AUTUMN 2019
Oct 10 17 24 31, Nov 7 C Oakley
Trance, trance-ition and trance-formation
Reading:
The Emotional Tie. Borch-Jacobsen M (Stanford University Press 1992);
The Genealogy of Psychoanalysis. Henry M. (Stanford University Press 1993)
How to Make a Paranoid Laugh. Roustang F.(University of Pennsylvania Press 2000).
The first half of the evening will be a talk and discussion. The second half will be for you to present some clinical work. If you aren’t yet seeing patients you can present something from any related work you are engaged with and have a go at using some psychoanalytic ideas in your thinking about it. The first week Chris Oakley will present some clinical work of his own.
Nov 14 21 28, Dec 5 12 K Armitage
Foucault & Psychoanalysis
Over these five weeks we will look at the work of the influential philosopher and historian of ideas, Michel Foucault. We will focus in particular on his texts that take on directly or indirectly the genealogy of psychoanalysis, its practise and its power relations. Texts will include readings from:
Foucault: Mental Illness & Psychology
Foucault/Binswanger: Dream & Existence
Foucault: Madness & Civilisation
Foucault: Psychiatric Power
Foucault: The Will to Knowledge (aka The History of Sexuality: An Introduction)”
SPRING 2020
Jan 9 16 23 30, Feb 6 H Oakley
Psychosis
The reading list is for you to use before, during or after the seminars depending on how familiar you already are with the suggested reading and what inspires you as we go along. I will do my best to demonstrate some of the theoretical propositions with clinical material.
Freud, S (1922b) ‘Some neurotic mechanisms’ in Jealousy, Paranoia and Homosexuality. SE XIII 195
Freud, S (1924b) Neurosis and Psychosis. SE XIX 149
Freud, S (1924e) ‘The Loss of Reality’ in Neurosis and Psychosis SE XIX 183 (If you only have time for one, read this one)!
Klein, M Envy and Gratitude (1975) Hogarth Press. London
Laing, R D: Sanity Madness and the family (1961), Or the divided self (1960)
Lacan, J., ‘On a question preliminary to any possible treatment of psychosis’ in Écrits, a selection (London: Tavistock Publications 1977) pp 179-221
Roustang, F., ‘Towards a Theory of Psychosis’ in In Dire Mastery. Discipleship from Freud to Lacan. (Baltimore and London: John Hopkins University Press 1976)
Seminar 1: The paradoxes of paranoia (no reading assigned)
Seminar 2: Why did Freud consider psychosis as not suitable for his psychoanalysis and how did Klein reopen the consulting room to the possibility of working with psychosis.
Seminar 3: Laing, Bateson and psychosocial theories of ‘madness’
Seminar 4: Lacan’s theory of psychosis
Seminar 5: Francois Roustang
Feb 13 27, Mar 5 12 19 (no seminar 20 Feb) B Watt and A Newman
Interpretation
Why do we interpret? What do we interpret (psychical conflict? the transference and/or counter-transference? resistance? fantasy? dreams? identifications? object relations? infantile sexuality? the ‘Symbolic’? aggression? Oedipal angst…)? Are there cases where interpretation is not enough or even ‘too much’? Can there be psychoanalysis without interpretation? What about insight? And are there other ways of thinking that don’t prioritise interpretation as “a magic weapon” or as the privileged tool of analysis? What are some of the other tools that we might use, and when might we use them?
We will frame these questions broadly as a dialogue between the Freudian/Lacanian tradition on the one hand, and the Object Relations/Relational tradition on the other. Both traditions have their clinical advantages and disadvantages, having arisen through clinical work with different types of patients in different historical and intellectual contexts. Drawing on both approaches, and the techniques which flow from them, allows us access to a wider range of therapeutic tools, to listen to our patients more openly and to (as much as possible) mitigate the blind spots of each tradition.
