Talking about Matricide – a panel discussion following Yael Pilowsky Bankirer’s book “Psychoanalytic Explorations of the Masculine and the Maternal: Uncovering the Image of Circumcision in Freud’s Works”. 

 Saturday 1st March, 2025 6.00pm till 8.00pm

 AGIP: 1 Fairbridge Rd, Archway, London N19 3EW

 (The book will be on sale at the event)

 Speakers: Dr Yael Pilowsky Bankirer, Prof. Miri Rozmarin, Rabbi Dr. Tali Artman Partock, and Dana Lubinsky

 

The event will explore the concept of matricide within psychoanalysis, particularly in relation to the image of circumcision as a site for the formation of masculine identity. The speakers will respond in their presentations to one of the book chapters: “Little Hans: A Double Layered Matricide”. Through the playful story of little Hans, his fascinating conversations with his parents, and his dreams and fantasies, this book chapter depicts the way Freud repeatedly both formulates and conceals matricide as part of masculine Oedipalisation. 

 

In her book, Psychoanalytic Explorations of the Masculine and the Maternal, Yael Pilowsky Bankirer reads into Freud’s writings with the unique prism of circumcision as a marker for both the formation of masculine identity, and for matricide, the disappearance of the mother.   

 

Yael Pilowsky Bankirer uses Freud’s idea of circumcision within a text as a Leitfossil: a key-fossil through which an unresolved unconscious conflict can be traced. She conducts a close reading of Freud’s texts – including Little HansThe Wolf ManTotem and Taboo and Moses and Monotheism – to illuminate and uncover the textual unconscious, deconstruct the explicit narrative and open alternative psychoanalytic possibilities inherent to the encounter with the maternal realm. Throughout the volume, Pilowsky Bankirer informs her analysis by considering the work of Freud in tandem with that of Lacan, Kristeva, Irigaray, Derrida, Benjamin, Butler and more.

 

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Dr. Yael Pilowsky Bankirer is a psychoanalyst and poet based in Cambridge, UK. She is a Medical Doctor and has a PhD in Gender Studies and Psychoanalysis. She is a member of the Site for Contemporary Psychoanalysis and an editor for Sitegeist – a journal of psychoanalysis and philosophy.

 

 

Prof. Miri Rozmarin is an Associate Professor in the Gender Studies Program at Bar-Ilan University. She is also a Senior Research Fellow and the Head of the research lab “Contemporary Feminist Political Subjectivities” at the Van Leer Jerusalem Institute. Her research interests include political subjectivity, vulnerability theory, and maternal subjectivity. She has published extensively in these areas, including two books and numerous articles in leading journals. Her current research aims to explore how vulnerability is mobilized as a resource for contemporary political subjectivities.

 

 

Dana Lubinsky is a clinical psychologist and poet. Her debut poetry collection “Neither word, Nor Covenant”” (Bli Brit, Bli Mila”) published by Am Oved, 2014, for which she won the Ministry of Culture Award for Emerging Poets in Israel, explores the exclusion of women from the symbolic order, and the dialectics of feminine writing, amid women’s recent migration into written language.

Her second book, “Once Aflame” published this summer, delves into maternal subjectivity, challenging the widespread notion of motherhood as a renunciation of selfhood. In addition to her clinical practice and poetry, Dana also engages in writing essays and literary critiques that touch upon the interface between literature, gender, and psychoanalytic theory. She is a mother of three.

 

 

 

Rabbi Dr Tali Artman Partock teaches Judaism at the University of Cambridge and Leo Baeck College. She is also a community rabbi and training to be a psychoanalytic psychotherapist at AGIP. Her research focuses on trauma and recovery in religious communities of Late Antiquity. Mostly looking at reintegration after enslavement, prostitution and other forms of sexual violence. Some of these topics are discussed in ‘Agency Personhood and Rabbinic Law,’ forthcoming in Routledge, 2025. 

 

 

Eventbrite Link for Tickets: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/talking-about-matricide-a-panel-discussion-tickets-1225479495159?aff=oddtdtcreator