and relationships in fantasy, fiction and film

• histories, theories and practices of libidinal economy, including sexual-economic revolutionary theories and movements

• how psychoanalysis as a profession and set of practices and theories is articulated wth specific economic conditions and trends, regionally, nationally and/or internationally

The conference will include a number of invited keynote speakers but there will also be opportunities for unsolicited papers to be presented. Proposals for 20-minute papers on any aspect of the conference theme will be welcome; they should include an explanatory title and a 600-word abstract, and should be sent simultaneously to David Bennett d.b@unimelb.edu.au and Ivan Ward ivan@freud.org.uk.

A Vision of Students Today

2009-07-09T13:07:00.003+01:00

This has just been posted on ScHARR's own, rather excellent, Library blog, so many thanks to the team there for their hard-work (and for letting me nick their cool link).

I'm not sure that it is a terrific ad for distance learning, but it raises some very interesting questions about the process of learning, what learning means, and how we achieve it. If nothing else it makes clear that we need to move beyond the nineteenth century conception of learning in higher education, which unfortunately still too often dominates universities (which are, fundamentally, I always like to remind people, medieval institutions re-designed in the shape of nineteenth century prisons, run today by CEOs as though they were international corporations. And we wonder why sometimes they don't work as we'd like them to...?)

And this video certainly doesn't address psychoanalysis or psychotherapy explicitly -- except to imply, perhaps, that there is a whole future generation of alienated, highly-educated, square-eyed, tech-governed clients just waiting outside our consulting rooms.

So, then, for your consideration:

In Your Dreams?

2009-06-19T11:32:00.003+01:00

I thought that this most recent announcement from the Freud Museum was much too delicious not to share:

In Your Dreams! Singles nights with a twist at the Freud Museum

The Freud Museum is proud to present a couple of lively evenings of mind-expanding games and flirtatious banter with London's brightest and best (that's you by the way, don't let us down!).

As the father of psychoanalysis, Freud is best known for his theory that everything we do is driven by unconscious thoughts and feelings. So let your unconscious guide you to the Museum where a night to remember will unfold.

We can't guarantee to reveal the innermost workings of the mind, but we can promise an intriguing evening where dreams will be interpreted, free associations made and doubtless repressed feelings liberated!

Plus, there'll be plenty of time to enjoy a drink in the garden, admire Freud's couch and of course your fellow guests!

I think the Freud Museum has stumbled on to a winner here! Good luck to everyone. I hope the couch will be very busy.

As a happily married man -- and someone for whom the prospect of dating, letting alone Freudian dating, always seemed a terrifying prospect -- I, alas, will not be attending, so I would be most grateful if any Psycho-Babble On... reader who intends to brave what promises to be at the very least a most intriguing evening would offer a report on the event.

I look forward to your correspondence.

Book announcement: Jeffrey Berman, Death in the Classroom

2009-06-03T15:21:00.003+01:00

I heard Jeffrey Berman speak at a conference a couple of years ago on this and was impressed with his intelligent and moving ideas. Here, now, is announcement for the book, published with SUNY press. You can read the first chapter here.

Jeffrey Berman, Death in the Classroom

Shows how death education can be brought from the healing professions to the literature classroom.

In Death in the Classroom, Jeffrey Berman writes about Love and Loss, the course that he designed and taught two years after his wife’s death, in which he explored with his students the literature of bereavement. Berman, building on his previous courses that emphasized self-disclosing writing, shows how his students wrote about their own experiences with love and loss, how their writing affected classmates and teacher alike, and how writing about death can lead to educational and psychological breakthroughs. In an age in which eighty percent of Americans die not in their homes but in institutions, and in which, consequently, the living are separated from the dying, Death in the Classroom reveals how reading, writing, and speaking about death can play a vital role in a student’s education.

“Death in the Classroom deals with an extremely important topic—our attitudes toward death and grieving and the possibility of helping students, through reading, writing, and classroom discussion, to reflect on death and grieving in their own and others’ lives. I like the book’s clarity and the vigor of its argument for death education in the university classroom. This is a book for teachers, especially teachers of literature and life writing who are committed to teaching literature from an ethical and experiential perspective, and it will also appeal to those interested in death education and attitudes toward death and dying, particularly in North America.” — Hilary Clark, editor of Depression and Narrative: Telling the Dark

Jeffrey Berman is Distinguished Teaching Professor of English at the University at Albany, State University of New York. His previous books include Dying to Teach: A Memoir of Love, Loss, and Learning, also published by SUNY Press; Cutting and the Pedagogy of Self-Disclosure; Empathic Teaching: Education for Life; and Risky Writing: Self-Disclosure and Self-Transformation in the Classroom.

Lecture Announcement

2009-06-02T14:57:00.002+01:00

BRACHA ETTINGER: Aesthetics/Ethics/Politics

Evening Symposium with JUDITH BUTLER

Wednesday 3 June 2009 6.00pm – 9.00pm
Christopher Ingold Auditorium, University College London, Gordon Street, London WC1H 0AY

Organised by Griselda Pollock (CentreCATH, University of Leeds)
Penny Florence (Slade School of Art)
The Freud Museum, London

SPEAKERS
Judith Butler (University of California, Berkeley)
Catherine de Zegher (Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto)
Griselda Pollock (CentreCATH, University of Leeds)
Concluding Remarks: Bracha Ettinger

Tickets; £25 / £15 from The Freud Museum Tel: 020 7435 2002 or online at www.freud.org.uk

On the occasion of the exhibition BRACHA ETTINGER Resonance/Overlay/Interweave in the Freudian Space of Memory and Migration 3 June–26 July AT The Freud Museum

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

Why Are Conservatives Happier Than Liberals?

2009-05-07T14:15:00.006+01:00

Digging around in the lower depths of my inbox, those bits and pieces that came and lay unloved for many months, I found this essay announcement, with abstract:

Why Are Conservatives Happier Than Liberals?
By Jaime L. Napier and John T. Jost

In this study, researchers drew on system-justification theory and the notion that conservative ideology serves a palliative function to explain why conservatives are happier than liberals. Specifically, in three studies using nationally representative data from the United States and nine additional countries, researchers found that right-wing (vs. left-wing) orientation is indeed associated with greater subjective well-being and that the relation between political orientation and subjective well-being is mediated by the rationalization of inequality. In a third study, they found that increasing economic inequality (as measured by the Gini index) from 1974 to 2004 has exacerbated the happiness gap between liberals and conservatives, apparently because conservatives (more than liberals) possess an ideological buffer against the negative hedonic effects of economic inequality.

(To read the article, go here, though you will need to subscribe or purchase the article.)

Just to summarise, conservative are apparently happier than liberals because they have in-built defences so that they don't feel bad about others' suffering. In Kleinian or more general object-relations terms, we might say that they are more successfully splitting; in particular, splitting feeling (and the capacity to empathise) from thought (i.e. the ideological justification for continuing to support a system that perpetrates inequality).

This is then evidence -- now apparently backed up by appropriately 'scientific' studies -- for a long-held belief amongst a number of psycho-social thinkers that capitalism is psychopathological; schizoid, as a Kleinian might say. (Others, of different psychoanalytic persuasions, of course had different diagnostic categories, but they most often arrived at a similar conclusion.)

Such assessments are regarded unfashionable by some nowadays, but surely this gives us license to carry on with our speculations?

(NB: these studies were obviously conducted pre-crash -- I wonder if the results would be different were they to revisit these subjects?)

Conference Annoucement/CFP

2009-05-05T12:16:00.003+01:00

APCS
Call for Papers

The Association for the Psychoanalysis of Culture and Society
2009 Annual Conference:
Psychoanalysis, Economy, and Limits
Rutgers University: October 9-10, 2009
Submissions due by July 1, 2009.

