Recordings
Psychoanalyzing Ambivalence with Carol Owens and Stephanie Swales
Click here to watch on New School Livestream
Adrian Price: “An Artificial Tongue with a Natural Curl” – On Lacan’s Last Major Written Piece ‘Joyce le Symptôme’
Click here to link to audio © A.R. Price
Jamieson Webster: Paranoid Encounters – From Masculinity to #MeToo – Paranoia, Hysteria and Other Neurotic Dispositions
On April 4, 2019, Jamieson Webster presented the opening keynote lecture for Paranoid Encounters, a graduate conference organized by The New School Philosophy Department. The conference explores a perspective often disregarded, even rejected by philosophy — that of paranoia — in order to understand ...
The Stutter in Psychoanalysis: A Mini-Course with Michael Levine
Click here for Class #1 audio Click here for Class #2 audio Click here for Class #3 audio
Transgender Psychoanalysis: A New Ethics of Sexual Difference – Patricia Gherovici & Oren Gozlan
Click here for link to audio
Ray O’Neill on Dali, Lacan, Freud, Narcissism & the Double
Irish Lacanian psychoanalyst Ray O’Neill discusses the life and work of Salvador Dali from a psychoanalytic viewpoint, addressing narcissism, the theory of the double & posing the question what’s really in a name? This talk was first presented at the Psychoanalysis, Art & the Occ...
Hilda & Freud: Collected Words
“The flowers and the words bear this in common, they are what I want. And the professor knew it.” H.D. Hilda & Freud: Collected Words is a play by Antonio Quinet based on H.D.’s Tribute to Freud, the letters she exchanged with Freud and her literary circle, her memoir of her psychoanalysis, and ...
Ricardo Goldenberg: Jouissance Again!
Summary by Evan Malater: No mere bomb cyclone could keep the Unbehagen from coming out in force for today’s day long Jouissance event featuring Brazilian analyst Ricardo Goldenberg. A fine day was had by all though Jouissance as such was had by none. By this I don’t mean to insult Ricard...
Marc Strauss: The Usual Sexpects
Summary by Evan Malater: Jamieson started with a message of discontent aimed at the discontents from part one of the Marc Strauss miniseries following Kelly Merklin’s admirable presentation. To those who seemed disturbed by the idea that Kelly’s patient was a (Lacanian) psychotic, she of...
The Unbejection’s Presentorsion Discustshine of Shock Lacan’s Famisslie Diffuckult Teckst: L’ETOURDIT
Summary by Evan Malater: With L’etourdit we find Lacan giving an address in the form of a hypercondensed recapitulation of his life’s thinking till that time (1972) with the added surprise that since he was secretly working on Joyce, the language was hypercharged with puns, overdetermina...
Schreber Live! Patrick Scanlon “Granted – From Glory to Grandeur”
This expanded cinema piece explores the materiality of light in the shadow of Schreber’s Memoirs. Additionally, the character of Judge Schreber is represented in costume, encouraging spectators to play with the film itself, refracting and reflecting the projector’s rays of light. Costume by Bekah Ca...
Schreber Live! Felix Bernstein, Patricia Gherovici, Gabe Rubin, and Jamieson Webster “The Trans-migration of the Body of Schreber into a Woman”
A planned interruption of the body of Schreber as it trans-migrates into the body. Click here to read the performance text
Schreber Live! Michael Eigen “I want to be a Woman – Caesura, Blackout, Rebirth”
Michael Eigen (born 1936) is an American psychoanalyst and writer, perhaps best known for his willingness to allow for the role of mysticism in the therapeutic process.
Schreber Live! Julie Fotheringham “Fleeting – Improvised WO/MAN”
This dance performance comprises “fleeting – improvised – movement” that spontaneously arises as if in response to “nerve contact” with fellow humans or the divine rays of God. These brief improvisations will embody Schreber’s words that suggest movement, such as “voluptuousness” and “ne...
Schreber Live! Forecourts of Heaven (Scholarly Interventions)
Click here to read the text of Kabir Dandona’s talk “What is Soul Murder, Anyways?”
Schreber Live! Luce DeLire “Milk that Goat – Freud, Kant, Schreber”
Milk that Goat – An Essay Film by Luce deLire The project: In a curious passage of his analysis of the memoir of the psychotic Daniel Paul Schreber, Sigmund Freud quotes Immanuel Kant as follows: “In Schreber’s system the two principal elements of his delusions (his transformation into a woman...
Schreber Live! Lakshmi Luthra “Interior Castle”
Interior Castle Voice and synthesizer Length variable A synthesizer mimics the cadences of the artist’s voice as she inhabits various scenarios, moving from the generic intimacy of a mental health screening, to a sadistic guided meditation, ecstatic visions and mythic mating rituals. This rovi...
Mass Psychology in the Age of Trumpism: Chiara Bottici, Judith Butler, Jamieson Webster
This event was part of the Philosophy Colloquium and of the “Fascism: Old and New” initiative in Public Seminar. Click here for more info on the Public Seminar initiative Summary by Evan Malater: 1) Jamieson Webster: On The Taboo on Virginity When faced with certifiable big questi...
