Teaching Programme 2011/12
All Seminars take place on Saturday at the LSE, The Old Building (OLD.1.26 and Clinical Seminar Group in OLD.1.27) Old Building, Houghton Street, London WC2A 2AE.
Time: Seminars: 10.00 am – 1.00 pm
AUTUMN TERM
8 October – 5 November 2011
What psychotherapists do with philosophy: Wittengstein & Descartes – Paul Gurney (with Angela Kreeger)
Coming to psychoanalysis from a background in philosophy and political theory, I was struck by the difference between how some psychotherapists interpreted the work of certain philosophers, and how I had experienced the discussion of these same thinkers within the formal study of philosophy. In these seminars I will be encouraging us to study original texts of two influential philosophers, followed by interpretations of their works by two accomplished psychotherapists, in order to formulate our own interpretations and examine what if anything gets lost – and found – in inter-disciplinary re-location.
Week 1: Meditations on First Philosophy, René Descartes, trans. Moriarty, 2008, Oxford, OUP, pp13-64.
Week 2: Psychology and metapsychology, Jacques Lacan, from The Seminar of Jacques Lacan Book II: The Ego in Freud’s Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis, trans. Tomaselli, 1988, Cambridge CUP, pp3-12
Week 3: Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, Ludwig Wittgenstein, (1922), trans. Pears & McGuiness (1961), 2001, Oxford, Routledge
Week 4: Philosophical Investigations, Ludwig Wittgenstein, trans. Anscombe, Hacker & Schulte, 2009, Oxford, Wiley-Blackwell
Week 5: The Talking Cure: Wittgenstein’s Therapeutic Method for Psychotherapy, John M. Heaton, 2010, Basingstoke, Palgrave-Macmillan
(Closer to the time, for the Wittgenstein seminars, I will be suggesting particular sections to focus on).
12 November – 10 December 2011
Freud and his Early Followers – Papers on Technique – Kirsty Hall (with Madhu Nandi)
Week One Freud – Papers on Technique with special emphasis on the paper, ‘The Dynamics of the Transference’ in Vol XII of the Standard Edition (available on PEPweb).
Week Two Sándor Ferenczi – Transference as Introjection – using his paper ‘Introjection and Transference’ in First Contributions to Psychoanalysis (available on PEPweb) and also look at his Clinical Diary.
Week Three Karl Abraham – Transference as Projection – using ‘The psycho-sexual differences between hysteria and dementia praecox’ and ‘A short study of the development of the libido, viewed in the light of mental disorder’ both to be found in his Selected Papers on Psychoanalysis.
Week Four Freud again – papers on technique, this time with emphasis on ‘Remembering, repeating and working through’ and his late paper, ‘Constructions in Analysis’ (1937) SE XII and SE XXIII respectively and all on PEPweb.
Week Five Trainees to pick a paper with clinical implications by either Freud, Ferenczi or Abraham which we have not yet discussed and offer a very brief presentation. I will offer more detailed suggestions in advance of the teaching. For example, The clinical implications of early Freud as in The Interpretation of Dreams, or later Freud as in The Ego and the Id could be raised for discussion.
SPRING TERM
7 January – 4 February 2012
Post Kleinians including Bion – Joanna Swift (with Racheli Azgad)
My aim in these sessions will be to look briefly at Klein and certain basic Kleinian concepts, considering how they developed on and yet also undermined Freudian ideas. We will then focus on Bion’s contribution. We will look at Bion’s concepts of containment, of thinking including the idea of Alpha and Beta elements, and his understanding of the nature of the analytic space. We will compare his understanding of psychotic processes and psychosis with Freud and Lacan’s very different ideas. I hope we will then go on to touch on the work of more minor yet interesting figures in the Kleinian tradition such as Steiner and Britton and consider how their work has developed out of debates within Kleinian thought but also through encounters with Attachment theory and Lacanian thought. Detailed reading will follow later.
