May 2016 / Psychoanalytic Events

Welcome to our monthly roundup of all the goings on in the psychoanalytic field ― courses, conferences, seminars, workshops, exhibitions and book launches!

For daily news and updates visit our Facebook page dedicated to Psychoanalytic Events.

Let us know about your upcoming event by emailing freud.quotes [at] gmail [dot] com so you may be included in future roundup. 

Toronto
2 May / Toronto Psychoanalytic Society & Institute
Freud Café – Coupling: A psychoanalytic point of view

Online Seminar
4 May - 25 May / Global Center for Advanced Studies
Introduction to Psychoanalytic Technique

Northern California
4 May / The Psychoanalytic Institute of Northern California
Research off the Couch – Re-visiting the transsexual conundrum

Colchester, Essex
4 May / Centre for Psychoanalytic Studies, University of Essex
'Once He Was a Poet: Psychoanalysis as Poetry in Lacan's Clinical Paradigm'

Sheffield, UK
4 May / The University of Sheffield
Empson Lecture: Professor Adam Phillips, 'Against Biography'

London
4 May - 6 July / The Tavistock Centrefor Couple Relationships
The Psychodynamics of Couple Relationships: Readings in Love & Hate

London
5 May / Freud Museum London
Confronting the Catacomb Saints: Death & the Camera in Palermo

Vienna
6 May - 8 May / Psychoanalysis and Politics conference
Solidarity and Alienation: Social Structures of Hope and Despair

Online
6 May / IPA Q&A
What Would Freud Say?

London
6 May / The Tavistock Centrefor Couple Relationships
In Search of a Soulmate: Seeking the Perfect Other

New York
6 May / The New School
Das Unbehagen presents: Paul Verhaeghe

New York
May 6 - May 7 / The Association for Psychoanalytic Medicine
Symposium: "On The Body"

Toronto
7 May / Toronto Psychoanalytic Society & Institute 
Ruptures in the Analytic Setting and Disturbances in the Transformational Field of Dreams

Needham, Massachusetts
7 May / The PINE Psychoanalytic Center
"Must all have prizes?  A comparison of psychoanalytic, psychodynamic, and cognitive behavior therapy"

San Francisco
7 May / San Francisco Center for Psychoanalysis
Toward an Erotics of Memory: The Work of Giuseppe Penone

London
7 May / Tavistock Centre
How do we Work with the Pre-Symbolic?

London
7 May / 14 May / 21 May / 28 May / Public Seminars
The Centre for Freudian Analysis and Research

London
7 May / WPF Therapy Workshops
Bion and his Sortilèges' Memoir of the Future

Northern California
7 May / The Psychoanalytic Institute of Northern California
The Body, Technology and Becoming

London
8 May / Film Screening / Freud Museum London
Sigmund's Shorts: Maybe Darkness

London
8 May / Lecture
The Psychodynamics of Online Relating

San Francisco
9 May / San Francisco Center for Psychoanalysis
Sex, text, ur-text: Freud's Dora and the erotics of knowing

London
9 May - 23 May / Evening course / Freud Museum London
David Lynch's blurred identity trilogy

London
10 May / Lecture and book launch / Freud Museum London
Translating Anzieu, Professor Naomi Segal

Johannesburg, South Africa
11, 18, 25 May / Institute for Psychodynamic Child Psychotherapy
Klein Theory Course

Lisbon
12 May / Sociedade Portuguesa de Psicanalise
I Congresso de Psicanálise de Língua Portuguesa – “Violência, Memória, Identidade”

New York
13 May / The New School
Feminine Law: Freud, Free Speech, and the Voice of Desire

Colchester, Essex
13 May / Centre for Psychoanalytic Studies, University of Essex
'Transference interpretations in short term psychotherapy with adolescents'

London
13 May / The Group Analytic Society International
Impossible Groups That flourish in Leaking Containers - Challenging Group analytic Theory

Chicago
14 May / The Chicago Institute for Psychoanalysis
Eighth Annual Memorial Seminaron the Forward Edge of Self Psychology

Online Seminar
14 May / Global Center for Advanced Studies
Perverting Motherhood: Philosophy, Psychoanalysis and Biology

London
14 May / NCVO
Where are the Boundaries of Self and Other?