This conference will address the intersection of psychoanalysis and the economy in light of the question of limits. Now when the enactment of an unlimited market economy has paradoxically revealed its limitations, the time has come to investigate the implications of psychoanalysis for thinking about economy and its limits. We are seeking proposals that investigate what psychoanalysis—both in its theoretical and clinical forms—can offer for an understanding of this intersection. Please think broadly about issues that arise in your discipline in relation to these questions. Topics might include:

Ø The possibilities for psychoanalytic interventions in the economy

Ø The economy of psychoanalysis as a theory or as a practice

Ø The economy in media studies

Ø Negotiating budgetary constraints and financial restrictions in psychoanalytic work

Ø The relationship between the infinite and the finite in psychoanalysis

Ø The other as a limit or the limitations of otherness

Ø New clinical, cultural, or theoretical interventions on the relation between psychoanalysis and limits

Ø Negotiating the limits of intellectual work in the struggle for social justice

Ø Psychoanalytic responses to economic crisis and anxiety

Ø The economy of race and ethnicity

Ø Psychoanalysis and the possibility of economic justice in a time of neoliberal hegemony

Ø How the economy might be politicized

Ø Contemporary investigations into feminism and psychoanalysis relative to the economy

We are particularly interested in panel proposals or roundtables that discuss these issues and also invite you to think of alternate formats that promote discussion.

Abstracts should be no longer than 250 words.

APCS, an interdisciplinary psychoanalytic organization, encourages all participants to reflect on the social importance of their contribution and its relationship to social justice. It is our view that the psychoanalytic investigation of culture and society constitutes a unique and indispensible means not only of understanding but also of intervening in our most serious social problems, and we encourage proposals that work to further this project.

For updates, see: www.apcsweb.org

APCS Call for Papers

2009-03-24T12:48:00.001Z

The Association for the Psychoanalysis of Culture and Society

2009 Annual Conference:

Psychoanalysis, Economy, and Limits

Rutgers University: October 9-10, 2008

Submissions due by July 1, 2009.

This conference will address the intersection of psychoanalysis and the economy in light of the question of limits. Now when the enactment of an unlimited market economy has paradoxically revealed its limitations, the time has come to investigate the implications of psychoanalysis for thinking about economy and its limits. We are seeking proposals that investigate what psychoanalysis—both in its theoretical and clinical forms—can offer for an understanding of this intersection. Please think broadly about issues that arise in your discipline in relation to these questions. Topics might include:

The possibilities for psychoanalytic interventions in the economy
The economy of psychoanalysis as a theory or as a practice
The economy in media studies
Negotiating budgetary constraints and financial restrictions in psychoanalytic work
The relationship between the infinite and the finite in psychoanalysis
The other as a limit or the limitations of otherness
New clinical, cultural, or theoretical interventions on the relation between psychoanalysis and limits
Negotiating the limits of intellectual work in the struggle for social justice
Psychoanalytic responses to economic crisis and anxiety
The economy of race and ethnicity
Psychoanalysis and the possibility of economic justice in a time of neoliberal hegemony
How the economy might be politicized
Contemporary investigations into feminism and psychoanalysis relative to the economy

We are particularly interested in panel proposals or roundtables that discuss these issues and also invite you to think of alternate formats that promote discussion.

Abstracts should be no longer than 250 words. Please attach a cover sheet that includes your name, primary affiliation, and contact information. Abstracts may be sent to: todd.mcgowan@uvm.edu

APCS, an interdisciplinary psychoanalytic organization, encourages all participants to reflect on the social importance of their contribution and its relationship to social justice. It is our view that the psychoanalytic investigation of culture and society constitutes a unique and indispensible means not only of understanding but also of intervening in our most serious social problems, and we encourage proposals that work to further this project.

Annual Freud Memorial Lecture 2009

2009-03-18T22:49:00.001Z

Friday 22nd May 2009, 6pm
Lakeside Theatre, University of Essex

"What have they done to you, poor child?"
Valerie Sinason

Freud ( Dec 14th 1897) Letter to Fliess
The brilliance and significance of early Freud in the fields of sexual abuse and trauma is often inadequately acknowledged. Due to the fearfulness of his followers and the subsequent privileging of the symbolic at the expense of literal experience. Using examples from clinical work in learning disability, abuse and dissociative identity disorder Valerie Sinason draws attention to key theoretical concepts on memory and trauma in Freud's early work that aid her as a clinician.

Valerie Sinason is a poet, writer, child and adult psychotherapist and adult psychoanalyst. For the last ten years she has been Director of the Clinic for Dissociative Studies. Previously, she was a Consultant Psychotherapist at the Tavistock and St Georges Hospital Medical School, Psychiatry of Disability Dept. She is President of the Institute for Psychotherapy and Disability and Hon Consultant Psychotherapist at Cape Town Child Guidance Clinic.

Entry is without charge, but we would strongly advise registering to secure a place.

Please contact Debbie Stewart, Centre Administrator for further information.

Psychoanalysts at work.

2009-03-09T22:24:00.003Z

The New York Times is offering a slide show of psychoanalysts in their offices. Let the wild analyses commence!

This thanks to Norm Holland and the P syArt email list.

Supervision Workshop in London

2009-03-05T10:30:00.002Z

Beginning Thursday, 12 March, Dr Joseph Berke and Professor Robert Young will offer free weekly supervision workshops on clinical and theoretical matters. Therapists and trainees are invited to bring their puzzling case materials and conceptual problems for discussion.

Venue: 8 Shepherd's Close - Off Shepherd's Hill, near Archway Road
Nearest underground: Highgate on the Northern Line (take Jackson's Lane exit).

TIME: 3.30-5.00

Joesph Berke is a Psychoanalytic Psychotherapist and former Director of the Arbours Crisis Centre

Robert Young is a Psychoanalytic Psychotherapist and former Professor of Psychotherapy at Sheffield University

Queries to
Joseph Berke 020 8348 4492
or
Robert Young 020 7607 8306

http://www.psychoanalysis-and-therapy.com
Wikipedia entry: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_M._Young
Human-Nature.Com Web Site: http://www.human-nature.com

Call for papers and conference announcement

2009-03-03T13:18:00.004Z

CALL FOR PAPERS

Psychoanalysis, Culture and Society

A Postgraduate Conference

Centre for Psychoanalysis
Middlesex University
London

Saturday, 20TH June, 2009

We are pleased to announce Psychoanalysis, Culture and Society: A Postgraduate Conference.

We invite postgraduate students and research fellows to submit proposals for papers on psychoanalysis or psychoanalytically informed research. Papers may be from any academic discipline, including psychology, sociology, cultural studies, psychosocial studies, history, literature, art, religious studies or philosophy.

This one-day conference is designed to give postgraduate students from all disciplines who are interested in psychoanalysis an opportunity to present and discuss their research in an informal and intellectually stimulating setting.

The conference takes place at the Hendon Campus of Middlesex University (30 minutes from central London) between 9:30 and 5:30 on Saturday, 20th June, 2009. Tea, coffee and a light lunch will be provided. The conference fee is £30 for presenters and attendees.

Submitting an abstract

Abstracts of 300 words (maximum) should include a title, the name of your university or institution and a telephone number.

Papers should be no more than 20 minutes long. A further 10 minutes will be allowed for discussion. Sessions of 1½ hours will have space for three papers. There will be concurrent panels to accommodate as many papers as possible. The day will end with a plenary.

The deadline for submission of abstracts is Monday, 11th May, 2009. You will be notified about acceptance of your abstract by Friday, 15th May. Abstracts, queries and registration should be sent to: David Henderson, d.henderson@mdx.ac.uk

Centre for Psychoanalysis
Psychology Department
Middlesex University
The Burroughs
Hendon
London
NW4 4BT

Merry Christmas, Mrs. Klein

2008-12-22T10:56:00.003Z

In a festive holiday treat, BBC Radio 4 Saturday Play just this week broadcast Nicholas Wright's play, Mrs. Klein. The information from the BBC website is here:

Saturday 20 December Mrs Klein

By Nicholas Wright

The troubled relationship between influential child psychoanalyst Melanie Klein and her own children.