11 February – 10 March 2012
ADORNO: Hegel, Marx and Psychoanalysis – Philip Derbyshire (with Peter Nevins & Joanna Ryan)
The aim of the course would be to look at the ways Adorno provides an analysis of the subject under capitalism leaning on Marx’s account of exchange and the commodity and a version of Hegel’s dialectic which leaves it open to the future and undetermined. Adorno sets Freud in relation to these two, both using and reconfiguring Freudian concepts (and his philosophical anthropology) and looking at the social shifts that make Freud’s model of the psyche both complicit with and resistant to domination. The upshot of such an investigation would be to outline a productive encounter between Marxism and psychoanalysis and to indicate how the idea of an open dialectic might be brought into relation to the aims of the clinic.
Texts:
Theodor Adorno, ‘Sociology and Psychology’ New Left Review 46, 1967
“ “ ‘Freud and the Pattern of Fascist Propaganda’ in Adorno, (1991), The Culture Industry, London, Routledge
Theodor Adorno & Max Horkheimer, The Dialectic of Enlightenment, tr. Edward Jephcott, (2002). Stanford University Press, Stanford
Theodor Adorno, (1966) Negative Dialectics, new translation to be provided as pdfs
Site conference 17 & 18 March 2012
Training w/end: 25& 25 March 2012
Psychoanalysis, Desire, Buddhism – Stephen Gee & Jim O’Neill
Michael Eigen has written about three psychoanalysts as mystics: Winnicott, Bion and Lacan. Buddhism is a mystical tradition in that it finds the numinous in the ordinary and everyday and not in a supreme being. Discourses on desire are central to both traditions as in the recognition that unconscious processes operate for better or worse towards both life and death. Buddhism is a tradition with many ancient skilful means to uncover and work with these ‘karmic’ processes. Over the past twenty five years or so psychoanalysts, following in the footsteps of Bion, Winnicott and Lacan, have explored this ancient tradition and its teachings particularly on the sources of suffering, desire and emptiness and found much to inspire them. During this weekend seminar we will be looking at some of the links and discoveries they have made. Stephen Gee and Jim O’Neill have intensively studied and practiced Buddhism and bring that experience to the exploration of the psychoanalytic writing influenced by Buddhism.
(Easter April 6th-9th)
SUMMER TERM
28 April – 26 May
Trauma – Val Parks (with Kati Gray)
There is much talk of trauma and traumatic conditions in the media nowadays, and therefore in the way patients may represent themselves when they request analysis. Classical psychoanalysis has formulated an account of two originary traumas: birth and first encounter with sexuality. These are common to all people. Hence, trauma in adults is seen as a reworking and repetition of these originary traumas. Allied fields of psychiatry, psychology and the neurosciences developed the concept of post-traumatic stress disorder, with a clear set of symptoms. It is this latter that has been taken up in the popular imagination and the mental health sphere. How might contemporary psychoanalysts situate themselves in this polarised field, both theoretically and clinically? Or must we give ground to the other psy professions?
Week 1 Freud and Early Psychoanalytic Theorists
Freud developed psychoanalysis against the backdrop of an age just as turbulent as our own, with wars, genocides and developing modern technologies. We will look at his changing theories of the aetiology of neurosis, and then at the thoughts of the early theorists on “war neurosis”.
Freud, S (1895) Project for a Scientific Psychology Appendix A Part 2 Psychopathology
————- (1918) From the History of an Infantile Neurosis (The Wolfman)
Ferenczi, Abraham, et al (1921) Psychoanalysis and the War Neurosis Int. J. Psychoanal. 2 1-59
All these available on PEP website
Week 2 Laplanche : Afterwardsness
Jean Laplanche has taken up the term ‘Nachträglicheit’, (which he has chosen to translate into English using the neologism ‘afterwardsness’, scattered throughout Freud’s work and not consistently translated by Strachey. He has used it to give a more sophisticated account of the action of traumatic experiences in an individual’s life, including the enigmatic sexual messages of parents.
Laplanche, Jean (1991) “Notes on Afterwardsness” in Essays on Otherness
Routledge, London
—————– (1976) “Sexuality and the Vital Order in Psychical Conflict” from Life and Death in Psychoanalysis John Hopkins UP, Baltimore and London
Week 3 Two Contemporary Object Relations views
Starting from their clinical experience, these two writers from very different contexts, elaborate and apply their theoretical thinking to the work with survivors of extreme trauma in adult life.