Session 1 + Session 2: Freud and the birth of ‘Classical Technique’
Freud, S. 1914 ‘Remembering, Repeating and Working-Through’ in SE Volume XII (1911-1913), (2001) London: Vintage
Klein, M. (1955) ‘The Psycho-analytic Play Technique: Its History and Significance’ in New Directions in Psycho-Analysis, London: Tavistock
Sklar, J. (2011) ‘Formulation of interpretations in clinical practice’ (chapter 2) in Landscapes of the Dark: History, Trauma, Psychoanalysis, London: Karnac
Strachey, J. (1934) ‘The Nature of the Therapeutic Action of Psychoanalysis’
Secondary Reading
Freud, S. (1911) ‘The Handling of Dream-Interpretation in Psychoanalysis’ in SE Volume XII, London: Vintage
Freud, S. (1901) ‘On Dreams’ in SE Volume V, London: Vintage
Glover, E. (1931) ‘The Therapeutic Effect of Inexact Interpretation: A Contribution to the Theory of Suggestion’
Session 3: Lacanian Interpretation
Fink, B. (2007) ‘Interpreting’ (chapter 5) in Fundamentals of Psychoanalytic Technique: A Lacanian Approach for Practitioners, New York: Norton
Lacan, J. (1958) ‘The Direction of the Treatment and the Principles of Its Power’ from Ecrits: The First Complete Edition in English (2007) New York: W.W. Norton Translated by Bruce Fink
Session 4 + Session 5: Critique of Interpretation: Object Relations and the ‘Relational Turn’
Fairbairn, (1958) ‘On the Nature and Aims of Psycho-Analytical Treatment’ (available on Pep Web)
Guntrip, H (1975), ‘My Experience of Analysis with Fairbairn and Winnicott (How Complete a Result Does Psycho-Analytic Therapy Achieve?)’, International Review of Psycho-Analysis, (available on Pep Web)
Lomas, P. (1987), The Limits of Interpretation, London: Constable – chapters 1-4
Sontag, S. (2009) ‘Against Interpretation’ in Against Interpretation and Other Essays, London: Penguin
Suttie, I. (1935), The Origins of Love and Hate, London: Free Association Books – chapter 12
Secondary Reading
Mills, J. (2012) Conundrums, London: Routledge
SUMMER 2020
April 23 30, May 7 14 21. V Parks and L Guild
You want it darker?’
These five seminars take forward questions raised by the case studies seminar series (Spring Term 2019) and also the translation conference in June 2019. The focus is on key moments in the history (between the 1930s and the 2000s) of the travel, exchange, or failure to arrive, of psychoanalytic ideas between France and the UK (and to a lesser degree the US). We’ll revisit this toing and froing (or not), from the roots of object relations theory and with it an emphasis on the pre-Oedipal maternal, to feminist responses to the problematics of (conservative) psychoanalytic thought and also debates and divergence across feminist thinking. Traced through these selected encounters are questions such as, where are drive and affect, the unconscious and the body in our thinking and practice? Why the hold of object relations; why the warm welcome to Laplanche, but slower arrival of Anzieu and wariness in relation to Green? Was it because of what was too dark – those ‘fangs’ (Freud), that we draw at psychoanalysis’ peril?
Week 1: Subject, object, ego – and anxiety
Melanie Klein, ‘The Importance of Symbol-Formation in the Development of the Ego’ (1930), in Love, Guilt and Reparation. PEP: http://www.pep-web.org/document.php?id=ijp.011.0024a&type=hitlist&num=31&query=zone1%2Cparagraphs%7Czone2%2
Anna Freud, ‘Analytic technique and the defense against instincts and affects’, in The Ego and the Mechanisms of Defence (1936), 36-9. Pdf version of full text available online: https://www.sas.upenn.edu/~cavitch/pdf-library/Anna_Freud_Ego_chs_3_4_5.pdf
Jacques Lacan, ‘Discourse analysis and ego analysis’, in The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book I: Freud’s Papers on Technique (1953-4), 62-70. Available online – search ‘Lacan Seminar 1 pdf’
Week 2: Me, myself, I
Jacques Lacan, ‘Le Stade du miroir…’ (1949), trans. ‘The Mirror stage as formative of the function of the I as revealed in psychoanalysis’ (1977), in Ecrits (1966/1977). Various pdf versions available
Donald Winnicott, ‘The Mirror role of mother and family in child development’ in Playing and Reality (1971), 130-8, or PEP: http://www.pep-web.org/document.php?id=zbk.017.0001a&type=hitlist&num=6&query=zone1%2Cparagraphs%7Czone2%2
Week 3: The maternal: ‘all thoughts are thoughts of the body’ (Anzieu)
Jacques Lacan, Seminar 8: Transference, seminar 15 (22.3.61): ‘ Oral, anal, genital’. Available online – search ‘Lacan Seminar 8 pdf’. The www.lacaninireland.com version page numbers are 204-223
