Film screening: Husband, for better or for worse

The screening will be followed by a Q&A and panel discussion with filmmakers Devorah Baum and Josh Appignanesi and psychoanalysts Francesca Joseph and Douglas Gill

Saturday, 23 September 2023 19:00 – 21:00 BST

Westminster Quakers, 52 St Martin’s Lane Covent Garden London WC2N 4EA

£8 Site members and trainees

Click here to book

Praise for the film

‘Genre-defying Freudian docudrama … I couldn’t take my eyes off it’ – Josh Glancy, Sunday Times

‘Complex, subtle … A rich new seam of autofictional docucomedy’ – Peter Brdshaw, The Guardian

‘Pointed, self-reflective critique of a modern marriage. Peppered with insight’ – Ben Nicholson, Sight & Sound

Devorah Baum is an author, academic and filmmaker whose topics include emotions, comedy and religion. Her book Feeling Jewish interrogates the way feelings frequently labelled quintessentially Jewish – guilt, self-hatred, paranoia, anxiety – emerged from specific historical conditions of deracination and marginalisation. She demonstrates how these have now, in the era of globalised hypermediation, become more common to us all, as have their vexed feelings. Her widely acclaimed writing has appeared in The NYT, The Guardian, Granta, and the FT. She has spoken at numerous festivals, events and conferences, and on TV and radio. She is Associate Professor at Southampton University.

Josh Appignanesi is Devorah Baum’s husband. Trained in anthropology, he is a writer/director whose work spans documentary, fiction and the space in between. His debut feature, the religious melodrama Song of Songs, won awards at London and Edinburgh, and was BIFA-nominated. He went on to make the David Baddiel-scripted religious satire The Infidel (In competition Tribeca, Turin). His last film, the Jacqui Davies-produced Female Human Animal (Sheffield Doc/Fest) is a hybrid docufictional psychothriller set in the real life art-world, featuring surrealist Leonora Carrington and the Mexican novelist Chloe Aridjis.

Francesca Joseph is a psychoanalyst and a member of the Site for Contemporary Psychoanalysis. Her previous career was as a writer and director in film and television, where she won many awards. Her first feature film, Tomorrow La Scala! premiered in Un Certain Regard at the Cannes Film Festival, and she is known for having created a new genre – the documentary soap – with her series Driving School. This year the Grierson Trust cited Driving School as one of the 50 most influential documentaries of all time.

Douglas Gill is originally an artist and art therapist and co-founder of Studio Upstairs; a charity and therapeutic arts community in London and Bristol. He trained as a psychoanalyst with the Philadelphia Association and works in private practice in London. Doug is a member of the Site for Contemporary Psychoanalysis

 

This is one of the Site’s ‘Occasional Events’ featuring talks with contemporary artists and their work. Whilst the arts and psychoanalytic practices tend to remain distinct, the creative potential between them is infinite. This series is aimed at exploring what contemporary artists have to offer psychoanalytic thinking.

The Psychologization of Islamophobia

Critical psychologist and author Dr Robert K Beshara discusses the psychologisation of Islamophobia through the lens of Jacques Lacan’s university discourse

Saturday  28 January 2023, 17:30 – 18:45 GMT

Online 

 

Abstract

In this talk, Dr Beshara will unravel the psychologization of Islamophobia drawing on Jacques Lacan’s university discourse (S1→S2→a→$), which, according to Bruce Fink, is “an arm of capitalist production”.

Along the way, he will import theoretico-methodological tools from Edward Said, Enrique Dussel, Walter Mignolo, and others by illustrating an application of decolonial psychoanalysis to critical Islamophobia studies.

www.routledge.com/Decolonial-Psychoanalysis-Towards-Critical-Islamophobia-Studies/Beshara/p/book/9780367174132

Biography

Robert K. Beshara is the author of Decolonial Psychoanalysis: Towards Critical Islamophobia Studies (Routledge, 2019) as well as Freud and Said: Contrapuntal Psychoanalysis as Liberation Praxis (Palgrave, 2021). He is also the editor of A Critical Introduction to Psychology (Nova, 2019) and Critical Psychology Praxis: Psychosocial Non-Alignment to Modernity/Coloniality (Routledge, 2021). Further, he is the translator of Mourad Wahba’s (1995) Fundamentalism and Secularization (Bloomsbury, 2022). He is the founder of the Critical Psychology website: www.criticalpsychology.org. He works as an Assistant Professor and Chair of the Department of Arts & Human Sciences at Northern New Mexico College. For more information visit www.robertbeshara.com.