Faced with coming to terms with the news of the death of her son, Mrs Klein decides against going to his funeral. Frustrated with her mother's behaviour, Klein's daughter Melitta confronts her with some home truths.

Mrs Klein ...... Janet Suzman
Melitta ...... Eve Best
Paula ...... Clare Corbett

Director Alison Hindell.

--------------------------

A very BIG Thank you to Sarah for bringing this to my attention, because I missed it on the day. BUT, thanks to modern technology, we needn't go without. You can listen again (until December 27) via the BBC iPlayer (though I don't know if this will work outside of the UK), and the 'listen again' link on the website (when it's updated).

Happy listening!

On the lighter side

2008-10-15T22:17:00.004+01:00

The students in my undergraduate psychoanalytic theory seminar have discovered some terrific illustrations for some Kleinian ideas that are too perfect not to share.

These clips (sorry about the ads) are from The Family Guy. No, I haven't seen it (come on! there's only so many hours in the day!), but I will try to catch it when I can now.

First up, a terrific illustration of the Kleinian paranoid-schizoid position. Note the demands, note how the baby deals with the Oedipal threat, note the fear of retaliation from the object... Klein in a one-minute cartoon:

And this one... well. It just made me laugh. Because my sons do this:

More analyses welcome. Another must-watch for fans of Freud, it seems. Many, many thanks to everyone: Katie, Izzy, Tori, Sally, Liz, Emma, Rachel, Fay!

Synchronicity, investor psychology and history in the making.

2008-10-13T14:37:00.013+01:00

In a strange synchronicitous event on former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher’s 83rd birthday, we are seeing her 1983 reforms of the UK money markets dramatically reversed. What would Carl Jung have to say about that? Well as he’s no longer with us, I’d like to have my say first.

The current facts: the ongoing collapse of free market capitalism is today resulting in a move towards nationalisation of many major financial institutions, with governments the world over considering major international reforms of the global banking system. In Britain this has amounted to nothing less than a socialist coup, that is the unelected take over of financial boardroom strategy of 3 major banks by a Labour government, without any need for re-election or opposition from parliament. These are the most far reaching reforms of our economy since Thatcher’s deregulation of financial markets in 1983, and prior to that the nationalisations of the 1940’s. The UK taxpayer now owns large parts of these banks and their elected representatives (treasury staff) now have a say in how these assets are managed.

Some of the reforms made include bank CEO’s bonuses no longer being awarded in cash, but bank shares, thus encouraging a long term view when making decisions on lending and borrowing, as they stand to win or lose on the basis of their own decisions. The banks’ declared ‘loss of confidence’ (returning to this below) will not be able to hold the taxpayer to ransom either ( as I feared it might), because the government shares in these banks are large enough to ensure control of boardroom decision making and thus, the freeing of money for lending to small businesses and homebuyers, at reasonable rates.

However, there have been some objections to what’s happened from the public, such as ‘but they're spending our money, tax payer’s money, to bail out banks’. Hmmm. But the city spivs were running off with huge amounts of our money anyway, money they were earning through risky investments of our savings in volatile markets, causing spiralling debt and a property boom that ensured we spend a greater proportion our income on housing than any other country in the developed world. Effectively we UK mortgage holders were paying rents for our homes to banks (the real homeowners) who were investing the profit in further property development (through, for example, selling high interest ‘buy to let’ mortgages offered to increasingly greedy landlords) which fuelled a house price boom that excluded many working people in Britain from the stability of having their own home. Instead many have been forced to pay high rents to ‘buy to let’ property tycoons for substandard housing. Meanwhile, bank CEOs, mortgage brokers, bank share holders, property developers and such like, coined in huge profits generated by their risky investments of our money… leading to the crisis we have seen in the past few weeks. The ‘loss of confidence’ that led to the drying up of funds and frozen liquidity was caused by fear amongst financiers of each others greed. In psychoanalytic terms, this economic collapse has been driven at bottom by paranoid schizoid greed and envy.

The ultimate fear was that continued lending might fail to bring in the big bucks that had been previously lining the pockets of city spivs at the ordinary working person’s great expense. So they stopped lending. Today we are seeing the return of managed markets, restored confidence, as the government intervenes to contain the paranoid schizoid confidence crisis. This demonstrates how ethereal high finance really is, and how driven our economies are human emotions such as paranoia, fear, enthusiasm, greed and envy. As our financial institutions have increased in size to embrace a deregulated global free market, their default position during uncertain times has been driven by increasingly primitive processes, which is how large groups tend to operate in a crisis. Today we see the resuscitation of nationalisation as the only workable strategy of containment.

Happy birthday Maggie.

Jo.

Oh! My Winnipeg!

2008-09-20T10:35:00.001+01:00

A couple of weeks ago, your Psycho-Babble On... team went to the lovely Showroom cinema in Sheffield to enjoy an evening of Guy Maddin's dramamentary, tragic love letter and noir homage, My Winnipeg. It was decided, by virtue of me being Canadian and the more strictly psychoanalytically-inclined, that I should be charged with the task of offering to you, our loyal reader (notice the singular -- I assume nothing), thorough analyses and commentary on this artistic endeavour. (Plus, it was my turn after a long holiday to add something to the blog.)

Well, let me start with the proviso that I've never been to Winnipeg, and while it is 'close' it is still a 25 hour drive from my hometown of Toronto. I did, however, get most of the ice hockey references, and yes, I've had my nose freeze shut when out walking in December (though that was in Montreal).

The problem with trying to write about a film like My Winnipeg is that it is so relentlessly and unrepentantly intelligent, and knowing, that it renders any analysis by critical hacks (almost) pointless. It's like reading Angela Carter: you start thinking to yourself, 'I know what this is! I know what this is! This is a panopticon she's describing here!' and when you turn the page your enthusiasm crashes to the bottom of your stomach when you read, 'It is a panopticon that I am describing here' -- and neither with Carter's novels nor with Maddin's film does this necessarily inhibit your appreciation or enjoyment of the offering, but it does crush the pretensions of we critics that think artists can't say anything without our explanations.

SO, what can I say about My Winnipeg? Or, what can I say about My Winnipeg that Maddin hasn't already? It is a brilliant examination of and play with Oedipus, even if I though there was one too many shots of Maddin's mother's naked lap to make the point. But the association of home with the mother, and how both are simultaneously longer-for and loathed, is brilliantly portrayed. Winnipeg's unique situation, as a city of slumbering numbness at a mythical junction of two rivers, inciting both passion and contempt, makes it a northern Thebes, and Maddin himself a winking (pre-eye gouging, obviously) Oedipus.

And these Oedipal pictures are drawn in neat black-and-white, the noir style both lovingly and satirically presented, but the overall effect is to heighten the tragedy, since noir is itself so steeped in the Freudian melodrama. Hitchcock, too, looms large, not only stylistically, but with small but overt links to Psycho, Vertigo and -- I think -- The Birds. Maybe others, too -- I'd have to watch it again, which I'll be more than happy to do one day.

Maddin's mother -- or, I should say, 'Maddin's' 'mother', because really I'm taking about the representation of her here, not the woman herself (who I've never met, even though, yes, we're both from Canada) -- is fantastically rendered: she is not only Jocasta, but also Freud himself -- the relentlessly interogator who pushes through the snowbanks of denial ('snowbanks of denial'? -- it works, watch the film) to expose those truths that her children would hide from her; but, more akin to Melanie Klein, she is a menace, a monstrous figure that haunts every unconscious frame.

My Winnipeg deserves a place on the psychoanaytic cultural shelf, right up along there with the Theban plays, The Oresteia, Hamlet et al. Go and see it.