Ankara, Turkey
14 May - 15 May / Düşünbil Akademi
II. Lacan Sempozyumu – ODTÜ

Hertfordshire, UK
14 May / The Site for Contemporary Psychoanalysis
Working with Sexual Material

London
14 May / Annual Lecture 2016
Working analytically with early relational trauma and borderline states of mind - Orpheus' journey to reclaim Eurydice from the Underworld

Vancouver, BC
17 May - 31 May / Das Unbehagen & New School Lacan Salon
Schreber - Text and Transference. A seminar with Marcus Coelen

London
17 May / Lecture
Psychodynamic Thinking across the Life Cycle

Toronto
19 May - 20 May / Toronto Psychoanalytic Society & Institute
The Analyst at Work with the Adult, Through the Lens of Infancy, Childhood & Adolescence

Greece, Athens
19 May - 22 May / International Conference 
Psychoanalysis and the Group: Hope and Despair in Groups, Institutions and Society

Vienna
21 May / Sigmund Freud Museum
XLIII. Sigmund Freud Lecture: Stefano Bolognini

Oakland
21 May / Northern California Society for Psychoanalytic Psychology
Reconceiving Harm and Reparation in the Intersubjective Worldwith Jessica Benjamin, Ph.D.

Melbourne
21 May / Melbourne Brain Centre
2016 Freud Conference

London
21 May / Confer
Embodied minds and mentalised bodies

Manchester
21 May / The Free Psychotherapy Network
Mind the Gap: Free Psychotherapy in an Unjust World

London
21 May / WPF Therapy Workshops
Sibling ambivalence – Love, hate and rivalry

London
21 May / Institute of Group Analysis
Group Analysis meets Psychosocial Studies

London
22 May / Freud Museum London
Art and Mourning: The role of creativity in healing trauma and loss

Prague / Paris
23 May - 18 July / Study Abroad
Prague to Paris: Summer Psychoanalysis Course 2016

Indiana
25 May - 27 May / Conference
Interdisciplinary Conference on Analytic Philosophy and Clinical Psychoanalysis

London
24 May / Freud Museum London
Soul Machine: The Invention of the Modern Mind

London
24 May - 29 May / Lyric Hammersmith
4.48 Psychosis: The world premiere of composer Philip Venables’s opera, based on Sarah Kane’s extraordinary play about her experience of depression.

Brooklyn NY
27 May / Lecture / Morbid Anatomy Museum
Double, Double, Toil and Trouble; Narcissism, Mourning & Sexuality: Freud and Lacan meet Dalí and Goldin, An Illustrating Lecture with Claire-Madeline Culkin and Ray O Neill

London
27 May / Psychoanalysis, Culture and Practice
 ‘The Life of Objects: What Objects Tell Us About Ourselves’ – Deborah Levy

London
27 May / Freud Museum London
A panel discussion on the impact of trauma in the work of journalism

Ohio
27 May - 29 May
2016 International Zizek Studies Conference

London
28 May / Seminar
The Fragile Self: working with narcissistic vulnerability, grandiosity, shame, and alienation

Vienna
30 May / Lecture / Sigmund Freud Museum
Radical innovator and staunch conservative: Anna Freud’s wartime work and contribution to psychoanalytic theory and practice

San Francisco
TBA
Spring Conference: Psychoanalysis and Laziness

Vienna  
16 Oct 2015 – 12 June 2016 / Special exhibition at the Sigmund Freud Museum
„So this is the strong Sex.“ Women in Psychoanalysis

Let us know about your upcoming event by emailing freud.quotes [at] gmail [dot] com so you may be included in future roundup.

