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”.
by Admin General | Oct 10, 2021
‘When we revolt it’s not for a particular culture. We revolt simply because, for many reasons, we can no longer breathe’ Franz Fanon
Saturday 9 October – Sunday 10 October 2021
What can we dare to imagine of a psychoanalysis yet to come? More of the same or the courage to open our minds, hearts and practice? This conference will explore the complex ways in which race percolates through the psychoanalytic project – even if it is often denied. It offers an opportunity to think about how race impacts upon the clinic, our theory-making, access to the treatment and the structures of our institutions and training.
Organised by The Site for Contemporary Psychoanalysis in conjunction with the department of Social, Therapeutic and Community Studies (STaCS), Goldsmiths University of London, to coincide with Black History Month.
The conference will be recorded and made available to attendees after the event.
This will be a blended conference held online via Zoom with limited personal attendance, depending on Covid restrictions. Details to be confirmed nearer the time.
Speakers
- Achille Mbembe
- Adam Phillips
- Abi Canepa-Anson
- Anthea Benjamin
- Christina Moutsou
- Claudia Bernard
- Dawn Estefan
- Francis Gilbert
- Gill Pelage
- Helen Morgan
- Leena Dhingra
- Lynne Brown
- Paul Kassman
- Peter Nevins
- Riad Akbur
- Salma Siddique
- Steve Roberts
- Stuart Stevenson
- Tina Mistry
- Wendy Dugba
- Wanderley Santos Moreira
Programme
Saturday 9 October 10am – 5pm
9.45am: Welcome
10 – 11am: Key note address – Prof Achille Mbembe
11 – 12.30pm: Race in the clinic
- Chair: Nick Blackburn
- Abi Canepa-Anson – The gap between the silence and the scream – exploring the problems of racism and colour blindness in psychotherapy training
- Peter Nevins – Race matters: practising psychoanalysis differently
- Dawn Estefan – The Black Screen: an exploration of the arbitrary visibility of blackness in the working alliance between the educator and student, therapist and client
- Q&A
1.30 – 2.30pm lunch
1pm: Film screening: I can’t breathe
- Eric Harper, Matt Lee, Tamara Shefer and Sunny Tsai
1.45 – 3.15pm: Race, trauma and psychoanalysis
- Chair: Eric Harper
- Stuart Stevenson – Working with institutional and inter-generational trauma
- Wanderley Santos Moreira – Slavery trauma: Afropessimism, psychoanalysis and resistance
- Gill Pelage – White supremacy as an illusion of knowledge and power internalised worldwide
- Q&A
3.30 – 5pm: Panel
- Chair: Peter Nevins
- Adam Phillips – Discussion of the book White Fragility
- Helen Morgan – The problem of whiteness
- Tina Mistry (aka The Brown Psychologist) – Being South Asian and the struggle for emotional wellbeing
- Q&A
Sunday 10 October 10am – 5.30pm
9.45 – 10.45am: Key note address – Prof Claudia Bernard
- Chair: Chrysanthi Nigianni
- Q&A
10.45 – 12pm: Stories and narrative – challenging binary thinking
- Chair: Chrysanthi Nigianni
- Christina Moutsou & Salma Siddique – Doing anthropology in the consulting room
- Riad Akbur – It was 30 years ago today… Class, race and the making of obscured legacies
- Q&A
12 – 1.30pm: Breaking out – working outside the therapeutic frame
- Chair: Andrew Linton
- Discussion on Changing the Game, a social enterprise which delivers therapeutically oriented group interventions to young people of colour in prisons
- Speakers: Paul Kassman, Wendy Dugba and Anthea Benjamin
1.30 – 2.30pm lunch
2.30 – 4pm: Creative writing – exercises in escape
- Francis Gilbert: Introducing free writing
- Leena Dhingra: White privilege and partition – exercise
- Steve Roberts: Standard english and writing in dialect – exercise
- Plenary
4 – 6pm: Fish bowl
- Facilitators: Lynne Brown and Peter Nevins
- The participants will divide into two groups, one made up of those from black and other ethnic minorities and the other of white practitioners. The groups will have a 30-minute discussion among themselves, one after the other, with the audience watching. Then they will have a joint conversation before the discussion is opened to the floor.
- Participants: Adebukunola Odeyemi, Celestina Oniye-Thomas, Colette Ferns, Eric Harper, Eugenia Noble, George Taxidis, Hodan Salah, Julia Ogunmuyiwa, Julie Knowles, Manar Ahmed, Monique Williams, Nick Blackburn, Patrick Ackason, Penelope Allsobrook, Peter Nevins, Preety Das, Priscilla Penniket, Sanjay Sur, Swaliha Bax, Wanderley Santos Moreira
6pm: Conclusion
by Admin General | Jun 5, 2021
In Greek mythology, the seer Tiresias was allegedly transformed into a woman for seven years for disturbing two copulating snakes on Mount Cyllene. Niya B re-reads this myth from an eco-transfeminist lens through ritual performances, workshops and sonic explorations. The project is called Ekdysis – the biological term for the process of shedding the external layer of the skin in reptiles. Counteracting the traditional, patriarchal way of manufacturing history, Niya B engages with her own autobiography to re-envision this metamorphosis as a transgender mythopoesis, which is directly affected by ecology, the feminine/Other and the non-human.
Ekdysis is an ongoing project which is displayed through live actions, moving image and installations. In this iteration, Ekdysis manifests as a single-channel video following an autoethnographic journey in the land that holds the mythological events of metamorphosis.
This project has been made possible with support from Arts Council National Lottery Grants.
Niya B is a transfeminist artist working at the intersections of visual art and performance exploring themes related to ecology, (trans)gender politics and equity in mental health. Niya uses video, soundscapes, text and live acts to create a meditative space of vulnerability, affect and interdependence.
Selected shows include: From Tomorrow (Tate Britain, London); WIP: Work in Progress/Working Process (online); Cultural Institute commission (Leeds); Futureless (Somos Art, Berlin); Ekdysis, solo (Enclave, London); NEoN digital arts festival (Dundee); Unfix (CCA, Glasgow); Eco-futures festival, Disorders, Translucent, Queer Artists Now, Fringe!, @disturbance (London); Emergency (Manchester); Trans:plant, solo (London), International Print Biennale (Newcastle); 5th Moscow Biennale; 5th Thessaloniki Biennale.
Niya was awarded with an a-n bursary and a Jerwood bursary in 2020. Ekdysis installation (2020) features in the publication Future Now (Aesthetica Art Prize 2021).
#ekdysis
IG: niya___b
TW: niya___b
FB: Niya.B.art
web: www.niyab.com
This event forms part of our summer series, In Relation.
