Plans for our 2015 Spring Conference on Conflict continue apace. Our keynote speaker, Josh Cohen’s paper, Giving Up Without a Fight: The Wish to Sleep in Psychoanalysis and Culture is anticipated with much excitement.
We can also now announce Site member Barry Watt‘s paper, Rethinking Belonging Beyond the Community of One.
Barry’s paper will examine the psychoanalyst Francois Roustang’s assertion that psychoanalytic associations foster social cohesion through mobilising the transference to produce discipleship to an association’s leaders or overall orientation. Although self-cohesive, such powerful transferential ties tend towards institutional group-think and rivalry with associations of differing persuasions. These are effects that Roustang regards as contrary to the goal of analytic treatment, that he describes in terms of freedom from transferential demands. Barry examines Roustang’s critique to think about far-ranging questions regarding what it means to be in a psychoanalytic association. Roustang suggests an inescapable double-bind for associations between fostering discipleships or courting internecine warfare. Must this be the case? or can there be another way of formulating what belonging means n psychoanalysis, a formulation that offers a fresh conception of a psychoanalytic community beyond the terms Roustang offers?
Barry Watt is a psychoanalyst in private practice and a member of the SITE. He is also a housing advocate and community activist.