We are pleased to be able to announce two further speakers for our Spring Conference on Conflict.

Conflict as Difference is the title of Previn Karian‘s paper. It will present an outline of Jung’s typology as detailed in Psychological Types, CW 6. Rather than plunge into the detail of this complex 550 page text, what will be examined are the personal, professional and social conditions from which Jung pressed out his type theory. This will be viewed through his primary distinction of the two attitudes – extraversion and introversion – rather than the four functions (thinking, feeling, intuition, sensation). The epistemic conclusions of Jung’s typology will then be combined with its aesthetic implications of irony in Kierkegaard’s central text, The Concept of Irony, and its linguistic implications in Derrida’s early writings as they apply to clinical work. Conflict as the site of emergent difference rather than annihilatory aggression will be explored as the holding frame of Jung’s typology that creates a psychoid space for individual and social life, deploying irony and the vicissitudes of language for its vibrant thriving.

Previn KarianPrevin Karian is an independent multi-modality psychotherapist based in Southampton. He has a BA in English Literature, a Diploma in Psychosynthesis, an MA in Psychoanalysis and is completing his second MA in Modern European Philosophy. He is a participant of IPN (Independent Practitioners Network) and is a member of The National Counselling Society, The Squiggle Foundation and the UK Kant Society. He has been a member and Committee member of PCSR (Psychotherapists and Counsellors for Social Responsibility) and was Chair for their 2013 Psychotherapy and Power conference on LGBTQ Invisibility. He is currently editing a book on GSD (Gender and Sexual Diversity) and is under publishing contract for the first of a 3 volume study on Jung’s typology due out this year. He was a regular contributor to the left field client voice journal ipnosis. His main interests are his grandson and Frank Zappa’s instrumental compositions.

Conflict, as understood in Dorothée Bonnigal-Katz‘s paper, Conflict and Ego Ideals is a pivotal clinical and metapsychological concept, implying endogenous contradictory demands and imperatives which Freud posits as constitutive of the human psyche, whether from an economic/dynamic perspective (drive-related conflict) or from a topographical point of view (conflict between systems or agencies). Her paper offers to focus on conflict from a topographical perspective, with reference, more specifically to an array of key psychical agencies that implicitly arise from Freud’s second topography: namely the ideal ego, the ego ideal and the superego. Though Freud himself does not definitively distinguish between these three agencies, Dorothée’s presentation will examine the genesis, the characteristics and the vicissitudes on these three entities, drawing, mainly, on the work of Daniel Lagache. Special attention will be given to the ideal ego, “the target of the self-love” which once underlay infantile narcissism, as Freud suggests in his 1914 essay on narcissism and which elicits, via mechanisms of displacement and projection, the unconscious preservation of a narcissistic ideal of omnipotence and perfection. Arising from the lethal convergence of self-idealisation and identification, the ideal ego is a primary narcissistic formation endowed with momentous weight in psychic conflict, ranging from unfettered domination to intermittent repression. These considerations will lead me to a clinical discussion of conflict in three distinct psychopathological categories: in psychosis, in neurosis and in what I will refer to, cautiously, as a borderline case, even though the term ‘borderline’ will be the object of stringent clarification.

Dorothée Bonnigal-Katz

Dorothée Bonnigal-Katz is a psychoanalyst based in North London and Leamington Spa and the founder of the Psychosis Therapy Project at Islington Mind. She is a member of The Site for Contemporary Psychoanalysis and a leading translator in the fields of psychoanalytic theory and continental philosophy. She translates for the International Journal of Psycho-Analysis and the European Federation of Psychoanalysis on a regular basis. Her most recent translation – Dominique Scarfone’s Laplanche: An Introduction – has just been published by the Unconscious in Translation (New York).

 

More Conference news to follow…