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).
by Admin General | Sep 11, 2022
Join us for a round table discussion on Dr Ruth Kara-Ivanov Kaniel’s book Birth in Kabbalah and Psychoanalysis (De Gruyter 2022)
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.
by Admin General | Dec 1, 2021
This is an in-person event with no prescribed talk or presentation. A rare opportunity for an audience to engage directly with the leading contemporary psychoanalyst and writer, Adam Phillips.
The Q&A will be hosted by Chris Oakley as part of The Site’s occasional events series.
About Adam Phillips
Adam Phillips is a practicing psychoanalyst, formerly child psychotherapist at the Charing Cross Hospital, London. He is General Editor of the Penguin Modern Classics Freud translations and author of numerous works of psychoanalysis and literary criticism, including most recently, The Cure for Psychoanalysis, On Wanting to Change, Attention Seeking and Unforbidden Pleasures
by Admin General | Oct 30, 2021
An online talk by Avgi Saketopoulou as part of the Clinical Site series
Psychoanalytic thinking teaches us that trauma leaves the subject fractured, less agentic, more subject to iterative, stalled revisitations of the traumatic event. In this presentation, and with the help of Jean Laplanche’s metapsychology, I argue that significant possibilities for psychic transformation and for contact with experience are courted when we make ourselves passible (Lyotard, Scarfone) to returning to the site of the traumatic. Drawing our attention away from the usual – and somewhat fixed – framework of repetition compulsion, this presentation foregrounds a different approach which I frame through the concept of traumatophilia. Traumatophilia concerns itself less with what to do about trauma and rather draws attention to what subjects do with their trauma. Therein, I suggest, we find ourselves in the domain of limit consent, that psychic territory where we encounter the vexed entanglements between freedom and constraint, and wherefrom traumatized subjects can make bids to enlarged psychic freedoms. The trauma of slavery and racism’s durational persistence offer premier sites and searing examples for discussing these ideas.
About Avgi Saketopoulou
Avgi Saketopoulou is a Greek and Greek-Cypriot psychoanalyst. She trained and now teaches at the NYU Postdoctoral Program, and is also on faculty at the William Allanson White Institute, the New York Psychoanalytic Institute, the Mitchell Center, the National Institute for the Psychotherapies, and the Psychoanalytic Center of Philadelphia. She serves on the editorial boards of Psychoanalytic Dialogues, The Psychoanalytic Quarterly and Studies in Gender and Sexuality. Her written work has received the Ralph Roughton Award, the annual essay prize from the Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association, the Symonds prize, and the Ruth Stein Prize. Her just-completed book project is provisionally entitled: Risking Sexuality Beyond Consent: Race, Traumatophilia, and the Draw to Overwhelm. The book puts psychoanalysis into conversation with queer of color critique, and its second part critically engages Jeremy O. Harris’s Slave Play. She is co-chair of the first conference in the US dedicated to the work of Jean Laplanche coming up on October 2-3, 2021 “Laplanche in the States: the sexual and the cultural”.
