by site.admin | May 10, 2015 | Conference 2015
We’re pleased to announce the full programme for our 2015 Conference: On Conflict.
CLICK HERE FOR CONFERENCE SCHEDULE
As well as the exciting papers we’ve previewed in earlier posts, the final schedule also includes an intriguing collaborative paper, In the Frame: Conflict in Psychoanalysis, from SITE members Eric Harper and Andie Newman.
In their paper, Harper and Newman consider whether psychoanalysis wants to think of itself as being in the business of conflict resolution, serving to sublimate the symptom. Is interpretation of conflict an alienating speaking for the other? And is the conflict of madness, when reduced to mental illness/psychosis, colonisation? Can we be both alongside and allow for difference?
These are some of the questions which arise, specifically, when thinking about RD Laing, a figure who is so often dismissed and yet still leaves a palpable legacy for those both within and beyond the SITE. Laing was in conflict with the world and suffered from an addiction which created all kinds of conflicts. He acted in a conflicted manner, alleviating suffering but also inducing hurt.
Furthermore, within the Freudian systems, conflict is everywhere. It leaks out between conscious, pre-conscious and unconscious and ruptures the synthesis of id, ego and superego in the mastery of past, present and future. It ends up under the dire mastery of Thanatos, a drive which makes analysis interminable.
In this paper, the authors use Laing to move towards that which is revolutionary in psychoanalysis, and ask whether this radical spirit still persists in the transmission of psychoanalysis. It is a paradoxical move as, they argue, Laing was no revolutionary: he shrinks away from those lines of flight that might take us beyond the reproduction of docility. But a call for life can still be heard in the drunken rage.
Are we on the side of life, or are we at risk of reproducing docility, whether in our analysands or our trainees or both, with the spread of resentment in analytic organisations via the narcissism of minor differences for, as Deleuze remarks, “the revolutionary alone is free from resentment.”
Eric Harper is a psychotherapist, social worker and human rights activist currently working in London with homeless persons presenting with both mental health and addiction concerns. Prior to coming back to London he assisted with the founding of the African Sex Worker Health and Human Rights Alliance. His published work includes articles on therapy and human rights, for example The therapist’s relationship to the unknown. Harper, E. Mantis Publications. Jungian Journal. 2013 Torture a presence without Absence. Harper, E. The Symptom Online Journal for Lacan.com. Issue 4, 2003. Horror Unmasked: Truth or Fiction. Buur, L and Harper, E. Published by Human Rights and Human Welfare. Vol. 2, No.1 2002.
Andie Newman is a psychoanalyst working in private practice in both central and north London. She trained at The SITE for Contemporary Psychoanalysis and is also a member of the College of Psychoanalysts-UK.
For venue and booking details please see our Events posting HERE. A limited number of Conference tickets will be available at the door.
by site.admin | Apr 27, 2015 | Sitegeist-news
The Editorial Panel of Sitegeist are delighted to announce that issue 10, back again as a paperback journal, is now available.
Issue 10 is devoted to theoretical papers produced by trainees at the SITE, past and present. It shows the breadth of interests, styles and approaches provoked by the SITE’s training in psychoanalysis.
Christian Murphy uses Lacanian discourse theory to think about knowledge and desire in the consulting room, investigating as he does so notions of neutrality and abstinence, and asking whether they are empty concepts.
Paul Kellett van Leer sets out for the rich hunting ground of transference, tracing a lineage from Freud to Laplanche via Bach. He asks how we might handle the inherent uncanny, haunting effects of transference and what, as practitioners, we might do with it.
Francesca Joseph’s paper examines frustration, satisfaction and helplessness through the structure of the oedipal drama and draws on classical psychoanalytic texts, some of the work of Adam Philips and Orson Welles’s film, Citizen Kane.
R.D. Laing’s work has had a mixed reception over the years, with a focus on how he lived, rather than what he said. Andie Newman, in her paper, ‘Towards a Laingian Theory’, attempts to address this by investigating Laing’s theoretical legacy and its relevance to psychoanalytic thinking.
Julie Walsh’s paper, reprinted from Sitegeist’s issue on Research asks, as its central question, “how care and research come to coalesce in the activity of psychoanalysis”, and examines how the drive for knowledge is given a vital role in the Freudian canon.
Finally Barry Watt’s paper wants to come to grips with the concepts of universality and singularity in psychoanalytic thought and, in particular, to come to an understanding of these terms through their ontological differences and similarities.
We will be selling copies of issue 10 at two of our forthcoming events: the much-anticipated talk by the eminent psychoanalyst Dominique Scarfone, and at our Conference on Conflict on May 16th. Details of these events can be found on our EVENTS page.
Copies can be purchased online HERE.
by site.admin | Apr 20, 2015 | News
A Special Offer from the Unconscious in Translation
If you are planning to attend either of the forthcoming Site events in May, here is a special offer from the Unconscious in Translation:
Order Dominique Scarfone’s Laplanche: An Introduction and other UIT titles and receive a 20% discount & no shipping costs. Order by 11 May 2015, quote code “LONDON” (all caps) at check-out: http://ucsintranslation.com/
Books will be available for collection at both events:
• Wednesday 13 May 2015
An Evening with Dominique Scarfone:
Conversation & Reflection on the work of Jean Laplanche
October Gallery – Bloomsbury
https://www.the-site.org.uk/events/an-evening-with-dominique-scarfone/
• Saturday 16 May
Spring 2015 SITE Conference
Conflict
Resource for London – Holloway
https://www.the-site.org.uk/events/site-2015-spring-conference-on-conflict/
The Unconscious in Translation is a publisher of English language translations of theoretical and literary works connected to psychoanalysis and the philosophy of mind. Jonathan House is the general editor.
For any further information, email jonathan.house@gmail.com
by site.admin | Mar 30, 2015 | Conference 2015
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 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 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…
by site.admin | Mar 12, 2015 | News
Birkbeck Cinema, Friday 24 April, 2015, 1pm–9pm
It’s just over fifty years since the publication of Sanity, Madness and the Family, R.D. Laing’s and Aaron Esterson’s groundbreaking study of ‘schizophrenia’ in eleven young women. Birkbeck Research in Aesthetics of Kinship and Community (BRAKC) and the Birkbeck Guilt Working Group have organised a one-day symposium at Birkbeck Cinema, 43 Gordon Square, London WC1H 0PD, on Friday 24 April 2015 (1pm–9pm) to discuss the lasting impact of that book.
Do people still read it? Why is it almost never referred to in psychotherapy trainings in this country? How have the ideas it introduced been either absorbed into or rejected by clinical, academic and more general discourses about the family and mental/emotional illness?
Andrew Aisbong, co-director of BRAKC, will facilitate the event, and participants include SITE member Chris Oakley, as well as Jacqui Dillon, Robbie Duschinsky, Simon Fernando, Amber Jacobs, Oliver James, Lucy Johnstone, Lynne Segal and Anthony Stadlen.
The symposium will culminate in a screening at 7pm of Ken Loach’s 1971 film Family Life, introduced by the producer of that film, Tony Garnett.
