by site.admin | Dec 22, 2014 | Conference 2015
Spring 2015 Conference
Conflict
10am to 5pm on Saturday 16 May 2015
Venue: Resource for London, 356 Holloway Road, London N7 6PA
What does a contemporary psychoanalysis have to say about conflict? Is there anything new to add about that which is at the heart of all the stories psychoanalysis wants to tell?
The SITE 2015 Spring Conference takes conflict as a foundational concept in psychoanalysis, not merely because of a supposed conflict that is at the heart of every neurosis, but because it is always already established in the split between the conscious and the unconscious.
KEYNOTE SPEAKER: JOSH COHEN
Josh Cohen is Professor of Modern Literary Theory at Goldsmiths, University of London and a psychoanalyst in private practice. He is the author of books and articles on modern literature, cultural theory and psychoanalysis, including How to Read Freud (Granta, 2005). His latest book is The Private Life: Why We Remain in the Dark (Granta, 2013).
Giving up without a fight:
The wish to sleep in psychoanalysis and culture
Prior to desire and the conflicts to which it gives rise, suggests the French psychoanalyst Piera Aulagnier, we find ‘the original presence of the rejection of living in favour of the search for a state of quiescence, of non-desire’. Non-desire, she posits, precedes the inexorable thrust of the organism towards dynamism, growth and conflict, and seeks to reverse it.
Freud had begun to hint at this primary state of non-desire in his meditations on the convergence of love and silence in ‘The Theme of the Three Caskets’ (1913), and on sleep in the ‘Metapsychological Supplement to the Theory of Dreams’ (1917), before placing non-desire, or the drive to return to an undisturbed state, at the centre of psychic life in Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920). The wish to sleep, to extinguish psychic conflict, may be older and stronger than the wish to dream, or sustain psychic conflict.
Drawing on both clinical material and works of literature (as well as other arts), this lecture will explore the insistently recurring fascination in psychoanalysis for an original state of inertia, as well as its manifest expressions in lethargy, indifference and lassitude. Bringing Freud, Aulagnier, Winnicott and Green into conversation with Schopenhauer, Melville’s ‘Bartleby the Scrivener’, Perec’s A Man Asleep and Ed Ruscha’s ‘Liquid Words’ paintings, I will explore what happens when we think of psychic conflict as conditioned by a more primary (and paradoxical) drive to a zero state. And what bearing might a consideration of this zero state have on the malaise of our ‘24/7’ culture of permanent busyness and distraction.
Full programme to be published soon…
Ticket prices*
£60.00 in advance (£70.00 for tickets bought on the door)
£50.00 for Site members
£45.00 for Site trainees
(*lunch not included)
To book a place at this event, please download and complete booking form, payment can be made by cheque or via bank transfer (all details on booking form).
For more info, email siteenquiries2015@gmail.com
To book, please click on the link below:
Site booking form conference May 2015
by site.admin | Oct 15, 2014 | Members' News
This centenary symposium, from the Department of Sociology at the University of Warwick, brings together scholars and writer-practitioners of psychoanalysis to consider the legacy of two of Sigmund Freud’s most important metapsychological papers: ‘On Narcissism: An Introduction’ (1914) and ‘Mourning and Melancholia’ (1915).
The Symposium will take place on March 11th and 12, 2015 and is organised by Dr Julie Walsh, a trainee member of the SITE, and will feature papers from SITE members Dorothée Bonnigal-Katz and Haya Oakley, as well as contributions from John Fletcher, John Forrester, Stephen Frosh and Elizabeth Lunbeck.
Full details HERE
by site.admin | Aug 18, 2014 | Conference 2015
The SITE for Contemporary Psychoanalysis 2015 Spring Conference
On Conflict
What does a contemporary psychoanalysis have to say about conflict? Is there anything new to add about that which is at the heart of all the stories psychoanalysis wants to tell?
Conflict is a foundational concept in psychoanalysis, not merely because of the supposed conflict that is at the heart of every neurosis, but because it is always already established in the split between the conscious and the unconscious. Psychoanalysis is littered with such dichotomous opposition: the good and bad breast, the internal and the external, the imaginary and the symbolic, the father and the son. A relentless conflict between what we want and what we’re supposed to want.
Where there is conflict, there is repression. At least that’s how Freud, after his ‘second topography’, thought of it. Conflict has a causal relationship to repression—it provides a reason, that is, for repression to be called upon. But what might be repressed in conflicts affecting not just individuals, but organisations, governments, the global and the local? And what is repressed in order for a conflict to change, for it to be averted or dampened down—resolved, even? What would be lost in this change? We ask:
What are conflicts used for?
What might a dialectic of conflict be?
How can individuals or groups bear the inherent losses engendered by conflict?
What do we want to say about the scars and fault-lines of organisational psychoanalysis?
What is a fruitful conflict?
In the spirit of the SITE, we hope to hear voices that speak from differing and opposing perspectives and disciplines or from those who occupy marginal spaces. Not to encourage conflict, but to provoke a thinking about it; not to close down difference, but to hear what that difference does. Isn’t this the radical nature of psychoanalysis?
We invite papers inspired or provoked by these questions.
We invite ideas for workshops, seminars, readings or screenings as part of the Spring Conference Satellite programme.
Abstracts for papers lasting twenty minutes can be sent to the Conference Committee below.
All papers will be eligible to be published in the issue of our journal, Sitegeist, devoted to the Conference.
a.gaitanidis@talk21.com
andienewman@hotmail.com
rob@robweiss.co.uk
by site.admin | May 13, 2014 | Sitegeist-news
The new Sitegeist editorial panel has now met and decided on the themes for the next two issues.
For issue 10, the focus will be on papers produced by trainees from the Site for Contemporary Psychoanalysis. The idea is that trainees’ theoretical papers can be read by a wider audience, who will get a feeling for what the organisation stands for. Submission is open to all current trainees and full members who have been qualified for less than five years.
For issue 11, the editors want to examine the theme of anxiety. This issue is open to all and the editors welcome contributions that tackle this topic from a broad range of psychoanalytic and philosophical perspectives. Please see the submissions guidelines before sending work.
The Editorial Panel have agreed to examine the possibility of a return to a paper edition of the Journal in the form of a print-on-demand publication.
For more details, or to speak about submitting work email rob@robweiss.co.uk and dbonnigk@btinternet.com for issue 10, or valparks@btinternet.com for issue 11.
See our Notes for Future Contributors for submission guidelines.
by site.admin | Jan 1, 2014 | SW Workshops
The SITE is very pleased to offer another series of psychotherapy workshops that will be running in Truro Winter/Spring 2014. The workshops will show how contemporary psychoanalysis can bring a richer understanding to varied social and clinical situations. They will be delivered by psychotherapists involved with the SITE training in clinical psychoanalysis in Truro.
Details and Booking Form below:
SW workshops Winter Spring 2014