XLIII. Sigmund Freud Lecture by Stefano Bolognini, 21 May 2016, Vienna

Stefano Bolognini: The Humanizing Function of Contemporary Psychoanalytic Empathy

Saturday, 21 May 2016, 11 a.m. at Billrothhaus. Lecture in English

Admission free. Registration: veranstaltung@freud-museum.at

An event by the Sigmund Freud Foundation

Introduction: Gohar Homayounpour

In common language the word “empathy” evokes some superficial mix of sweet tenderness, benevolence a priori, friendly support and no interpretive penetration for disclosing the unconscious level of the psychic reality. In psychoanalysis “empathy” means something profoundly different. This paper emphasizes the difference between normal human empathy and psychoanalytic empathy, which is a much more complex phenomenon.

“True empathy is a condition of conscious and preconscious contact characterized by separateness, complexity and a linked structure, a wide perceptual spectrum including every colour in the emotional palette, from the lightest to the darkest; above all, it constitutes a progressive shared and deep contact with the complementarity of the object, with the other's defensive ego and split off parts no less than with his ego-syntonic subjectivity”(Bolognini, 1997).

Through three short clinical examples, the author will provide the audience with a lively and shareable experience of the depth, complexity and partial unpredictability of psychoanalytic empathy: something that cannot be planned, but that has to be recognized and appreciated as one of the most important and effective events that can change an analytic process and, consequently, the destiny of a patient’s life.

Stefano Bolognini; Doctor in Medicine and psychiatrist, training and supervising analyst of the Italian Psychoanalytical Society. He is the President of the International Psychoanalytical Association, after having been IPA Board Representative and chair of several IPA committees. Stefano Bolognini is a former President of the Bologna Psychoanalytic Center, former President of the Italian Psychoanalytical Society. For 10 years (2002-2012) he was member of the European Editorial Board of the International Journal of Psychoanalysis. He is the author of several books, participates regularly in radio and television debates and writes for main Italian newspapers and magazines.

See also

Zizek's Sigmund Freud Lecture: Theology, Negativity, and the Death-Drive

Introduction to Psychoanalytic Technique: Part I - GCAS (Online) Seminar

Four classes on Wednesdays, May 4, 11, 18, and 25, 2016

Introduction to Psychoanalytic Technique is part of GCAS America and is meant for the interested researcher who would like to expand their knowledge of psychoanalysis from one of the foremost experts in the field. This course is not accredited.

Description: 

An introduction to psychoanalytic technique will be conducted in seminar format through in-depth discussion of assigned writings by Freud.

The class will become familiar with the basic technical approach to conducting psychoanalysis conceptualized by Freud.

Course Prerequisites:

While some background in psychotherapy practice would be useful, it is not necessary. Familiarity with basic psychoanalytic concepts would also be helpful.

Required Books and Materials:

“Recommendations to physicians practicing psycho-analysis” (1912) in The Standard Edition, 12: 109-120.

“On beginning the treatment (further recommendations on the technique of psycho-analysis I)” (1913) in SE, 12: 121-144.

“Remembering, repeating and working-through (further recommendations on the technique of psycho-analysis II)” (1914) in SE, 12: 145-156.

Schedule:

Four classes on Wednesdays, May 4, 11, 18, and 25, from 1:30-3 PM EST

More info here.

Framed Lives Summer Series - Painters, April 17th - July 10th, 2016 - London

Screenings and Discussions on Iconic Painters

Framed Lives is a long-term programme of film screenings and discussions. Each series features four biographical films/documentaries about famous individuals within a specific field. Screenings are followed by brief presentations by psychoanalysts, film scholars and other experts, leaving plenty of time for discussion from the floor.

April 17th, 2016 10:00 PM through July 10th, 2016 12:00 AM

Location: The Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA), The Mall, London SW1Y 5AH

More info here.