Margarita Diaz Cordal (2005) “Traumatic effects of political repression in Chile: A clinical experience “ Int.J.Psycho-anal., 86:1317 (available on PEPweb)
Caroline Garland (1998): Chapter 1 “Thinking about Trauma” Understanding Trauma: A Psychoanalytic Approach Tavistock London
Week 4 A Post-Jungian approach
Renos Papadopoulos writes from a very extensive clinical practice with refugees and torture victims. In these papers, he both writes of clinical experience and discusses a philosophical framework from which to approach the trauma of exile and persecution.
Renos Papadopoulos (2002) “The other other: when the exotic other subjugates the familiar other” J. Anal.Psychol. 47 : 163 -188
————————– (1998) “Destructiveness, atrocities and healing: epistemological and clinical reflections” J. Anal.Psyhcol. 43: 455-477
(both available on PEPweb)
Week 5 Two contrasting Lacancian views
Paul Verhaeghe and others have developed the idea of an equivalence between the contemporary idea of PTSD and Freud’s concept of actual neurosis. Anne-Lise Stern, a Holocaust survivor who was an analysand of Lacan’s, meditates on the impossibility of being an analyst with “le savoir deporte” (deported knowledge) – but an equal impossibility of being one without it.
Paul Verhaeghe and S. Vanheule (2005) “Actual Neurosis and PTSD: The Impact of the Other” Psychoanal. Psychol. 22 493 -507 (PEPweb)
Anne- Lise Stern (1996) “Sois déportée et témoigne!” from Le Savoir-Déporté, Camps, Histoire, Psychoanalyse, Edition du Seuil 2004 Paris (I will draw on and paraphrase this, as it’s not translated)
Michael Dorland (2005) “Psychoanalysis After Auschwitz? The “Deported Knowledge” of Anne-Lise Stern” on the Other Voices website www.othervoices.org 2:3
(May bank holiday 2 – 4 June)
9 June – 7 July 2012
Psychoanalysis and postmodernism – Peter Wood (with Marsha Lebon)
There will be three parts. The first, which will take the first two weeks, will consider modernity. Then onto the critical writings of Derrida. Finally, a leap into postmodernism and the subject of psychoanalysis.
Part 1 – Modernism
We cannot explore modernity without considering Foucault and his work. I have purposely turned away from The History of Madness instead preferring to explore some of his lectures at the College De France, specifically on Psychiatric Power.
Foucault challenges the tendency of western societies to make universalistic claims for knowledge, which often went under the mark of science. After Nietzsche, we begin to see science’s claim of being able to speak on behalf of universal if (self)delusionary truths. In this respect, modernity’s claims conceal the cultural basis of its thinking and practice. Moreover, under the mark of objectivity it routinely kicked over the trace left by the effects of context (institution, power-play etc) on the kind of knowledge it was able to produce. This is where Foucault’s lectures on psychiatric knowledge become so interesting.
Week 1 We will explore the 19th December 1973 lecture in which Foucault traces out psychiatry’s growing claims that it is able to “be an effective agent of reality, a sort of intensifier of reality to madness”.
Week 2 We will explore the following chapter, the 9 January 1974 lecture which concentrates on the manoeuvres and tactics used by psychiatry: questioning, the clinical presentation of the patient, forms of clinical knowledge and the birth of the hysterical subject.
Essential background reading for next week: Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge (1979)
Part 2 – In transition: (postmodernism)
Week 3 we will turn to Derrida and begin making a postmodern turn: we will explore an excellent essay of his called “To do Justice To Freud” – the History Of Madness In the Age of Psychoanalysis”. In this essay Derrida explores the opening prepared by Lacan’s reaction against the Cartesian Subject. You can, if you like, as background reading, have a look at Foucault’s History Of Madness, which forms the backdrop to Derrida’s ideas on this subject. For those prepared and willing I would also encourage the reading of Derrida’s ‘Cogito and the History of Madness’ from Writing and Difference.
Part 3 – Postmodernism
Weeks 4 and 5 I will turn to a series of papers from Bringing The Plague – Towards a Postmodern Psychoanalysis (Fairfield et al). In these last two weeks we will test the claim that these writer/practitioners have disowned pretentions of enlightenment, progress and the tendency to universalisation.