CALL FOR PARTICIPANTS

PSYCHOANALYSIS TO COME: COMMUNITY & CULTURE

A DAS UNBEHAGEN INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE

COPENHAGEN, JULY 24-26, 2020

We are welcoming paper and panel submissions for an international conference on the future of psychoanalytic community | psychoanalysis and culture to be held in Copenhagen, July 24-26, 2020.

We intend this three-day conference to be a space for those of us committed to psychoanalysis to think through the future of psychoanalytic community, the possibility of an international psychoanalytic network “without borders” and the forms this may take in relation to other established organizations, culture, film, digital media, technology, publishing, academia, philosophy and the arts.

As we know, psychoanalysis has not survived so much by way of psychology departments and the field of “mental health” at large, but more so through the humanities, philosophy, literature and film theory, creating a discourse and culture of its own.

Das Unbehagen first began by putting to question the method and mode of psychoanalytic transmission, both within and without institutional boundaries. We have undergone many iterations: from a small group of practitioners planning events and classes in New York, to an international collective of clinicians and scholars connected remotely, to a group that both implicitly and explicitly puts to question its own possibility and future. From the start, dU has been committed to the idea that engagement with psychoanalysis can and should take place outside of an institutional setting and that a psychoanalytic collective founded on and motored by the desire of its participants is both possible and necessary—without prescribing exactly how such a collective might stay alive or whether its current instantiation will.

We hope to gather participants from a variety of disciplines and theoretical orientations to participate in both traditional panels and more experiential events, all of which will ask us to work with the question of the psychoanalytic endeavor, its future, and its reach. Thus we are interested in papers, panels, and other submissions that theorize, historicize, hystericize, problematize, philosophize, construct, deconstruct, and compound the realities, possibilities, intersections and missed encounters of and between psychoanalysis and community, and located anywhere on the range from practical to imagined.

Some possibilities for topics are below, though we welcome any submissions—both critical and creative—that conjugate psychoanalysis, community, culture, and the future. We encourage as well collaborative work on submissions and welcome not only paper proposals, but also proposals for panels, roundtables, performances, and workshops.

–Psychoanalysis and the arts/literature/film
–Psychoanalysis and culture
–Psychoanalysis and politics
–Psychoanalysis and…
–The transmission of psychoanalysis (time and space)
–Psychoanalytic writing; case writing
–Transference and the psychoanalytic community
–Teaching psychoanalysis, psychoanalysis in/and the academy
–The solitude of the analyst
–Dreams and/of the psychoanalytic community (dream matrix?)
–Class issues in psychoanalysis
–The immigrant analyst
–Digital technology and access to psychoanalysis
–Psychoanalysis and AI
–History of traditional analytic training models
–Belonging and unbelonging
–Community terminable and interminable
–“Group Psychology”
–Licensure and the authorization of the psychoanalyst; the regulation of psychoanalysis; self-authorization and collectivity
–Psychoanalysis and the social link; sinthomes of psychoanalytic communities
–The death drive and psychoanalytic community; violence and psychoanalysis
–Theories of community, theories of the future, theories of time (messianic, momentary and nachtraglich): Barthes, Bataille, Agamben, Derrida, Bergson, Edelman, Levinas, etc.

Please send proposals by January 31, 2020, to Emma Lieber (elieber14@gmail.com) and Vanessa Sinclair (sinclairvanessa@gmail.com), and feel free to be in touch with any questions.

Events to take place July 24-26, 2020, at Husets Biograf, housed at Huset KBH located in central Copenhagen (https://huset-kbh.dk)

Norwegian Airlines is recommended for international travel (https://www.norwegian.com).

As far as accommodations, in addition to to standard hotels, there are a variety of spaces available via airbnb.com and hostels.com