Another event at the Freud Museum

2008-09-12T14:08:00.001+01:00

Invitation
Freud Museum and Anna Freud Centre
Evening Talk and drinks reception
Tuesday 23 September 7pm - 9pm

Elisabeth Young-Bruehl
will talk about and read from her acclaimed biography of Anna Freud.
ANNA FREUD: A Biography
(Second Edition)

The talk will be from 7pm-8pm, followed by a book launch & drinks reception 8pm - 9pm

This event is free, but please phone or email the museum to secure your place.
Tel: 020 7435 2002 Email: info@freud.org.uk

“Young-Bruehl’s description of one of the most complex but brilliant lights in psychoanalytic history has stood as a beacon to students of psychoanalytic history. It is the best, most carefully crafted, biography of any psychoanalyst and it illuminates the entire tradition with a clarity that only the exploration of the life of the daughter of the founder of the movement could possibly provide. It is a beautifully written, insightful, and remarkably edifying piece of work. The best has just got better.” - Peter Fonagy, Chief Executive of the Anna Freud Centre)

This new edition of Elisabeth Young-Bruehl's definitive biography of pioneering child analyst Anna Freud includes a major retrospective introduction by the author, an updated bibliography, and new material on Anna Freud and Dorothy Burlingham at Hampstead.

Written with exclusive access to Anna Freud’s vast literary estate, it is the ultimate biography of this remarkable woman. Anna Freud (1895-1982) grew up vying with psychoanalysis for her father’s attention. She would eventually become his constant companion, professional collaborator and ambassador to the psychoanalytical movement. After his death she became the chief keeper of his memory and his science, as well as taking her own historical place in the development of psychoanalysis, through her work with children.

In this remarkable biography Elisabeth Young-Bruehl draws on access to Anna’s personal poetry, letters, dreams and prose writing to tell her story from her Viennese childhood to her last days in Hampstead, wrapped in her father's old woollen coat.

Freud Museum
20 Maresfield Gardens
London NW3 5SX
Tel:00 44 (0)20 7435 2002/ Direct Line 02074352098
VISIT our website: www.freud.org.uk

Rita Apsan
Freud Museum Photo Library and Shop
20 Maresfield Gardens
London NW3 5SX
Tel:00 44 (0)20 7435 2002/ Direct Line 02074352098
VISIT our website: www.freud.org.uk

A reflection on the film ‘Savage Grace’ dir Tom Kalin 2008

2008-09-10T13:38:00.003+01:00

I went to this see this film last month and emerged from the cinema stunned by the graphic scenes of Oedipal triumph fuelled by the death instinct… or at least that’s a psychoanalytic interpretation of the driving narrative. For a more conventional summary of the plot try the following:

‘Based on Natalie Robins' non-fiction book, Savage Grace tells the tragic story of Barbara Baekeland, a middle-class woman who married into the Bakelite plastics fortune, but allowed her insecurities to poison her familial relationships and lead to murder.’

The fact that this film is based upon a true story makes it even more shocking. People were getting up and leaving the cinema during explicit scenes that smash every social taboo upholding the veeneer of civility, that we accept as ‘reality’, in contemporary western society. The title of the film depicts the problem the characters face, which is how to deal with the unconscious savagery that necessitates an etiquette of polite aggression to regulate societies sustained by greed and glamour. We observe how the materially ambitious use the trappings of glamour as a fragile container for narcissistic and paranoid modes of object relating. Such relationships are based upon trade rather than love. Everything is a business deal, a power move. Yet we are treated to visual scenes of sumptious beauty and elegance that permit complex power trade offs to pass as the ultimate in sophistication. However, when this fragile container of glamour fails, as it must, the result is devastation. This is the kind of film I expect to read a lot of essays about in the future! Go see if you have a strong stomach and enjoy thought provoking explorations of the social regulation of desire.

Jo

From the Freud Museum...

2008-09-10T10:28:00.004+01:00

THE CREATIVE JOURNEY

We are back with our Literary dialogues at the Freud Museum!
This time Amanda Craig will be in conversation with novelist and critic Michael Arditti.

Thursday 18 September 7.00pm: Amanda Craig

Amanda Craig is the author of five highly acclaimed novels, Foreign Bodies, A Private Place, A Vicious Circle, In a Dark Wood and Love in Idleness. She has been hailed in the Evening Standard as ‘the greatest novelist under the age of fifty’. Her new novel, Hearts and Minds, a sequel to A Vicious Circle and Love in Idleness, will be published this year. She contributes regularly to the Daily Telegraph, Independent on Sunday and the New Statesman and is the children’s book critic for The Times.

And the final one will be on

Thursday 23 October 7.00pm: Deborah Moggach

Deborah Moggach is a highly esteemed novelist, short story and screenplay writer. Her novels include The Ex-Wives, Porky, The Stand-In, Final Demand, These Foolish Things, the best-selling Tulip Fever and, most recently, In The Dark. Her TV adaptations include several of her own books, Nancy Mitford’s Love in a Cold Climate, Anne Fine’s Goggle Eyes and The Diary of Anne Frank. Her 2005 screenplay for Pride and Prejudice earned her a BAFTA nomination.

The events will be hosted by Michael Arditti.

Michael Arditti is a novelist, short story writer and critic. His novels include Unity, A Sea Change and the award-winning Easter. He is currently the Leverhulme artist in residence at the Freud museum.

All talks take place at The Freud Museum
Entrance: £12 or £10 for Friends of the Freud Museum

Please apply online at www.freud.org.uk/order1.htm using the secure order form, or phone the museum to secure a place. Payment should be made by Credit/Debit Card in advance.

20 Maresfield Gardens
020 7435 2002 info@freud.org.uk

Rita Apsan
Freud Museum Photo Library and Shop
20 Maresfield Gardens
London NW3 5SX
Tel:00 44 (0)20 7435 2002/ Direct Line 02074352098
VISIT our website: www.freud.org.uk

Announcing...

2008-07-30T14:31:00.003+01:00

On behalf of our friends in Dublin:

Reading Bracha L. Ettinger's The Matrixial Borderspace
Two-Day Intensive, Interdisciplinary Seminar
Saturday 18 and Sunday 19 April 2009

As Part of The(e)ories: Advanced Seminars for Queer Research 2009 in Collaboration with UCD School of English, Drama and Film Studies

Seminar Description:

This two-day intensive, interdisciplinary seminar is devoted to responding to Bracha L. Ettinger's The Matrixial Borderspace (University of Minnesota Press 2006) from a range of interdisciplinary perspectives: psychoanalysis, philosophy, film studies, visual culture, feminism and queer theory. The seminar provides a unique opportunity to read a small sample of Professor Ettinger's oeuvre closely and discuss its implications for a range of fields but especially for the insights offered for considering gender and sexuality and the potential for a sustained dialogue between psychoanalysts, critical theorists and practitioners of the arts.

The first day of the seminar will feature a discussion of Sigmund Freud's paper on the uncanny together with Professor Ettinger's formulation of the matrixial before a lecture by Professor Ettinger on her current research. Day two of the seminar will be devoted to discussing The Matrixial Borderspace in more detail and the various theoretical, ethical, cultural and political questions it raises more generally. Each session will begin with four short responses by (30 mins.) by a leading expert in the area of the theme being considered, after which the chair of the session will offer a short response (10 mins.) to the presentation before opening the discussion up more generally to attendees of the seminar (50 mins.). The emphasis here will be on discussion. To further facilitate an engagement with the themes of the seminar, attendees will read one required article or book chapter for each session, which will be provided in a reading pack in advance.

Required Reading:

There are two required texts for this seminar: a copy of Sigmund Freud's paper will be provided however delegates must source a copy of Bracha Ettinger's book themselves.

1. Bracha Ettinger, The Matrixial Borderspace (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2006).

2. Sigmund Freud, 'The Uncanny' in The Uncanny, trans. Hugh Haughton (London: Penguin, 2003; first pub. 1919), pp. 121-62.