ECHO: A seminar with Vanessa Place and Jamieson Webster, in conversation with Jack Halberstam, Evan Malater, Sam McKinniss, and Naomi Toth
What is Echo after? This event was the sixth in the series “In Authenticity,” hosted by Vanessa Place and Jamieson Webster. PARTICIPANTS: Jack Halberstam is Visiting Professor of Gender Studies and English at Columbia University. Halberstam is the author of five books including: Skin Sho...
Book Launch: “Lacan on Laughter—The new LOL” with Simon Critchley, Patricia Gherovici, Dany Nobus, Manya Steinkoler, and Jamieson Webster
How to fight a situation that seems farcical? When reality reaches absurdity, the subversive power of laughter steps in. Laughter is never innocent, it happens to us, at times inappropriately and inauspiciously. Psychoanalysis is well known for having shed some light on the perennial mysteries of wh...
Steven Reisner: Crazy Like a Fox – Evil is Not a Psychiatric Illness
Steven Reisner argues that Trump’s tactical strategies, including lying and bullying, have been such successful political strategies that they cannot be used as evidence of mental illness. I argue that the only delusion in such a successful manipulation of the truth for political advantage is ...
David Bell: New Barbarisms
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 curr...
Laurence Rickels: All You Vampires
The title “All You Vampires” summarizes the drift of the presentation by tampering with the title of Robert Heinlein’s time-travel story “All You Zombies” and placing the vampire in the seat of sole survivor (and mourner). To this end I attend to the origin story of the living dead, Richard Matheson...
Marcus Coelen: 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 writ...
Das Unbehagen in conversation with Paul Verhaeghe
Summary by Evan Malater Verhaeghe at this point in his career seems interested in accessible models that can be shared beyond the enclaves that speak Lacanian. He gave us a rendition of ideas in his last book, What About Me (Identity is the title in the original, his publisher thought that this hoke...
Trans*Unbehagen: What is Trans*Psychoanalysis
Introduction by Evan Malater This event was born from the ashes of a listserv thread that has reached 100 posts and shows no signs of dying. So to start, a passage from a post by Cecilia Wu: “ If it is our goal as a progressive society to maximize the range of gender expression, why bother with the ...
Psychoanalysis and the Occult
Psychoanalysis and the Occult (Case Material on Psychic Reality) April 9 2016 – NPAP Sponsored by Analytica.org and Unbehagen.org Created by Scott Von and David Schweichler Click here for link to audio Thee Psychoanalysis and the Occult symposium took place last week on April 9 ...
Freud as a Thinker of the Political Body: Fear and Distress as Political Affects – Vladimir Safatle in Conversation with Marcus Coelen
“For Freud distress is a prerequisite for social emancipation, not an experience of resignation or vulnerability, a demand for care by proto-parental figures, or a continued political experience of exploitation of fear. What we have in Freud the affirmation of distress as an ontological insecu...
Institute No Institute
Becoming a psychoanalyst is founded upon a subjective transformation that occurs in a personal analysis. It cannot be measured or predicted, yet it is the necessary factor that allows one to conduct analytic treatment. Neither the analyst alone nor a group of independent observers can determine its ...
A Panel for the Launch of George Makari’s “Soul Machine: The Invention of the Modern Mind”
“Imagine a time in the future when your mind might travel. Perhaps it would enter a different torso or a foreign face. Would you still possess the same self, the same being? Our minds, most of us would agree, define us; they carry our personhood, and where they go, we go too. In Western cultur...
Double Entendre: Katy Bohinc, Rachael Wilson & Jamieson Webster respond to Alain Badiou
Wendy’s Subway presented performances and discussion of Bohinc’s “psycho-sexual thriller” Dear Alain, Webster’s The Life and Death of Psychoanalysis (Karnac Books, 2011), which addresses Badiou’s theory of love and asks how it may be conceived from the psychoanalyst’s discourse; and Wilson’s “Fiftee...
Dana Amir: Cleft Tongue: The Language of Psychic Structures
“The scene of perversion is a scene of seduction. In this scene, which is shared, whether consciously or not, by two people, there is a continuous continuous reversal of roles in which the chosen object, the person on which the perverse subject actually depends and with whom he yearns to fuse,...
Jamieson Webster & Nuar Alsadir in conversation with Barry Yourgrau for the launch of “Mess”
“The word “hoard” derives from the proto-Germanic term for “hidden or secret treasure.” Hoards are well known to archeologists, dating back over 10,000 years to the hunter-gatherers of the Stone Age. Foodstuffs such as joints of meat were common early deposits, ditto ornaments, weapons, and human re...
Dany Nobus: Writing as an Instrument of Torture – An Exploration of Sade’s Practical Reason via Lacan’s “Kant with Sade”
Of the twenty-eight substantial papers and six shorter contributions that make up Lacan’s Écrits, “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 wil...
Josh Cohen: Art, Psychoanalysis, Art and the Logic of Indifference
“As Leo Bersani and others have observed, there is a paradox at the heart of the Freudian corpus that animates and finally undoes it. In resisting the theoretical innovation of the death drive, Freud’s contemporaries were resisting an inner tendency of psychoanalysis to corrode the capacity of...
