by Admin General | Sep 23, 2023
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
‘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
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.
Speakers
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
by Admin General | Mar 31, 2023
A particular epistemology of trauma has come to dominate psychoanalysis: trauma, we uncritically accept, is of destructive, if not catastrophic effects. So mesmerised are we by this epistemology that suggesting it is not a factual accounting of how trauma works but rather one paradigm amid possible others sounds strange. But what if we got this wrong? What if trauma is not a piece of shrapnel to be removed, but a cause of becoming?
In this presentation, Dr Ari Saketopoulou puts pressure on the influential psychoanalytic fiction that ghosts of the past can be durably turned into ancestors. Characterising current approaches to trauma as traumatophobic, she identifies the serious clinical limitations, political dead-ends, and ethical blockages of traumatophobic thinking. In contrast, she introduces the concept of traumatophilia, showing how iterative returns to the site of the traumatic have the potential to re-open trauma, putting its stalled energies back into circulation. At stake in traumatophilia is a revivification of trauma, a courting of psychic energies that can prove transformative. For transformation to be possible, however, we need to be working with a notion of psychic life that can be transformed.
Taking as her case study the controversial sexual fetish of race play, Dr Saketopoulou illustrates how traumatophilia works. Her analysis reveals how traumatophobic logics generate and preserve new forms of racism: these new forms, while drawing on rhetorics of anti-racism, actually deny psychic complexity and autonomy to racialised subjects. Prying our attention away from the preoccupation with repairing racial trauma, traumatophilia invites us to consider what traumatised subjects may do with their trauma. Questions of ethics are central to this presentation, which is grounded in queer of color critique, Black feminisms, and Laplanchean metapsychology.
Bio:
Dr. Avgi Saketopoulou is a Cypriot and Greek psychoanalyst based in New York. She is on faculty at the NYU Postdoctoral Program in Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis, where she also trained, and teaches in other psychoanalytic institutes, such as the William Alanson White Institute. Her published work has received several awards including the JAPA Essay Prize and the Ruth Stein Prize and her interview on relational psychoanalysis is in the permanent collection of the Freud Museum in Vienna. She is recipient of the first Tiresias Essay Prize from the IPA's Sexual and Gender Diversities Studies Committee for her co-authored essay with Dr. Ann Pellegrini, which will be included in a Gender Without Identity, coming out in Spring 2023 from the Unconscious in Translation Press. Her monograph, Sexuality Beyond Consent: Risk, Race.
Traumatophilia from which ideas for this presentation derive, is published by the Sexual Cultures Series, NYU Press.
by Admin General | Feb 25, 2023
A free flowing and wide ranging conversation between two psychoanalysts and writers. Adam Philips and Josh Cohen will discuss psychoanalysis with each other and the audience.
Bio: Josh Cohen
Josh Cohen is a psychoanalyst and Professor of English at Goldsmiths University of London. He is the author of many books and essays on psychoanalysis, modern literature and cultural theory, including How to Read Freud, The Private Life: Why We Remain in the Dark and Not Working: Why We Have to Stop.
Bio: Adam Phillips
Adam Philips, formerly child psychotherapist at the Charing Cross Hospital, London and is now a psychoanalyst in private practice and a writer
by Admin General | Jan 28, 2023
Critical psychologist and author Dr Robert K Beshara discusses the psychologisation of Islamophobia through the lens of Jacques Lacan’s university discourse
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.
by Admin General | Nov 19, 2022
‘Rose coloured, in many different shadings … with uneven patches of blood’
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).