On Language and Embodiment in the Makings of Gender – a talk by Dany Nobus

‘Rose coloured, in many different shadings … with uneven patches of blood’

Saturday 19 November 2022

5.30 – 7.30pm

Goldsmiths University – Room no. PSH LG02

Abstract

Of the five constitutive components of human sexuality, gender is by far the most complex and intractable. Apart from the fact that gender is indissolubly linked to the human ‘lived experience’, it is the component which, more than any of the others, enters the field of vision, is socio-culturally established in a wide range of symbolic forms, and has become strongly politicised, up to the point where it has intermittently featured on the agenda of the House of Commons. My principal aim in this lecture is to question the epistemological status of gender as a source of knowledge about oneself and as a site where language and embodiment seem to be forever embroiled in a Hegelian struggle for recognition and sovereignty. This will allow me to formulate a measured response to the recent provocation by Paul B. Preciado that psychoanalysis is fundamentally conditioned by a normative binary paradigm and therefore inherently trans*phobic, yet it will also enable me to review the questions as to how gender is made, whether it is a necessary precondition for the maintenance of human identity, and what would be lost were we to do away with the notion altogether.

Biography

Dany Nobus is Professor of Psychoanalytic Psychology at Brunel University London, Founding Scholar of the British Psychoanalytic Council, and former Chair and Fellow of the Freud Museum London. He is the author of numerous books and papers on the history, theory and practice of psychoanalysis, most recently Critique of Psychoanalytic Reason: Studies in Lacanian Theory and Practice (Routledge 2022).

Tickets are £15 for the public, £12 for Site members and Goldsmith University staff, £10 for Site trainees and Goldsmith University Students and are available on Eventbrite.

www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/on-language-and-embodiment-in-the-makings-of-gender-tickets-432530068077

Birth and Psychoanalysis

Join us for a round table discussion on Dr Ruth Kara-Ivanov Kaniel’s book Birth in Kabbalah and Psychoanalysis (De Gruyter 2022)

Date: Saturday 10 September 2022
Time: 18:00- 20:00 GMT
Venue: Westminster Quaker Meeting House WC2N 4EA

We will start with a conversation between Dr Ruth Kara-Ivanov Kaniel, a senior lecturer at the University of Haifa; Rabbi Dr Tali Artman Partock, who teaches Judaism at the University of Cambridge and the rabbi of Sukkat Shalom Synagogue; and Dr Yael Pilowsky Bankirer, a psychoanalyst and member of the Site.

The three women will discuss the book, which examines the experience of birth through the ages as a metaphor foundational to all fields of art, philosophy, religion and literature. It highlights the significance of birth in Jewish culture, as a challenge to existential philosophy and the centrality of death in Western culture. Rabbi Dr Tali will speak of pre-life, after-life and the problem of separation while Dr Pilowsky Bankirer will talk about the maternal, the womb and the Bionian no-thing.

The round table will be followed by a Q&A.

Tickets cost £15 for the public, £12 for Site members and £10 for Site trainees and can be booked on Eventbrite

https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/psychoanalysis-and-birth-tickets-399454488127

Angela Kreeger: From Olive Oyl to Laplanche – a long and winding road

Video recording from this event is available to purchase: here.

Saturday 26 June, 2-4pm

As a child my attention was caught by Olive Oyl, the companion of Popeye. She wanted to be a ‘conversationalist’ – and this is what I am, of a particular strain called a psychoanalytic psychotherapist. Adam Phillips has said that analysis enables both patient and therapist to live life more fully. I find the work endlessly fascinating, absorbing, interesting, testing and life changing – and I hope the people I see get as much from it as I do.

Angela Kreeger is a psychoanalyst in private practice and a member of the Site Council.

This event forms part of our summer series, In Relation. Tickets can be booked on Eventbrite