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! Emma Lieber “Bellowing Presidents”

How are presidents nominated and named? How do they speak? I will argue that Trump’s language is far more confined than the supposedly psychotic productions of Schreber. In fact, compared to Schreber, Trump’s language is a prison of linguistic confinement. Emma Lieber is a psychoanalyst-in-training and literary scholar whose critical and creative work has appeared in The Point Magazine, New England Review, Massachusetts Review, LA Review of Books, and various academic and psychoanalytic publications. Click here to read text of talk

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 and his favoured relation to God) are linked in his assumption of a feminine attitude towards God. It will be an unavoidable part of our task to show that there is an essential genetic relation between these two elements. Otherwise our attempts at elucidating Schreber’s delusions will leave us in the absurd position described in Kant’s famous simile in the Critique of Pure Reason—we shall be like a man holding a sieve under a he-goat while some one else milks it.“ Freud, CW XII, p.3...Read More

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 roving narration addresses the link between pleasure and pain, coping with the authority of God and community, and the erotic undertow of our reality. Artist edition forthcoming from Recondite Industries Lakshmi Luthra is an artist and Assistant Professor of Studio Art at Colgate University in Hamilton, New York. She received her MFA from California Institute of the Arts in 2009. Her work has been exhibited in Los Angeles, New York, Berlin and elsewhere. Click here for link to audio Click here for l...Read More

Evan Malater: “I Want to Hate… and I Always Will”: The Psychoanalytic Writing of Donald J. Trump

“Our analysis tries to avoid the trap of analyzing Trump in order to follow the precise Trump logic set out in his full-page newspaper advertisement, on its own terms. Since this advertisement contains a rare example of Trump explicitly writing about psychoanalyzing, we abandon the many fruitless attempts to psychoanalyze Trump and instead use it as the basis for examining the conditions by which Trump himself deigns to psychoanalyze. We posit that under these conditions of disciplined reading, Trump will in effect psychoanalyze us. By this we mean that the conditions of a Trump presidency place us in the position of being analyzed by Trump and not the reverse, despite defensive maneuvers aimed at reasserting the expertise of those who so clearly lacked the understanding for anticipa...Read More

Teresa Mendez & Daniel Buccino: The Sublime Psychology of Baltimore

“Lacan locates the unconscious, the sublime nexus of all our psyches, in Baltimore in the morning. The unconscious, he tells us, is like dawn — that threshold between sleep and waking. It’s a pulsating neon sign, ticking time, advertising enjoyment. It is intermittent and fading, present and absent. The unconscious is like Baltimore, with its sublime oscillations between tender and tough, wounded and resilient, swaggering and fearful, Northern and Southern, black and white. According to Freud and Lacan, there is no universal “dream book,” meant to provide facile interpretations to every dream image. Neither is there an easy decoder ring for the psychology of Baltimore. Every resident must tell his and her own story of the psychology of this place. Yet we all awake e...Read More

David Lichtenstein: A Letter from New York

“Psychoanalysis has died many times and in many places. The causes of its repeated demise are often less instructive than the conditions of its resurrection. The cause of death is always a version of the same: it is a discipline that demands too much. It is too austere and takes too long, costs too much, operates too slowly, and produces equivocal results. In short as a general condition, it is an impossible profession in a state of constant collapse. How it rises again from its own ashes however is always a story about the demands that arise in a particular time and place. It is always a particular story about a particular resurrection in the face of the universal impossibility.” – David Lichtenstein Click here to read “A Letter from New York” by David Lichte...Read More

Steven Reisner: Stop Saying Donald Trump is Mentally Ill

“Sigmund Freud had a word for those whose unique gifts permit them to bend reality to their will: artists. According to Freud, the artist “allows his erotic and ambitious wishes full play in the life of fantasy. He finds the way back to reality, however, from this world of fantasy by making use of special gifts to mold his fantasies into truths of a new kind.” Trump has to be understood, then, as a reality artist, one who is adept at the strategies that turn his biggest whoppers into reality. It is reminiscent of Charles Foster Kane, in Orson Welles’ classic film, who, when informed by the war reporter he dispatched to Cuba that there was no war to be found but only delightful girls and beautiful scenery worthy of prose poems, famously replied, “Dear Wheeler, you provide the prose po...Read More

11 Questions to Vanessa Sinclair

“The basic idea is that in order to become a psychoanalyst, one needs three components: one must undergo one’s own analysis, one must see analysands while being supervised by an analyst, and one must study psychoanalysis, take didactics, classes, attend lectures, etc. It’s a field in which there is lifelong learning, and if you are passionate about it, that seems obvious. So these training institutes offer these three components in a formal, organized way, but they aren’t actually necessary. Most people who tread the path towards becoming a psychoanalyst already have a clinical degree, whether it is a PhD, PsyD, LCSW, MD, at least in this country. Other places are more open about training what are called lay-analysts or psychoanalysts that may come from a non-clinical background. The...Read More

Lucas Ballestin: Hipster Politics

Lucas Ballestín analyzes the politics of the hipster, looking to dispel assumptions and use psychoanalytic intuition to explore new ways of thinking the much-hated figure as a response to contemporary political and social conditions. Click here to read the essay published in HKRB

Claire-Madeline Culkin and Ray O’Neill on Narcissism, Mourning & Sexuality

“All names carry ghosts of the pasts and desires in the present. For each of our namings there is a dopplegänger, a double from whom that name has been stolen/inherited, be it an actual person or a desired personal identity” – Ray O’Neill Click here to read a review of the event by Sola Agustsson in Hyperallergenic

Esther Sperber: The Shadow Of Zaha Hadid – Lilith Magazine

“…But alongside my admiration, and slight envy of Zaha Hadid, I hear a small ugly voice whispering in my head. This voice says, “she was too big for life and so she died.” It is true, I admit, that she defied so many social norms, being ambitious, creative and successful, and choosing not to marry or have children. This, the ‎Trump-like-misogynist voice in my head says, was too much; the universe could not maintain this kind of female presence. I hate this voice and can’t believe it resides within me. How is it possible that after years of thinking, lecturing and writing about women in architecture, questioning the current gender roles, a voice like this still persist and haunts me from within my own mind?” Click here to read more

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