Marcus Coelen: Schreber – Text and Transference (Session I)

A Seminar Sponsored by The Lacan Salon at The New School for Social Research and Das Unbehagen

Marcus Coelen

May 17, 19, 24, 31

7-9pm

Schreber – Text and Transference

Schreber does not stop triggering transference.

The Memoirs of My Nervous Illness, published in 1903, drew Jung to draw Freud’s attention to it, leading the latter to write his “Remarks on an Autobiographically Described Case of Paranoia” (1911)—and since then an ever growing textual network of writing, speaking, and gesticulating, is thinking psychosis and practicing its language with Schreber and schreberisms in mind. This seminar will be devoted to reading selectively the Memoirs themselves, Freud’s “Remarks” and Lacan’s “On a Question Preliminary to Any Possible Treatment of Psychosis.”

Approaching such a voluminous and demanding corpus in a condensed manner might allow us to perceive more clearly how, in each of these instances, the effort is made to respond to madness with both form and formalism: linguistic invention, grammatical-logical formalization, and mathematization. The wider Schreber text teaches us about a formalistic drive. My hypothesis will be that this drive can be set into a relation with the knotty question of “transference and psychosis” and lend itself to a discussion on how to keep this question vital both in clinical work and theoretical propositions.
Marcus Coelen is a psychoanalyst in Paris and Berlin as well as a researcher affiliated with the Department of Comparative Literature at the Ludwig-Maximilan-Universität in Munich and currently a visiting scholar at the Federal University Fluminense in Rio de Janeio. He is the editor and translator of several books and compilations of texts by Maurice Blanchot into German among which Vergehen (Le pas au-delà) (2012) and the author of Die Tyrannei des Partikularen. Lektüren Prousts (2006) and editor of George Bataille: Key Concepts (2015) with M. Hewson.

Please register for each individual date at the following event page below:
https://www.eventbrite.com/e/schreber-text-and-transference-a-seminar-with-marcus-coelen-tickets-24878908485

Readings can be downloaded from this shareable link:
https://drive.google.com/open?id=0BzwznXgY_dPLaTZWdzQtU2FrUEE