The Speaker:

Bracha Ettinger is an artist, senior clinical psychologist and practising psychoanalyst. Her artworks have been exhibited extensively and she has written a number of books and many essays on topics relating to psychoanalysis, philosophy, visual culture, feminism and ethics. She is the Marcel Duchamp Professor of Psychoanalysis and Art at the Media and Communications Division, European Graduate School (EGS), Saas-Fee. Further information about Professor Ettinger can be found here:

http://cmcep.uprrp.edu/Bracha_Ettinger/index.html

http://www.metramorphosis.org.uk

http://www.uprm.edu/optika.docs/bracha.pdf

Description of The Matrixial Borderspace:
A groundbreaking intertwining of the philosophy of art and psychoanalytic theory.

Artist, psychoanalyst, and feminist theorist Bracha Ettinger presents an original theoretical exploration of shared affect and emergent expression, across the thresholds of identity and memory. Ettinger works through Lacan's late works, the anti-Oedipal perspectives of Deleuze and Guattari, as well as object-relations theory to critique the phallocentrism of mainstream Lacanian theory and to rethink the masculine-feminine opposition. She replaces the phallic structure with a dimension of emergence, where objects, images, and meanings are glimpsed in their incipiency, before they are differentiated. This is the matrixial realm, a shareable, psychic dimension that underlies the individual unconscious and experience.

Concerned with collective trauma and memory, Ettinger's own experience as an Israeli living with the memory of the Holocaust is a deep source of inspiration for her paintings, several of which are reproduced in the book. The paintings, like the essays, replay the relation between the visible and invisible, the sayable and ineffable; the gaze, the subject, and the other.

Table of Contents:
Foreword: Bracha's Eurydice
Judith Butler

Introduction. Femininity: Aporia or Sexual Difference?
Griselda Pollock

1. The Matrixial Gaze
2. The With-In-Visible Screen
3. Wit(h)nessing Trauma and the Matrixial Gaze
4. The Heimlich
5. Transcryptum
6. Weaving a Woman Artist with-in the Matrixial Encounter-Event

Afterword. Painting: The Voice of the Grain
Brian Massumi

Notes
Works by Bracha L. Ettinger
Publication History
Index

Further Information:
This seminar is organised by Dr Noreen Giffney (noreen.giffney@gmail.com), Michael O'Rourke (tranquilised_icon@yahoo.com) and Dr Anne Mulhall (anne.mulhall@ucd.ie). For further information or to register, please contact one of the organisers. Places are limited so early registration is advised.

Dear shadow

2008-07-14T18:07:00.006+01:00

You have a dream. You find yourself walking through Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s painting "Netherlandish Proverbs", surrounded by figures re-enacting countless proverbs, sayings and aphorisms. The scene needs decoding. Above you, a man "hangs his cloak according to the wind" (adapts his viewpoint to the current opinion), whilst his neighbour "tosses feathers into that same wind" (works fruitlessly). A third figure "gazes at the stork" (wastes his/her time). And so it goes, according to accepted wisdom.

The sun is still climbing. You become aware of the shadow that your body casts on the ground. It is indistinct, and falls towards the sun rather than away from it. As you make your way through the characters and their travails, you begin to be overwhelmed by the burden of intersubjectivity, the sheer agony and exhilaration of being alive amongst other people also living, and yet long since dead. You think about joining them, leaving the darkness behind.

The realisation dawns that you have been here before, and some familiar words ring out, seemingly sung by a group of fleet foxes, sitting watching the humans from the slopes of Tiger Mountain, just outside the frame of Bruegel the Elder’s painting…

“In the town one morning, I went
Staggering through premonitions of my death-
I don't see anybody that dear to me.

Dear shadow, alive and well,
How can the body die?
You tell me everything,
Anything true.

Jesse,
I don't know what I have done-
I'm turning myself to a demon.
I don't know what I have done-
I'm turning myself to a demon.”

Misery and meaning

2008-06-20T12:28:00.016+01:00

So, there’s a credit crunch going on. And a war on terror. Oh, and the world is getting too warm too quickly. In the classic 1970s sit-com constantly on repeat in my mind, there is a battle going on between the Jones and the Frazer- between “Don’t panic!” and “We’re doomed!”

And in one ear, the hopefulness of The Smiths’ “Ask” is ringing out whilst in the other, I can hear the dolorous tones of “Heaven knows I’m miserable now".

Vacillating between the denial and embrace of a kind of thanatos, I was interested to stumble upon the “Web of misery”. This is a tool for making predictions based on new online indicators of economic distress, devised by the eLab eXchange, which is part of the Sloan Center for Internet Retailing at the University of California, Riverside. It now seems possible to measure how the US economic recession has affected people's online behaviour by inviting people to predict how much traffic is likely to increase to internet sites devoted to 10 subjects that are often associated with economic distress- Alcohol, Education, Employment, Food, Gambling, God, Guns, Health Care and Real Estate. For example, some are at greater risk for problem drinking as unemployment rises, so the US Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration could attract increasing numbers of visitors seeking help. Similarly, during periods of economic hardship, there will be increases in gun ownership and interest in religion. The outcome of these 10 “markets” will be determined early in the third quarter of 2008 using Nielsen Online's NetView audience measurement service. And in the spirit of free enterprise and lottery love, you can even try to dodge your own personal credit crunch by winning a prize of up to $500 for playing. Hmm…

Thus we have a predictor based on others’ predictions and on that most slippery of things, “confidence” (which, incidentally, is what powers behaviour on the world’s economic trading floors). It strikes me that if there is a “web of misery” online, there must also be a “web of joy” or perhaps, more significantly, a “web of meaning”. They will surely co-exist- our fears of the future, our anxiety around death, our denial of meaninglessness, these will themselves be constituents of the kind of meanings we seek and find. If we consider online behaviour, there are a number of ways of tracking the “web of meaning”- there is plenty of freeware which will track your web useage, how far your mouse has travelled, how many different sites you have viewed, what you have searched for, “where” you have wandered to in cyberspace (are we still using that term, by the way?!) On their own, these measures may not add up to more than a fairly small hill of beans- they can’t capture the complexity of the meaningfulness of online activity, because it spreads out not just through cyberspace but also through the noösphere. However, the sum of our online activity, much like the sum of our face-to-face social interactions, is surely an indicator of something significant.

Whatever the “web of meaning” is, and it is probably closest to the semantic web, there are reasons to be cheerful. As people experienced in the delights and dangers of online education, Michael and myself have found that the online context brings some particular opportunities for learning, for making connections, for forging meaning in miserable times. Our courses, the MA in Psychoanalytic Studies and the MSc in Psychotherapy Studies, use slightly different blends of pedagogies, but both focus largely on the power of asynchronous communication, the gradual building of dialogues on particular topics which has such a different flavour to synchronous communication, be that face-to-face or online. As this dialogue progresses, we are continually surprised and delighted by the way students make connections with one another- people they never meet in the flesh, and have little in common with, but who become trusted companions in the search for meaning. Indeed, we find that some of the characteristics of online behaviour, such as the oft-cited “online disinhibition”, have significant advantages. As they study a particular topic, students will find themselves engaging in self-disclosure, sharing the most personal experiences with one another, opening up about losses, traumas, sorrows and joys, making links between theory and personal experience and clinical practice. And overall, we found in our research that students value the online experience highly, more so than comparable face-to-face courses (see the bottom of this page for our most recent research). Interestingly, we have found that some students are more comfortable with the disembodiment, with the lack of visual feedback and bodily presence, with the “not knowing” about the Other; and some students find this same disembodiment a barrier to deep learning. I suppose we come back to the role of confidence- we are continually working on ways of engaging these students in a way which facilitates their self-confidence and ability to learn.

E-learning is no panacea, but as we sit on our “web of misery” and think about the future, eLearning does offer new ways of connecting, new ways of building our own “webs of meaning” which allow us to capture those bits of significant information flying past us, onwards into nothingness.

