Author: ceciliajwugmail-com
Jordan Osserman: On the Foreskin Question
“We have known at least since Foucault that the Victorians were paranoid about, and therefore in the habit of proliferating, sex. Improper, excessive sexuality lurked around every corner, associated with unruly behavior and florid physical ailments, such as the endlessly enigmatic “hysteria.” Childhood masturbation was especially worrying, a focal point of medical concern. In Heckford’s and ...
Psychoanalysis, Art, and the Occult
“We crossed over, in the sense that representatives from different environments shared time-space and actually communicated with each other. And we crossed over in the sense that we genuinely listened to each other with apprehensive ears and minds. We crossed over in the sense that we realised that it’s not just enough to stuff intellectual memes into our already overheated systems. We reali...
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 hokey title was better for America). Part One recapitulates the major theme of Civilization and its Disc...
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 being of gender? Isn’t being notorious for anchoring potential to rosetta stones of yore? Does...
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 2016. It was a unique event in content and form. This topic and its controversies were at the orig...
A/cephalic Discontents: Group Psychology, The Absence of Myth, and The Knot of Acephale
Scott Jenkins’ Notes on A/cephalic Discontents: Session I: There is a kind of nudity in anonymity, at least as much as there is a mask. The particular pleasure of the discussion: despite its intimacy, nobody in the room was familiar, on terms other than the texts, with more than a handful of others. ◊◊ In addition to those who begin at the beginning, and those who begin at “In the Beginning…...
Guilherme Massara Rocha: The Secret of Her Eyes – Necessity and Contingency in a Fragment of a Psychoanalytic Treatment
When we lose the eye as the phallus that guarantees the consistency of the visual, the blindness that ensues is not simply a non-signifying darkness, but rather an ‘undifferentiated palate of images.’ The event of an ocular castration gives way to a seething imaginary without the security of a local iconography, and in the desperate attempt to arrest this imaginary deluge a ‘volcanic hunger’ is in...
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 insecurity with the political function of reducing demand for an authority based on the phantasmagoric con...
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 occurrence, but somehow together they may. That something so difficult to determine lies at the hear...
Jamieson Webster: “Sick Bodies, Hysterical Pregnancies, ISIS Wives”
“Conversion is linked to combustible effects, to desires and fears that remain hidden, unspoken, but ripe, a demand that takes place through the body. This is certainly the situation with the original “conversion hysterics” of psychoanalysis. “I have a sounding board in my abdomen…if anything happens, it starts up my old pain,” said a woman to Breur in Studies in Hysteria (1895, p. 204). Som...
Tracy Morgan: “To Disembark”
“The denouement of a ten-year psychoanalytic treatment brings to mind the story of Jane Eyre. I was seven years deep into my analysis when I began to have the feeling that, like Jane’s blinded Mr. Rochester, my analyst had lost sight of me. From the precise moment I met Jane, and I can still see her seated in a dark room surrounded by a family not her own, she became a dear companion. Read...
Interview with Patricia Gherovici: “The Unconscious is the Last Activist”
PATRICIA GHEROVICI: I was first a writer before I became an analyst. I was working as a journalist while I was a student and I did a lot of journalistic writing. There was a continuation of that early career in my practice of analysis. Indeed, the process of analysis could be seen as a process of writing, with the difference that the writing is made by the analysand. A successful analysis works li...