In the thick of culture: systemic and psychoanalytic ideas (original) (raw)
Related papers
Culture and Psychoanalysis: A Personal Journey*
Oxford University Press eBooks, 2008
Starting with a reflection on the experience of his own analysis, conducted in German by a German analyst, the author explores the problems of psychoanalytic work carried out in a cross-cultural context. First, the Hindu world-view and its three major elements, moksha, dharma, and karma, are explained. The cultural belief in a person's inner limitations is contrasted with the Western mind-set of individual achievement. The high value that Hindu society places on connection as opposed to separation and how this affects notions of gender and the sense of one's body is discussed. The article then returns to the author's experiences in analysis and his conclusions about the nature of cultural transference and counter-transference and the optimal approach toward psychoanalysis with regard to differing cultural backgrounds.
Psychoanalysis and the Unrepresentable: from Culture to the Clinic
2016
Psychoanalysis and the Unrepresentable opens a space for meaningful debate about translating psychoanalytic concepts from the work of clinicians to that of academics and back again. Focusing on the idea of the unrepresentable, this collection of essays by psychoanalysts, psychotherapists, counsellors, artists and film and literary scholars attempts to think through those things that are impossible to be thought through completely. Offering a unique insight into areas like trauma studies, where it is difficult – if not impossible – to express one’s feelings, the collection draws from psychoanalysis in its broadest sense and acts as a gesture against the fixed and the frozen. Psychoanalysis and the Unrepresentable is presented in six parts: Approaching Trauma, Sense and Gesture, Impossible Poetics, Without Words, Wounds and Suture and Auto/Fiction. The chapters therein address topics including touch and speech, adoption, the other and grief, and examine films including Gus Van Sant’s Milk and Michael Haneke’s Amour. As a whole, the book brings to the fore those things which are difficult to speak about, but which must be spoken about. The discussion in this book will be key reading for psychoanalysts, including those in training, psychotherapists and psychotherapeutically-engaged scholars, academics and students of culture studies, psychosocial studies, applied philosophy and film studies, filmmakers and artists. “This anthology sets out to 'do the impossible' in interrogating the paradoxes of unrepresentable and unspeakable experience. Drawing together an impressive array of writers from diverse fields including those of clinical practice, film and literary studies, post-colonial theory and cultural analysis, it weaves a complex matrix of ideas grounded in the work of psychoanalytic thinkers as diverse as Freud, Lacan, Bion, Malabou, Winnicott and Meltzer. The essays are lively and compelling, offering new perspectives on themes such as trauma and embodiment, silence and invisibility in the digital age of media, the psychodynamics of touch, voice, gesture, love, grief, adoption, and anxiety. A wide range of textual material embracing literature, cinema, poetry, language, meta psychology and metaphysics, provides the basis for philosophical and psychological commentary that is often astute, and the daring inclusion of creative work premised on personal experience acts as an emotional coup de foudre. Piotrowska and Tyrer have curated a cracking compendium, one that seduces and challenges in equal measure, and one that will surely become essential reading for anyone interested in the riches of psychoanalytic enquiry.” (Caroline Bainbridge, Professor of Culture and Psychoanalysis, University of Roehampton, UK) “This is an important collection that speaks to contemporary events with compassion and poignancy. Piotrowska and Tyrer’s Psychoanalysis and the Unrepresentable: From culture to the clinic is simultaneously wound and suture. It both opens and seeks to comprehend the cultural fault lines that exist around trauma, abuse, race, image and language itself. These diverse, and at times provocative essays, allow for an outpouring of the unconscious and the experience of pain and anxiety. It is the inability to speak with the inability to be silent that suffuses this radical collection and yet it is these same tensions in this book that serve to heal the cultural body.” (Luke Hockley, Professor of Media Analysis, University of Bedfordshire, UK and author of Somatic Cinema [2014])
Psychoanalytic Methods and Critical Cultural Studies (pre-print)
Oxford Resource Encyclopedia, 2019
Within Communication Studies, critical and cultural scholars will likely encounter psychoanalytic methods by way of Rhetoric scholarship, which has made plentiful and recurring use of Freudian and Lacanian concepts. This entry offers a survey of psychoanalytic methods ‘before’ and ‘after’ the linguistic turn, juxtaposing key concepts with rhetorical scholarship that employs it. Psychoanalytic theory is foundationally the study of the unconscious. Before the linguistic turn, the Freudian theory of the unconscious informed Kenneth Burke’s theory of identification developed in A Rhetoric of Motives and numerous Jungian analyses of cinematic texts. In the linguistic turn’s aftermath, the psychoanalytic theory of Jacques Lacan contributed understandings of speech, identification, and rhetoric that transformed Freud’s original formulations. These contributions, captured in Lacan’s four fundamental concepts of psychoanalysis, registers of the unconscious, and “Seminar on ‘The Purloined Letter’,” illustrate a variety of ways that critical and cultural scholars have enlisted psychoanalysis to describe instances of public address, social movements, political and legal discourse, and cinema/film. The unique feature of Lacan’s approach is that the unconscious is structured like a language, which means that the unconscious is received as a speech act. Moreover, contrary to the view that the subject uses the signifier, Lacan maintains that the signifier exercises an organizing role over the subject and its desire. Conceived within the history, theory, and practice of Rhetoric, psychoanalytic theory offers conceptually rich insights tethered to the concepts of the unconscious, the signifier, and the drive (among others) that are enabling to the aims of critical and cultural studies.