Freud 2.0 possibilities

2008-05-29T15:58:00.005+01:00

Two websites I would like to draw your attention to:

First, if you haven't already leapt into the world of the Web 2.0, with social bookmarking, wikis and collaborative documents, please do with all haste. A great site, just brought to my attention (thanks Andy!), is G02Web20.net -- a catalogue of possibilities. If it all seems a bit overwhelming, try refining what's on offer by using the 'Select Tab' button at the top. That'll help you narrow in on what you're looking for.

I'm still playing with that and finding all sorts of new things, so any recommendations are very, very welcome. But one site I'm already familiar with that I would like to draw your attention to is Diigo. Diigo (pronounced: dee'go) is a social bookmarking site that allows for the public annotation of pages. It allows you to clippings, annotate, tag, highlight and share webpages. Sign up for an account -- and, if you use Mozilla Firefox (as you should, really), you can get a Diigo toolbar integrated into your browser. (Correction: the Diigo toolbar is available for a number of browsers, including IE.)

Then, when visiting a website while signed into your account (and they account OpenID now, it seems), you can highlight clips on the page, write comments and let all of your friends know what's there. And if you are browsing and find a page that someone else has annotated, you can see their comments. (If you sign up, come back here and have a look.)

Comments can be private or public, open to all or just to a select group. So if you do join the Diigo network, please join the psychoanalysis group (or, my Foucault group, if you are so inclined).

More on psychoanalysis and the internet in coming weeks.

Jacques Lacan was really into Joy Division

2008-05-28T15:34:00.004+01:00

As Jacques Lacan moved from the real, imaginary and symbolic orders into death, in September 1981, three men and one woman were proposing a new order in a Manchester studio. The newly named New Order re-recorded the last song which Joy Division wrote, a song called Ceremony, thereby beginning the process of picking up the pieces of Joy Division which Ian Curtis’ suicide had so finally torn apart. With the inclusion of their new female band member, New Order started climbing in to their own versions of the future, finding their own voice as the memory of Curtis’ voice faded from conscious memory.

After years of under-representation in popular culture, the story of Joy Division has been ceremonially re-presented through a bizarre triangle of films. First was the cartoonish 24 Hour Party People, a ramshackle trawl though the carnival of the Manchester music scene from punk to post punk to baggy, all seen through the Tristram Shandy-esque eyes of Tony Wilson. Whilst this captured some of the anarchic jouissance of a record company (Factory records) with a Situationist ethic where contracts were signed in Wilson’s blood on knowingly chic boardroom tables, the bit-part which Joy Division play ultimately “renders the scaffolding dangerous”, to quote a certain S. Ryder. Second was Control, the iconising black and white biopic of Ian Curtis, as pictured by long-time devotee and photographer Anton Corbijn. In attempting to recreate the mythology surrounding Curtis, that most archetypal tortured genius, chased to the grave by his shadow, the other band members were reduced to supporting players, and Curtis’ demise seemed a beautifully shot formality, rather like the feeling, upon glimpsing a new Peter Saville sleeve, that the existence of this new and wonderful artefact was entirely inevitable.

Most recently, and most successfully, Joy Division: The Documentary presented archive footage and interviews to artfully piece together the journeys that the band were taking, journeys which ultimately led in tragically different directions. It brings home the largely accidental nature of the magic that the four young men created. As we see the band blooming from shambolic post-punksters to era-defining musicians, bass hero Hooky describes it all as “easy”. They were, it seems, just being themselves, doing what came naturally. And what came naturally was a kind of fierce attachment to the importance of authenticity, married to a vision of the darker side of humanity and a gloomy aesthetic which perfectly evoked their own crumbling surroundings. An ailing Wilson poignantly surmises that after the initial rebellious surge of punk, the energy would need to find other outlets: “Sooner or later somebody was going to want to say more than 'fuck you' ... to say 'I'm fucked.' And that was Joy Division".

Or rather, that was Ian Curtis. Inevitably the triangulation of these three films, and the attention of the three remaining band members, focuses on Curtis’ own demise, both mysterious and sadly obvious in hindsight. Saville calls the trajectory of Curtis and Joy Division “the last true story in pop”. We hear very little from Curtis himself, and yet his presence suffuses every frame of the film. The nearest we come to a direct connection, unmediated by the heavy sheen of music and movement, is in a brief radio interview and an eerie recording of Curtis being hypnotized by band-mate Bernard Sumner and regressing to talk about previous lives, just weeks before his death.

This is one of the few hints that those around him recognised the trouble he was in. We may be distracted by the numerous reminders of just how special Joy Division were, but most viewers will already know the end of the story, the march of a self-condemned man to his own punishment and on into posterity. The band’s own lack of awareness of the extent of his struggle, their inability to help, is painfully clear. Young men more interested in making loud music, enjoying success and getting fucked rather than making existential statements about being fucked. They never really listened to the lyrics, or made a connection between the doom-laden images and their writer’s mental health. They were never to be the helpers that he needed, the helpers who probably could not have helped him anyway. The story of a suicide is always many things, and one of these things is a challenge to psychoanalysis. Psychoanalytic interpretation after the event is one thing, but where was the therapeutic help which Curtis might have benefited from? The nearest the film comes is footage of a neurologist discussing anti-epileptic medication. Sumner is in little doubt that Curtis’ burgeoning epilepsy, and the drugs he took to control it, contributed greatly to his eventual demise. But where was Lacan when Curtis needed him the most?

Joy Division: The Documentary includes excerpts from Malcolm Whitehead’s legendary short film- unsteady, grainy footage of three songs at the Bowden Vale Youth Club in March 1979, where the power of the music can be seen stunning audiences still reeling from the initial punk explosion, ill-prepared for a blast of white hot futurism drenched in the decay of recent history. If you look carefully, you can just make out an old man stood motionless on the front row amongst the pulsing, steaming youth of Greater Manchester, his grey hair swept back in the style beloved of continental academics, his eyes dancing behind spectacles, nodding his head to a particularly holy trinity in this order- “She's Lost Control”, “Shadowplay”, “Leaders of Men”.

Jacques Lacan was really into Joy Division.

Klein at the British Museum

2008-05-21T14:19:00.000+01:00

Not really, no. But her work lives on, and nowhere it is more apparent than in the British Museum. You can see why Freud -- and Klein, and Jung... the lot, really -- kept finding inspiration, or rather, 'evidence', in the art of the ancients.

I've been especially haunted by a figure that I found in Asian section. ('Room 33' in your guidebooks.)

I think you'll see why.

Wild analysis on why this has been haunting me is, of course, as welcome as it is inevitable. (I know my audience.) But I've finally had a moment to do some basic research, and though anthropology isn't exactly my forte, I thought I'd share some of my findings.

(Hey, let's be honest: anthropology was never really Freud's forte either. But who would want to live in a world without Totem and Taboo?)

SO, back to my nightmare. The British Museum website on this figure tells us that this is a sandstone figure of Chamunda. Here's a snippet from their description:

The Great Hindu goddess Devi takes many forms: benign, sensuous and maternal at one level, horrifying and powerful at another. Chamunda, with her skeletal frame and staring socket eyes, is one of her fiercest manifestations, associated with corpses and even sacrificial rituals.

And here we've got all the classic imagery of death and destruction, of Klein's mother intent on revenge, in the infant's phantasy, for all of the attacks that she has suffered at the hands (and poos) of her baby. She's already obviously endured these anal attacks, her inner contents (father's penis, other children, shit -- all threatening objects to her children) having been ripped from her. And how she's coming back, armed with a thunderbolt, trident, snake and sword. With the skull-cap and severed head she's carrying her first trophies.

Notice in the British Museum description what her weapons are for: to fight ignorance, which we can see linked to the epistemophillic impulse, the force that initiates anal aggression in the first place (see 'Early Stages of the Oedipus Conflict'), and to fight 'ego' -- though I don't think they mean 'ego' in the way Klein would intend it, obviously, there still there suggestions of an attack on the self, which is what the paranoid imagined retaliation of the mother actually is, after all.