Borderline Patients Seminar Series

A series of 5 seminars aimed at mental health professionals, led by Dr Giovanni Polizzi, who will be joined on 3 evenings by Professor Mary Target, Dr Kate Pugh and Dr Duncan McLean. (Thursday evenings 28 April and 5, 12, 19, 26 May 2016 - 8.30-10pm)

The series will explore the roots of the current descriptive psychiatric diagnoses of borderline personality in psychoanalytic conceptions and look at the evolution of the psychoanalytic conception of 'borderline' and psychoanalytic treatment, with a focus on a variety of contemporary psychoanalytic approaches. The ongoing relevance of psychoanalytic ideas for psychiatrists and psychologists will be highlighted throughout the series.

Date:
Thursday, 28 April, 2016 - 20:30

Venue:
Anglo Educational Services, Monticello House, 45 Russell Square, London WC1B 4JP

More info here.

Institute of Psychoanalysis Open Evening 2016

An evening open to anyone interested in psychoanalysis and training.

May 20th, 2016 7:30 PM through 9:30 PM

If you have ever thought about becoming a psychoanalyst or are interested in knowing more about psychoanalysis then this evening offers you the chance to -

Hear senior analysts speak about the profession, and training process.

Hear perspectives from current students.

Join small group discussions convened by analysts.

Tour the Institute.

Enquiries: Contact Marjory Goodall at marjory.goodall@iopa.org.uk

Please visit www.psychoanalysis.org.uk to learn more about the Institute of Psychoanalysis.

Prague to Paris: Summer Psychoanalysis Course 2016

This summer, embark on a study of psychoanalysis in two of Europe’s greatest cultural and intellectual capitals.

In Prague you’ll investigate the relationship overlap between psychoanalysis and art, including the mutual influences, borrowings, and inspirations between these two supposedly separate domains. In Paris you’ll examine psychoanalytic thought and critique in the field of 20th and 21st century art, exploring the relationship between madness and creativity, and testing the limits of psychoanalysis to interpret the visual arts.

Application due: 04/15/2016

Start Date: 05/23/2016

End Date: 07/18/2016

More info here.

The Bowlby Centre: Psychotherapy Training Open Day

The Open Day provides an opportunity to visit our centre and meet staff and students from the Bowlby Centre to find out more about our approach and the details of our training programme. It is also an opportunity to meet some of those who may be training alongside you, should you decide to join us.

The event takes place on a Saturday and is a facilitated workshop, an overview of the curriculum, a clinical vignette and also a discussion about our approach and the theoretical influences that have informed our work. We have had very positive feedback from participants about our open days.

There is a charge of £50 for attendance.

Venue:
The Bowlby Centre
1 Highbury Crescent
London N5 1RN

Dates:
Saturday 5th March 2016, 10am – 2pm
Saturday 14th May 2016, 10am – 2pm

More info here.

PROJECTIONS: David Lynch's blurred identity trilogy - Three-week evening course

9 May 2016 - 23 May 2016

Freud Museum London

Beloved American director David Lynch captivates and mystifies audiences with luxurious cinematic dreamscapes, creating glorious puzzles for the mind and heart of film fans. Three titles in particular (Lost Highway, Mulholland Drive and Inland Empire) form his unofficially named ‘blurred identity trilogy’ featuring surrealistic representations of characters embarking on perplexing paths in search of lost selves. In her PROJECTIONS course, MARY WILD will deconstruct and interpret the unforgettable Lynchian triptych from a psychoanalytic perspective, the central thesis being that in each instalment a psychogenic fugue follows the unconscious trauma of unrequited love. The framework of study will include Sigmund Freud's hydraulic model of the mind, Jacques Lacan’s linguistic theory, and Carl Jung’s concepts of persona/shadow to illuminate Lynch’s iconic dream-logic, which is disturbing and beguiling in equal measure.