Didier Anzieu, The Skin-Ego trans N. Segal (Karnac, 2016), chapter 7: ‘The Functions of the Skin-ego’, 103-122. Pdf available on scribd: https://www.scribd.com/doc/207621273/Didier-Anzieu-Skin-Ego
See also ‘Epistemological preliminaries’, The Skin-Ego 3-22, and Didier Anzieu, ‘Le Moi-peau‘, Nouvelle Revue de Psychanalyse: Le dehors et le dedans’ (1974), 195-208. Pdf version available online
Paul Verhaeghe, ‘Lacan’s answer to the classical mind/body deadlock: retracing Freud’s beyond’, in S. Barnard and B. Fink (eds), Reading Seminar XX: Lacan’s Major Work on Love, Knowledge and Feminine Sexuality (State University of New York Press, 2002), 109-140
A similar paper, ’Mind your body and Lacan’s answer to a classical deadlock’ is available online: https://paulverhaeghe.psychoanalysis.be/artikels/Mind%20your%20body.pdf
Week 4: ‘You want it darker?’: From Freud to Laplanche and Green
Jean Laplanche, ‘The Drive and its object-source: its fate in the transference’, in Seduction, Translation, Drives, eds J. Fletcher and M. Stanton (ICA, 1992), 179-196
André Green, ‘Theoretical strategies: dogmatic and genetic perspectives’ and ‘Outline’, in The Chains of Eros (2008)
Week 5: “Has sexuality anything to do with psychoanalysis?” (Green, 1995) – feminist critique, the feminine, the maternal …
Susan Gutwill, Andrea Gitter & Lisa Rubin, ‘The Women’s Therapy Centre Institute: The Personal is Political’, in Women and Therapy, 34 (2010): https://doi.org/10.1080/02703149.2011.532703
Jacques Lacan, ‘The Meaning of the Phallus’. Three English translations available, e.g. in Ecrits, and in J. Mitchell and J. Rose (eds), Feminine Sexuality: Jacques Lacan and the Ecole Freudienne (Macmillan, 1982). – see https://www.lacanianworks.net/?p=11851 for details and for further information about how to access online versions (including Mitchell and Rose’s text).
Moustafa Safouan, ‘Feminine Sexuality in Psychoanalytic Doctrine’, first published in Scilicet , 5 (1975), 91-104; translation in J. Mitchell and J. Rose (eds), Feminine Sexuality: Jacques Lacan and the Ecole Freudienne (Macmillan, 1982).
Both Rose’s and Mitchell’s introductions are warmly recommended if you want to read further.
John Fletcher, ‘Gender, Sexuality and the Theory of Seduction’, Women: A Cultural Review 11, 1-2 (2000), 95-108
Please let me (Liz) know if you can’t get hold of any of the reading; scans may be available.
Liz Guild and Val Parks
Training Weekend Sat/Sun May 30/31 P Zeal and L Meyer
Transgenerational impacts and influences in Psychoanalysis
‘Transgenerational’ refers to whatever acts across multiple generations. We will explore this phenomenon in this weekend training workshop. Parents and grandparents tend to feature in analytic work, carried forward in patients’ pre-occupations. Naturally, analysts are interested in these others, internalized relationships with whom largely constitute the outer ingredients of patients’ inner worlds. Yet these parents and grandparents were themselves subject in their turn, to parents and grandparents. What if the analyst holds open the whole transgenerational field of ancestors that are obscurely present in the room, on both sides of the dyad? How would this affect the process? In this systems-based transgenerational perspective, analysis has its place in the unfolding of both familial and cultural inheritance through decades, centuries, and millennia. Thus are emanations from recent and ancient wars, colonial and imperial (mis)adventures, sexual traumas, displacements and losses, loyalties and betrayals, loves and hates, restaged through the dynamic unconscious/unknown in the analytic dyad. In this weekend workshop we will explore these ideas with a mixture of theoretical discussion and experiential practices.
Reading list to follow.
June 4 11 18 25, July 2 P Nevins, J Mann
“There are good people on both sides…..”
This summer we will be taking a look at contemporary ideas around race, power and identity, focussing on the concept of white fragility from a contemporary psychoanalytic perspective. We will be thinking about the whiteness of mainstream psychoanalytic culture, how this came about and what it might mean. Readings will range from Franz Fanon, James Baldwin, Angela Davis, Bell Hooks, Stuart Hall and Audrey Lorde through to more recent publications by Robin DiAngelo; specifically ‘White Fragility’. ‘Why it is so hard for White People to talk about Racism’, and ‘Natives: Race and Class in the Ruins of Empire’ by Akala.
We will endeavour to look at how the dynamics of race and power might be thought about differently both in the consulting room and elsewhere. We will provide a reading list and a breakdown of each session nearer the time.