Past Events › Lecture

All cultures develop their own modes of self-explanation, but such explanations, somewhat like symptoms, inevitably conceal as much as they reveal. In this sense psychoanalysis may be well placed to enter into a critical relation with the forms of consciousness that characterize our age. At the current conjuncture we are witnessing an escalating descent into a kind of institutionalized barbarism which unleashes forms of group behavior which require a social and psychological understanding. The time seems right to return to the classic…

Lacan famously said that affects lie, and the only affect that doesn't lie is anxiety. The question of affect is of course a dense topic in Freud, not quite emotion, not quite drive, perhaps something repressed, perhaps some kind of oozing of the repressed, all of which seems to make and break social bonds. What is the relationship between affect and language? What is the difference between affect, psychoanalytically speaking, and the more conventional 'feeling'? While it is true that…

Of the twenty-eight substantial papers and six shorter contributions that make up Lacan’sÉcrits, ‘Kant with Sade’ is generally regarded as one of the toughest nuts to crack, and this opinion is shared by some of the most eminent and knowledgeable commentators on Lacan’s work. In this seminar, I will unpack one of the crucial lines of Lacan’s argument in ‘Kant with Sade’, notably that the contents of Sade’s libertine novels, which he also designated as “the Sadean fantasy”, i.e. the…

Wednesday, October 14th, 2015 / 8-10 p.m. The New School, 63 5th Avenue, Room 200 Josh Cohen is Professor of Modern Literary Theory at Goldsmiths University of London and a psychoanalyst in private practice. He is the author of numerous articles and four books on psychoanalysis, modern literature and cultural theory, most recently How to Read Freud and The Private Life:Why We Remain in the Dark. Psychoanalysis, Art and the Logic of Indifference Beginning from Freud's invocation of the 'Nirvana…

Angelo Villa, who came last year to present his work on "Psychoanalysis and the Hadicapped," wanted to return to tell us about how he thinks about psychoanalytic groups. In particular, we were interested in his idea that the group needed to be kept 'hysterical' in order that it not close down or fall into malaise. His work with the difficulties of treating severe mental illness in an experimental hospital setting, and handling the threat of burn-out and desire to sterilize,…