Advance viewing is optional, select scenes and montages will be shown during weekly sessions:

Week 1 – Lost Highway (1997): A jazz saxophonist is framed for the murder of his wife and sent to prison, where he inexplicably morphs into a another man and begins a new life

Week 2 – Mulholland Drive (2001): An amnesiac woman and an aspiring actress search for answers across Los Angeles in a twisting venture beyond dreams and reality

Week 3 – Inland Empire (2006): As an actress begins to adopt the persona of her character in a film, her world starts to become nightmarish and surreal

PROJECTIONS is psychoanalysis for film interpretation. PROJECTIONS empowers film spectators to express subjective associations they consider to be meaningful. Expertise in psychoanalytic theory is not necessary - the only prerequisite is the desire to enter and inhabit the imaginary world of film, which is itself a psychoanalytic act. MARY WILD, a Freudian cinephile from Montreal, is the creator of PROJECTIONS.

More info here.

Solidarity and Alienation: Social Structures of Hope and Despair - Sigmund Freud University, Vienna - May 6th-8th 2016

Psychoanalysis and Politics conference: Solidarity and Alienation

Sigmund Freud University, May 6th-8th 2016

The complete listing of papers for next year's Psychoanalysis and Politics conference in Vienna.

Questions of what founds and undermines solidarity appear central today. Psychoanalysis, however, may be said to have addressed the notion of solidarity only marginally. In ‘Civilization and its Discontents’ Freud asserts that “human life in common is only made possible when a majority comes together which is stronger than any separate individual and which remains united against all separate individuals” and posits this togetherness as the “decisive step of civilization” (Freud, 1930, 94 – 95). In this sense, there is scope for further enquiry into solidarity as the core of civilization and its motivations.

To Kropotkin (1998), mutual aid within a species is an important factor in the evolution of social institutions. Solidarity is essential to mutual aid; supportive activity towards other people does not result from the expectation of reward, but rather from instinctive feelings of solidarity.

Hoelzl (2004) raises the problem of the particularity of solidarity; Aristotle’s ethics understood friendship in terms of a network among male Aristocrats within the polis. Since, however, only Aristocratic and wealthy men were eligible for a friendship that constituted the social bond of the community, the politics of friendship was elitist and linked to personal wealth. The shift from solidarity among friends to solidarity with strangers summarizes the problem of universal solidarity and identifies a problematic source in the history of the concept. This raises the question of whether or to what extent solidarity is restricted to identification based on similarity, and to what extent it can go beyond perceived similarity.

Jürgen Habermas describes solidarity as standing in for one another. While Habermas’ discourse-ethics examines successful interactions of understanding, Axel Honneth’s critical social theory also takes negative practices of misrecognition into account. Solidarity is seen as one form or pattern of recognition, with law and love as two other forms. Humiliation and insulting acts are seen as the negative counterpart to solidarity. Habermas’s theory of communicative action and Honneth’s social theory of recognition share the Hegelian assumption of recognition as reciprocal. Because of the asymmetrical relationship between the master and the slave, an asymmetrical act of solidarity is understood as a deficient mode of reciprocal solidarity. Asymmetrical acts of solidarity establish the master-slave relationship and therefore bondage. In contrast, Hoelzl (2004) asserts that further to recognition, the individual must be willing to occupy the position of sacrificial victim given that solidarity, in its most radical form, may mean giving one’s life for the other. Questions may be raised, in this sense, on the nature, dynamics and stakes of solidarity and solidary acts. How far can acts of solidarity be unilateral? What do they presuppose in terms of mutuality, individual investments and social relationships? Further, what distinguishes solidarity from related emotions such as empathy, compassion, pity and love?

