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 | 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 10, 2015 | Conference 2015
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.
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 | 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