In a longer, and much more detailed explanation (which is interesting beyond its description of Chamunda), Chandra Alexandre explains how Chamunda was linked to death and was demonised by patriarchal traditions in India, which is very interesting in the context of men's envy and fear of the 'bad' (read: all-powerful and frustrating) mother, manifested so often in patriarchal strictures, institutions and misogyny more generally.

Please post your comments if you can offer any further enlightenment!

Freud Memorial Lecture

2008-05-20T15:35:00.007+01:00

Of interest to those of you in easy reach of London:

Freud Memorial Lecture 2008

Thursday 26 June 7.30pm at The Conway Hall, WC1

Adam Phillips

Freud’s Helplessness

Adam Phillips is a child and adult psychotherapist and acclaimed author. His books include: On Kissing, Tickling and Being Bored (1993); Terrors and Experts (1995), The Beast in the Nursery (1998), Promises, Promises (2000), Houdini’s Box (2001), Equals: On Inhibition, Mockery, Hierarchy and the Pleasures of Democracy (2002), and Going Sane (2005).

“Phillips has virtually invented the essay as a suitable form for penetrating psychological enquiry” Frank Kermode

Registration: £12 or £10 for Friends of the Freud Museum
Please apply online at www.freud.org.uk/order1.htm using the secure order form, or phone the museum to secure a place.

20 Maresfield Gardens
020 7435 2002
info @freud.org.uk

Passion Plays

2008-04-25T11:51:00.002+01:00

Any play where one of the central characters is a psychiatrist/analyst is ripe for some psychoanalytic criticism. “Equus”, Peter Shaffer’s 1973 play about a young disturbed man and his interactions with an aging psychiatrist, takes its place among the pantheon of psychoanalytically oriented plays. I encountered it last week in Sheffield where it has been performed with Simon Callow and Alfie Allen in the lead roles.

It is a play about seeing and interpretation. The central mystery is why the young man, Alan Strang, has behaved in such an extreme and irrational way- he has blinded six horses in the stables where he works. The rich imagery of the play offers a number of different interpretations, involving awakening sexuality and erotic shame, religious fervour and psychotic disturbance. The blinding, which is eventually (re-)seen towards the end of the play but which casts its shadow over proceedings, evokes both the Oedipus myth and the infamous eyeball scene from Buñuel and Dalí’s surrealist film “Un Chien Andalou”. Shaffer even throws in a few psychoanalytic teasers, such as naming the mother of the young man “Dora” Strang. You may recall that Dora (real name “Ida Bauer”) was an emblematic character in Freud’s life, representing one of his most important early case studies, a young woman he diagnosed with hysteria using his burgeoning kitbag of psychoanalytic tools. Dora Strang is both distant from her own husband Frank, Alan’s father, and resistant to Dr Dysart’s attempts to understand the family dynamics, perhaps because her explanatory frame is overtly religious, and the psychiatrist is the high priest of (ir)rationalism, of explaining human motivation without recourse to the infinite.

The analyst/detective goes about his business, gradually getting beneath the young man’s defences and tricking him into re-telling the story so that his motivations can be laid bare. What is particularly interesting about this play is that the analysis begins to work in reverse- as he looks for meaning in the young man’s behaviour, Dysart recognises that it is his own motivations that need to be scrutinised and understood. In an unusual move for the psychoanalyst, he turns his method upon himself, and the audience watches the analyser analysing himself, overcoming his own resistances, facing up to his own blind spots. And although the magistrate Hesther Saloman, who originally referred Strang to Dysart, listens to his musings and confessions, it is really the audience who are asked by Shaffer to decide what Dysart’s motivations are, to become the analyst to Dysart’s client.

Dysart is open enough to be a relatively straightforward case. After his many years of diligent psychiatric work with young people, it is the troubling case of Alan Strang which brings the insight that that he is being asked to eradicate something vital in his patient, the ability to worship, to be taken away from reason by passion. This is made all the more painful by the realisation that his own existence is passionless, his marriage hollow, his fantasies of a Bacchanalian existence in Greece mere bourgeois pipe dreams. And as Dysart gives voice to this anxiety, we the audience were invited to identify with him, to wonder to what extent we too are removed from the wider excesses of our passions, as we sat compliantly in rows, watching a performance rather than participating in one, being done to rather than doing. One of the play’s central motifs is the metal bit in the horse’s mouth, the means by which the wild animal is made tame, and a metaphor for the way that Dysart’s job controls him, calls him to tame the wildness in the young people he encounters. With the closing line, we wonder what our own metal bit might be.

More than a call to unreason per se, the play feels like a warning not to live without passion. Since its own birth, psychoanalysis has been preoccupied with the darkest excesses of violent rage and sexuality, both infantile and adult, and the efforts that we unconsciously make to keep these from conscious awareness. Shaffer is suggesting that there are parts of the psyche which should perhaps remain unseen and unanalysed, because to analyse is to tame, and to tame is to destroy. He seems to be issuing a call to rediscover the thrill of passionate worship and the all-encompassing nature of childhood urges. Thus it shares something with Maruice Sendak’s classic children’s story “Where the Wild Things Are”, where as he rages in his bedroom, little Max dreams/sails away in his wolf suit to a faraway land where he engages in creating a rumpus, before realising that his anger is separating him from his mother’s love and returning to his bedroom. Sendak’s story is currently in production as a Hollywood feature from the combined imaginations of Spike Jonze and Dave Eggers. Contemporary psychoanalytic writing, such as Adam Phillips’ “Beast in the Nursery”, has attempted to re-analyse the young child’s passion without subduing it.

Is it enough to visit wildness and passion in dreams and fantasies, as Max does, and thence return to civilisation? Or can we find acceptable ways for living passionately in our waking hours, without consuming/being consumed by our own desire, as Alan Strang ultimately is?

A Note on the Concept of the Unconscious

2008-04-08T17:11:00.006+01:00

Though the concept of the unconscious is fundamental in Freudian psychoanalysis, its hardly identifiable and controllable nature brings a kind of uncertainty to the psychoanalytic discourse. This uncertainty has extremely valuable effects on scientific discourse since it provides dynamism, flexibility and openness which is always desirable in a science with such a diverse object as the human soul.

To complicate matters, the concept of the unconscious is heterogeneous itself. The Freudian definition differs a lot from the definition of the disciples, not to mention modern and postmodern psychoanalysis. The concept of the unconscious was full of contradictions from the beginning; beyond psychoanalysis it was much more problematic. Taking everything into account, two different interpretations emerged in the early history of psychology:

The unconscious is part of the whole personality and it is much more significant than the conscious part (e. g. Freud).

The unconscious is another personality and it is much more significant than the conscious part (e. g. Morton Prince, Frederic Myers).

In the latter sense the unconscious functions as a co-consciousness. Supposedly, it is no accident that the idea of co-consciousness has been associated with mediumistic phenomena (and its scientific investigation) – in these states the co-conscious was especially spectacular:

As shown in the photograph (taken by Sir William Crookes) the medium Florence Cook is in trans-state while her co-conscious, the spirit Katie King, is materializing in the background. Convincing, isn’t it?

Of course, Freud denied the existence of such co-consciousness. Taken into account the evidences of co-consciousness, I share his opinion. The “so-called” multiple personalities should find themselves a more evidence-based diagnostic category…

The Importance of Sublimation

2008-04-01T16:35:00.003+01:00

All of this talk of jokes reminds me of another clip you might be interested in. This time, from the BBC sketch comedy show Mitchell and Webb:

This illustrates the fundamental importance of repression and sublimation: No repression, no comedy. Not in the 1970s, anyhow. Imagine how boring the world world would be if a sausage was really just a sausage, and not a lewd invitation! We'd get nothing done, ever.