Psychoanalysis, Culture & Society
This article discusses the development of a psycho-cultural approach that brings together object relations psychoanalysis and cultural studies to explore the psychodynamics of culture, politics and society. While foregrounding the work of Donald Winnicott and other psychoanalysts influenced by his ideas, I contextualise that approach by tracing my own relationship to the study of psychoanalysis and culture since I was a Cultural Studies student in the 1980s and 1990s and also my engagement with the psychoanalytic scene that existed in London at that time. I have since applied a psycho-cultural lens to the study of masculinity and emotion in cinema and more recently to the study of emotion and political culture in Europe and the US. The article provides an example of that work by discussing the populist appeal of Donald Trump in the US and Nigel Farage in the UK, where the contradictory dynamics of attachment, risk and illusion are present when communicating with their supporters and the general public.
Explorations in Psychoanalytic Ethnography
Social Analysis, 2006
in the context of psychoanalytic engagements with individuals and groups. 5 Being familiar with this plenitude of the productions of the human unconscious and its correlative existential conditions, I am always struck by the myopia of so many would-be critical pronouncements about the field of psychoanalytic evidence, which commonly draw on Freud's paradigmatic case studies. These critics assume that on that basis one can argue about the psychoanalytic field as a historical and present-day dynamic totality and, still worse, about the scope and nature of psychoanalytic experience, the method of its inquiry, its claims about itself and its therapeutic effects and validity, and, most vitally, its object-the human psyche and mind. Such critiques are legion, and it would require a separate work to deal with them. 6 This is not my intention. It will suffice to point out that these 'postmodern/deconstructionist discourses' have to be comprehended in their appropriate psycho-cultural context, that is, the current Western 'megapolitan' 7 civilization and its temporal (epochal) cum geopolitical threshold that dictates the life of humanity as a whole-by and large, without reciprocity. By this I mean that the appetites and desires of inhabitants of, say,
One of the most original and sometimes neglected contributions of Freud's late mental topography was the resulting transcendence of the old debates on man as 'by nature social' or as 'by nature antisocial' and the casting of a new and uniquely illuminating light on the relationship between the individual and his social environment. By splitting the mental apparatus into three interacting but distinct mental agencies, Freud achieved more than a clear articulation of mental dynamics—he developed a complex and compelling view of the individual as both internalizing and resisting culture, and a view of society as both part of the individual and as an externality confronting him as an alien force. For what else does each of the three protagonists of the mental apparatus represent if not a distinct facet of the individual's ambivalent relationship to his social environment? The id, with its blind defiance of all external considerations, stands in direct opposition to cultural requirements; these requirements are nonetheless internalized in the superego, with its slavish and uncritical devotion to external law; and the ego, with its compulsive urge towards mastery and control of externality, stands for yet a different facet of the same relationship between individual and society. Far from abstracting the individual from his social milieu and concentrating on mental dynamics, it seems to me that Freud's theory is in its very essence social, addressing not only the issue of how individuals cope with the social forces which constantly act on them but also how culture tolerates the unruly instinctual endowments of the individuals, forever taming them, modifying them and redirecting them in furtherance of social aims. Freud's towering intellectual achievement in this respect is the substantiation of the proposition that all civilization has been based on two indispensable pillars: first, the systematic frustration, manipulation and suppression of human desires, and, second, on the provision of an endless string of emasculated substitute gratifications, ideals and illusions. As a result each individual suffers from a variety of discontents and illusions, which can be regarded as the main costs of civilization to the individual. Locked in a vicious circle, discontents and illusions decide the human predicament: the illusions deepen the discontents for which they ostensibly offer consolations. This proposition not only places the clinical concept of neurosis at the heart of the relationship between individual and society, but also places Freud in the middle of two century-old debates—the debate concerning the nature of man as a social animal, and the debate on the causes of human suffering and the preconditions for eventual redemption. The first purpose of this paper is to demonstrate that far from centring on the individual, Freud's thought is in its essence social and that it represents one of the most advanced positions in our understanding of civilization, its illusions and discontents. I will then examine whether Freud's discussions of culture reflect the specific conditions of his historical epoch and of his cultural milieu or whether they apply equally to all cultures. In particular, I will argue that while different cultures generate their own unique medley of discontents and illusions, these result from certain constraints and processes common to all cultures. Finally, I will suggest that although the demands of the technocratic consumer society may have shifted away from those studied by Freud, our culture is free of neither discontents nor illusions—and that the mode of bringing them to light and subjecting them to criticism remains the same. ————————————— (Ms.