Angelo Villa: Hystericization and Psychoanalytic Belonging
“For belonging does entail an identification; I suggest that the turning point must be made through the difference between a passive identification and an active one. As far as the analysis delves into a familial bond, it allows the patient to return and find a new place in his personal histor...
Patricia Gherovici: Attack of the Difficult Ecrits – Class 2 – The Situation of Psychoanalysis
This class was based on a collaborative annotated reading by Patricia Gherovici and Manya Steinkoler of Lacan’s “The Situation of Psychoanalysis and the Training of Psychoanalysts in 1956,” to be published in the forthcoming Reading the Écrits – A Guide to Lacan’s Works, edited by Derek Hook, ...
Jamieson Webster: Attack of the Difficult Ecrits – Class I – Variations on the Standard Treatment
A poetic rendition by Cecilia Wu If we follow Jamieson’s lead and focus on the writing itself, considering the fact that Lacan’s writings are unsweetened, condensed transcripts of his speech acts, it’s hard to dismiss his mode of attack as a pain in the ass, or as unruly hunks of r...
Gerard Pommier: What Did Feminism and Gender Studies Bring to Psychoanalysis?
In his presentation to Das Unbehagen, Gerard Pommier addressed the challenge of defining the term ‘Woman’: “The uncertainty is such that this difficulty of definition could be used itself as a definition and normative ideal! Judith Butler writes, for instance, that “if a subject un...
Somatic Experiments, Clinical Encounters: In the Consulting Room with “Testo Junkie” – Paul B. Preciado in conversation with Kirsten Lentz, Carolyn Stack and Jamieson Webster
This interdisciplinary forum on Testo Junkie: Sex, Drugs, and Biopolitics in the Pharmacopornographic Era, puts author Paul B. Preciado into conversation with clinicians — Kirsten Lentz, Carolyn Stack, and Jamieson Webster, along with moderator Muriel Dimen — to discuss the range of ways Preciado’s ...
Sergio Benvenuto: Perversions are not Paraphilias
“Many deny, of course, that perversions exist, even if the dominant psychiatry has re-baptized them as “paraphilias.” A name change attributable to political correctness, considering that the term “pervert” is today an insult. In Greek, paraphilia means “wrong love”. After all, it’s better to ...
Adele Tutter: Under the Mirror of the Sleeping Water – Poussin’s Narcissus
Nicholas Poussin’s four paintings on the theme of Narcissus and Echo, completed over the course of three decades, reflect a deepening appreciation of their source in Ovid’s Metamorphoses. Poussin’s interpretations of the Narcissus myth parallel critical junctures in the development of psychoanalytic...
Elissa Marder: Knock Knock: Femininity, Fixation, Photography
“Ultimately, what I am seeking in the photograph taken of me (the ‘intention’ according to which I look at it) is Death: Death is the eidos of that Photograph. Hence, strangely, the only thing that I tolerate, that I like, that is familiar to me, when I am photographed, is the sound of the cam...
Performance/Panel: “The Ontology of the Rape Joke” with Vanessa Place, Jeff Dolven, Gayle Salamon, and Jamieson Webster
Rape is an act of physical and sexual violence; jokes are understood as a kind of psychic disruption, with humor forcing a release of pleasure. According to Freud, jokes can function as a shared victory over social repression, and “jokes that have a purpose run the risk of meeting with people who do...
Freud Out Loud: Civilization and its Discontents – A Marathon Reading
“The inclination to aggression constitutes the greatest impediment to civilization.” – SIGMUND FREUD, 1929 Why is the world so violent? Why can’t civilization contain it? Freud knows! Few thinkers understand human aggression as powerfully as the founder of psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud. His 19...
Angelo Villa: Psychoanalysis and the Handicapped
“Over the last few years, definitions of handicaps and disabilities have multiplied themselves, either generating improbable neologisms or exploring language in search of an impossible formula which may combine the designation of a difference with its negation. The ensuing feeling of confusion...
Patricia Gherovici: Two Fund(a)mental Concepts of Lacanian Psychoanalysis – A Course on The Phallus and object a
Can psychoanalysis rethink sexuality without fully relying on the controversial and contested notion of the phallus? The simplest, schematic version of the Freudian Oedipal model offers a binary logic of having or not having it, of presence or absence: boys have it, girls don’t. For Freud, castratio...
Genevieve Morel: The Unsinkable Fantasy
“Because the symptom is a source of complaint, we speak about it in psychoanalysis, to get rid of it. To the contrary, fantasy is so enjoyable that there is no incentive to speak of it, as Freud had noticed. We would rather keep to ourselves this intimate and painless satisfaction. Yet, withou...
Simon Critchley: Infinitely Demanding
“It is at this intensely situational, indeed local level that the atomising, expropriating force of neo-liberal globalisation is to be met, contested and resisted. That is, resistance begins by occupying and controlling the terrain upon which one stands, where one lives, works, acts and thinks...