Seminar 1:
Psychoanalysis, Politics and Society: What Remains Radical in Psychoanalysis?
This seminar is concerned with the contribution that psychoanalysis has made to progressive political thought. It argues that despite, alongside or in tension with the more conservative, psychologically ‘reductive’ side of psychoanalytic politics, there is a very challenging radical strand. On the whole, once the Berlin Institute of Psychoanalysis was destroyed by Nazism, it found its strongholds outside the main psychoanalytic movement, for example in the works of philosophers and social theorists from Herbert Marcuse to Judith Butler; and this is one of the issues that needs to be addressed as part of the question of whether this radicalism is truly ‘psychoanalytic’. Starting with Freud, and taking seriously the contribution of social theorists influenced by Klein and Lacan, the seminar suggests that psychoanalysis offers a vocabulary for, and orientation towards, subjectivity that is not otherwise highly developed in political thought.
Seminar 2:
Psychoanalysis and Jewish ‘barbarism’.
In some recent work on decolonization, there has been an attempt to claim some Jewish writers of the twentieth century as participating in a rethinking of ‘barbarism’ that aligns Jewish thought with the decolonial movement. This is problematic, especially because post-Holocaust and Zionist discourses have positioned Jews normatively as part of European ‘civilization’ opposed to barbarism. Nevertheless, the reclaiming of a radical Jewish tradition allied with other movements of the oppressed may provide resources for barbaric thinking, using ‘barbaric’ here in the positive sense to mean that which confronts the hegemony of European colonial thought. The relative absence of psychoanalysis from this discussion is striking. Given the place of psychoanalysis both as a ‘colonial’ discipline and as a contributor to critical and postcolonial thought, can it be seen in the positive tradition of Jewish barbarism? This session offers an account of Jewish barbaric possibilities and suggests ways in which psychoanalysis might connect with them.
Seminar 3:
Psychosocial studies is methodologically and theoretically diverse, drawing on a wide range of intellectual resources. However, psychoanalysis has often taken a privileged position within this diversity, because of its welldeveloped conceptual vocabulary that can be put to use to theorise the psychosocial subject. Its practices have become a model for some aspects of psychosocial work, especially in relation to its focus on intense study of individuals, its explicit engagement with ethical relations, and its traversing of disciplinary boundaries across the arts, humanities and social sciences. On the other hand, this possible hegemony of psychoanalytic discourse produces tensions with some other ‘trans’ components of the psychosocial studies enterprise such as postcolonial and queer studies. This ‘dispute’ also governs debates about the type of psychoanalysis that might be most appropriate for psychosocial studies. The debate about the place of psychoanalysis in psychosocial studies is radically different from the longstanding question of the scientific status of psychoanalysis; here, the issue is not whether psychoanalysis is ‘objective’ and empirically established, but rather whether and how it can be deployed as an ethical practice in the context of an emergent area of socially progressive critical research. The claim will be made that the engagement between psychoanalysis and its psychosocial critics is fundamentally productive. Even though it generates real tensions, these tensions are necessary and significant, reflecting genuine struggles over how best to understand the socially constructed human subject.
Seminar 4:
(In)security ‘Security’ is a nodal point for the state and the citizen. This seminar will explore security and insecurity as psychosocial states: states of feeling which have a social resonance and are shaped by social factors and discourses that increase and decrease precarity. These states of security and insecurity are formed by affect, giving them cogency and making them dynamic and causal in their operations. The psychoanalytic literature on (in)security deriving from the ‘British’ tradition of Winnicott and the sociological work that has stemmed from that, offer insights into the conditions that give rise to security of ‘selfhood’ and their links with issues of risk and trust, as well as paranoia and fears actively generated by the state, media and other institutional actors. In recent years this has been consolidated into notions such as the ‘neurotic citizen’ to describe ways in which management of anxiety has become a key concern of social policy. Could it be that the focus on security is not just a reflection of an underlying insecure state, but a cause of it?
Bibliografia:
Seminar 1:
Frosh, S. (1999) The Politics of Psychoanalysis. London: Palgrave.
Marcuse, H. (1955) Eros and Civilization. Boston: Beacon Press.
Zaretsky, E. (2015) Political Freud. New York: Columbia University Press.
Seminar 2:
Arendt, H. (1944) The Jew as Pariah: A Hidden Tradition. In J. Kohn and
R. Feldman (eds) (2007) Hannah Arendt: The Jewish Writings. New York: Schocken.
Cheyette, B. (2013) Diasporas of the Mind: Jewish and Postcolonial Writing and the Nightmare of History. New Haven: Yale University Press.
Damousi, J. and Plotkin, M. (eds.) (2012) Psychoanalysis and Politics:
Histories of Psychoanalysis under conditions of restricted political freedom. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Slabodsky, S. (2014) Decolonial Judaism: Triumphal Failures of Barbaric Thinking. London: Palgrave.
Stonebridge, L. (2019) Placeless People: Writing, Rights and refugees. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Seminar 3:
Frosh, S. and Baraitser, L. (2008) Psychoanalysis and Psychosocial
Studies. Psychoanalysis, Culture and Society, 13, 346–365. Greedharry, A. (2008) Postcolonial Theory and Psychoanalysis. London: Palgrave.
Wetherell, M. (2012) Affect and Emotion: A New Social Science Understanding. London: Sage.
Seminar 4:
Berlant, L. (2011) Cruel Optimism. Durham and London: Duke University Press.
Isin, E. (2004). The Neurotic Citizen. Citizenship Studies, 8, 217–235.
Walsh, J. (2014) Narcissism and Its Discontents. London: Palgrave.
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