Of course anyone who reads early Freud doesn't need to be reminded of this: For Freud, repression and sublimation really are at the very heart of Civilisation. It's worth remembering that without repression, we'd spend our whole lives under the sheets, pleasuring and being pleasured. All cultural, social life are just the final resting place of energies that otherwise would have been spent in sexual rapture, if society (in the persona of the internalised Father) hadn't stepped in to spoil things.

Well, psychoanalysis has naturally moved on from these initial formulations. But knowing this about Freud explains a lot, I think, about where psychoanalysis went when sexual 'repression' wasn't so obvious. (Again, as Foucault would say, we were never really sexually repressed anyway, but it's about appearances in this case, really.)

It also answers a question I long wondered about. Well, not really a question, but it was something friends and I went around asking people when we undergraduates, to show everyone how clever and witty -- in a post-Wildean way, I suppose -- we could be:

Do you think that dogs would have evolved to a higher level of civilisation if they hadn't been distracted by their ability to lick themselves?

The answer, of course, as I now know, is 'Yes'. Obviously.

Freudian humour, and my woeful failure...

2008-03-24T16:49:00.004Z

A little diversion, if I might: Nate at 'What in the Hell...' has posted a list of the Best Lightbulb Jokes, which included this little gem...

Q: How many Freudians does it take to change a lightbulb?

A: Two. One to change the lightbulb and another to hold the penis – uh, I mean, the ladder!

I'm still laughing. (But the real highlight are the Trotskyist pick-up lines Adam W. posted in the comments. “Hey baby, If I said you had a peasantry capable of being led by a tiny working class would you hold it against me?” Beautiful...)

So I thought I'd come up with the first Psycho-Babble On Compendium of Psychoanalytic and Psychotherapeutic Lightbulb Jokes... but alas, all I could come up with was

Q: How many Winnicottians does is take to change a lightbulb?

A: None. It all depends on the mother.

which is obviously rubbish so I can't be trusted to ever do this again. So rather than a 'compendium', I'm hoping for an Psycho-Babble On Occasional Series of Psychoanalytic and Psychotherapeutic Jokes of Any Sort, Really, because I think that's the best I can hope for. And of course I'll have to poach them, as my woeful effort (see above) amply demonstrates, so if you have any good ideas, please do send them to us.

(And by the way, if you like cartoons, and we know there are a lot of good psychoanalytic/therapeutic cartoons out there, do check out Prozacville in our links section.)

Žižek's fathers and the children of psychoanalysis

2008-03-20T01:02:00.026Z

I recently saw Žižek ! -- well, actually, I saw some clips on YouTube first. One particularly struck me, a clip of Žižek being interviewed on Nitebeat. You can see it here:

(You'll find it about 5 minutes in, though the rest is very illuminating, and entertaining, too.)

All very clever, and all very funny. It's the charming, counter-intuitive, Slavoj Žižek, after all. But something disturbed me about that Nitebeat clip, and not just the slappable puppet that hosts it, Barry Nolan. (Lacan makes Freud sound like a simple Valley Girl?!? How, in the name of... No. Nevermind. I don't know how these things work.)

No, what's really troubling is Žižek's ideas on fatherhood.

I'm not talking about the clips, near the end, where we see Žižek with his own son. Far be it from me to judge, and as I'm a father myself, I know better than to offer prescriptions. (More on that later, no doubt. Suffice to say for now that I sometimes sign myself as 'Laius'.) I'm talking about Žižek's ideas that he raises on Nitebeat in relation to his book, The Puppet and the Dwarf. Here, Žižek gives us two fathers to consider: the 'postmodern' father and the 'good, old fashioned totalitarian father'.

Žižek's 'postmodern' father uses emotional blackmail to get his son to do his bidding. The 'postmodern' father is treacherous, getting into his son's head, convinving him that he really does want to go to Grandma's house. 'You know how much she loves you...'. The good, old-fashioned totalitarian father, on the other hand, is rather more straight-forward in his approach. We are going to Grandma's and you may not like it but tough. He is authoritarian, yes, but does not manipulate on his son. He is not devious. He gets his son to do his bidding through good old fashioned beatings, for example. But I'm not going to complain about Žižek's apparent endorsement of corporal punishment.

We aren't left in any doubt as to which father Žižek prefers. The good, old-fashioned totalitarian father is more honest. He is a rogue, he is counter-intuitive, he doesn't play by the rules of that new authoritarianism, political correctness, but we love his cuddly brutishness. But he is not -- and this is where I get troubled -- an Oedipal father, not in the psychoanalytic sense

The 'postmodern' father (and here's why I explain why I've been insisting on the inverted commas) isn't 'postmodern' at all, but is actually just very liberal. As in the 19th century notion of the word. As in a way that Jeremy Bentham might recognise. Why Bentham? Because Bentham invented the panopticon, which gave the world a vision of the carceral society, and of our modern (and 'postmodern', if you must) prison guard, censor, educator, father -- the figure of authority internalised. And it is this father whose children can be psychoanalysed.

The way I see it, if all fathers were Žižek's totalitarian fathers, there would be no psychoanalysis. The totalitarian father's children don't need psychoanalysis, because they don't internalise law of the father; the father and his law are sitting right there, to stop the child from doing whatever it is his unimpeded id is telling them to do. And when the child can get away with it, later, when Daddy's not watching, he will. This child is not self-policing. He has no superego, no resistance, no internal conflict.

Ok, they would do, really, of course, but not in the same way. This coneption of the internalised authority is an invention, and is in fact proving to be one of the most enduring technologies of the 19th century. And that conception of authority, of power as hidden away inside, is a pre-requisite for psychoanalysis.
For psychoanalysis was another invention, a technology that was devised to analyse those children of liberal father's who got into their sons' heads, those children who internalised the voice of authority -- the superego -- and who then churned out all that delicious stuff of analyses.

As Foucault might say -- oh yes, this is where I've been going for some time now -- the liberal father is a necessary condition of possibility for psychoanalysis. So Žižek pines for his authoritarian Daddy (and make no mistake, he does adore a Stalinist), but it troubles me that he so easily dismisses the role played by the key character in the psychoanalytic drama.

'Maybe it works as a strategy, at a certain point,' he says earlier in the above YouTube clip about Lacan, without a hint of irony. 'First you need to seduce people with obscure statements, but I hate this kind of approach. I am a total Enlightenment person. I believe in clear statements, and so on.' Yes, he does. But he seems instead to want to seduce us with the outrageous, un-PC counter-intuitive statement. Which is fine. Everyone's got to have a marketing angle now, I suppose. But we can't let these pass unanalysed.

Too long for a blog post, no doubt. I'm learning the form. Give me time

Welcome and introduction.

2008-03-14T01:49:00.008Z

Greetings. And welcome to our humble efforts.

This rather cleverly named blog (geddit? geddit?) is to bring you a small sample of the thoughts, imaginings and hard work being undertaken at the University of Sheffield, UK in the area of psychoanalytic and psychotherapy studies.

We'll be trying to bring you important announcements, our thoughts on developments in the field, and whatever free associations wander in and out of (un)concious. We'll see how it goes; we aim to please, so let us know what you like.

The 'we' includes those lecturers and research students here in our psychoanalytic and psychotherapy studies programmes here -- see our links on the right for more information. But we above all want to stimulate debate, reflections and re-evaluations, all in a friendly, informal way. Please let us know what you think.

By psychoanalytic and psychotherapy studies we mean specifically the application of psychoanalytic and psychotherapeutic ideas to any range of ideas in the wider social, cultural, aesthetic spheres. We also focus on the analyses of psychoanalytic and psychotherapeutic discourses themselves, their historical, ideological and contemporary contexts. We aren't planning to write often about issues of clinical concerns per se but it is inevitable -- and entirely desirable -- that the things we talk about here will have an impact on clinical practice and key debates.

So, enjoy!

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