We may, furthermore, ask what constitutes the opposite of solidarity. Amongst several conceivable opposing poles such as egoism, disengagement or radical individuality, alienation is arguably at the core of its decline. Consensual definitions posit alienation as separateness and estrangement of the subject from the other, the social group and social institutions leading into a meaningless, inauthentic existence (Skelton, 2006). Questions can be raised as to whether alienation indeed undermines solidarity or constitutes its negative condition of possibility.

Since the Industrial Revolution, technology and capitalism are said to have a causal relation with alienation, as Gerlach (2009) states paraphrasing Marx, “when the life [the subject] has given to the object sets itself against him as an alien and hostile force.” Alienation is thus characterised by the universal extension of “saleability” – the transformation of everything into commodity – the conversion of human beings into “things” to appear as commodities on the market – the “reification” of human relations – and by the fragmentation of the social body into “isolated individuals” who pursue their own limited, particularistic aims, making a virtue out of their selfishness in a cult of privacy (Mészáros, 1970).

Paul Verhaege’s contemporary diagnosis links alienation today with an increase in systems of monitoring and measurement and an ethic of competition where effectiveness is postulated as the highest aim: “Only the best – that is, the most productive – are to be rewarded, so a measuring system is devised. Quality criteria are then imposed by the powers that be, fairly soon followed by a rigid top-down approach to quality that stifles individual initiative. Autonomy and individual control vanish, to be replaced by quantitative evaluations, performative interviews, and audits. From then on, things go from bad to worse. Deprived of a say over their own work, employees become less committed (‘They don’t listen anyway’), and their sense of responsibility diminishes (‘As long as I do things by the book, they can’t touch me’). […] This harmful trend is destroying work ethos and, in the long run, communal ethos as well” (Verhaege 169-170). Thus competition undermines solidarity and external measurement systems renders the product of one’s labour unrecognizable and alien.

Fromm (1955), describes the alienated subject as being “out of touch with himself as he is out of touch with any other person”, leading into different social visible forms of alienation such as over-conformity and non-commitment. Primitive anxieties and forms of attachment are said to pre-date alienation if understood as an individual or social schizoid phenomenon (Lerner, 1985). Different philosophical schools, furthermore, relate alienation to dialectical recognition and estrangement (Hegel 1807; Marx, Engels, 1846); absurdity of meaninglessness and nihilism (Sartre, 1938), loss of connection with God (Kierkegaard, 1849) and third-personal relationships to the I and the other (Heidegger, 1927; Buber, 1923). A thread can be found from Rousseau’s ideas on alienation from nature to psychoanalytic conceptualisations, and parallels could be drawn with Winnicott’s (1965) concepts of the true and the false self, though ‘false self’ formations are not linked with an account of social structures. We might refer to Menzies Lyth’s descriptions of a ‘forced introjection of a social defence system’ that ‘relied heavily on violent splitting’ to ask what forms of splitting (not necessarily always negative) are socially required of people today and about their consequences for our sense of solidarity and alienation. For Durkheim (1897), anomie is common when society has undergone significant changes in its economic fortunes, whether for better or for worse, and when there is a major discrepancy between the ideology and values commonly professed and what is achievable in one’s everyday life.

Lynd (1961) suggests that alienation understood as separation may have beneficent as well as terrifying aspects. Regarding the former, the myth motif of the wandering prophet “is the precondition for the discovery of that which is newer and older and more real than the parochial customs of the village” (170), versions of which can be found in Anna Karenina, Bread and Wine, and Doctor Zhivago. “The true prophet”, argues Lynd, “goes into the unexplored wilderness and […] returns to be a leader and life-giver to his people” (170), alienation being the precondition of this experience. Going beyond the settlement “and setting one’s face toward the more enduring, universal realities, involves conflict with many accepted social forms” (170). In this sense, questions can be raised on the hopeful potential of alienation itself and its potential to unsettle social establishments.

(The symposium lasts for three full days, from 9 am Friday 6th until about 6 pm Sunday 8th. Two dinners, Friday and Saturday, are included in the ticket price. Link to sign up)

More info here.