The Buffalo Symposium on Literature Psychoanalysis (May 1992) (original) (raw)
The Price of Admission: On The Predicament of Psychoanalysis and Literature (Keynote Address)
This paper describes why a psychoanalytic approach to literature often seems, to those working from within literature, to overlook or fail to appreciate what is inimitable and irreplaceable about literature. The paper does this by identifying an underlying rationale within the field of psychoanalytic literary criticism that governs how psychoanalysis is brought to bear on literature. This rationale detracts from what can be expressed about psychoanalysis in psychoanalytic literary criticism, and restrains literature within formulations that make it impossible to preserve what is most vital and irreducible about literature. How the Field of Psychoanalytic Literary Criticism Defines Itself Underlying the field of psychoanalytic literary criticism is, I find, a fairly consistent logic, one that must be confronted if the field of psychoanalytic literary criticism is to understand the rationale that determines its relationship to literature. This logic motivates even those works of analytic criticism that have attempted to move away from the more pathological, allegorical readings of literature that were common between sixty and ninety years ago.
Press for the Habilitation of Psychoanalysis
Using Lacanian Clinical Technique, an introduction, 2002
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Articulating Psychoanalysis and Psychosocial Studies: Limitations and Possibilities
Psychoanalysis, Culture & Society, 2008
Of the limitations and possibilities raised by Frosh and Baraitser's discussion of psychoanalysis and psychosocial studies, three themes are particularly deserving of further attention. The first concerns the epistemological and ethical break that divides psychoanalysis' clinical praxis from its role as a means of qualitative or interview methodology. A second deals with the status of psychoanalytic discourse as a touchstone of authority, as a 'master's discourse'. Debating such problems opens up two possible routes of methodological enquiry: the potential of using psychoanalysis, following Parker (2008), as a means of subverting effects of mastery, individuality and truth, and the idea of focusing on libidinal economy rather than on individual subjects when it comes to combining textual and psychoanalytic forms of analysis. The paper closes by discussing the notion of a trans-individual unconscious, proposing that psychoanalysis and psychosocial studies might find some common ground with reference to the Lacanian idea of the unconscious as the subjective locus of the Other.
The Outrageous Discourse of Psychoanalysis
In the following essay I’m going to take a radical position concerning the tendency to eliminate psychoanalysis from the European Academic field and the failure of psychoanalysts and relational therapists to defend psychoanalysis from such aggression. My question is why in Italy—just to make a local example, which I am involved in—different kinds of psychoanalytical traditions are not able to defend themselves from this attack while in France, for another example, all the different branches of relational therapies have been able to unite in making a common effort to take a position for psychoanalysis. One of the main problems, in my opinion, concerns the constitutive marginality of psychoanalysis in relation to Academic Institutions. In my way of writing, I will use psychoanalysis, with “P” in capital character, when referred to Academia, and psychoanalysis, with no capital character, when referred to clinical practice. Keywords Psychoanalysis, Academy, Transmission, Subject, Relationship, Epistemology, Ontology
British Journal of Psychotherapy, 2014
Karnac, London, 2012; 448 pp; £29.99 paperback This is a remarkable collection of essays, each closely argued and quietly sceptical of orthodoxies. It aims to be a 'staging post' (p. xiv) in the development of Independent thinking and technique, alongside Gregorio Kohon's The British School of Psychoanalysis: The Independent Tradition (1986) and Eric Rayner's The Independent Mind in British Psychoanalysis (1991). A sense of history and the importance of history taking indeed characterizes the Independents' approach. In a detailed and masterly opening chapter, John Keene traces the multiple strands of contemporary Independent thinking to a common source: Freud's over-estimation of the capacity of average maternal care. For Ferenczi and the Hungarians, this could not be taken for granted. Their observation that the infant is the dynamic product of an interrelationship opened the way from one-to two-person psychology; mother and baby, analyst and patient, like conscious and unconscious, internal and external, are in constant interaction. In a later chapter, 'The Inter-Subjective Matrix', Joan Raphael-Leff brings this line of thought to a new 'staging post': long overdue acknowledgement that the mother is a fully experiencing subject in her own right effects a further paradigm shift. Both parties in the relationship change, baby and mother, patient and analyst; and there are as many models for inter-subjective relating as there are subjectivities. Theorizing, Keene emphasizes, always takes its emotional colouring from the social and political context: in Freud's case, a late 19th century idealization of motherhood; in the case of the Controversial Discussions in the 1940s, a struggle for orthodoxy and succession following Freud's death which, as Keene writes, led to examples of institutional pathological thinking 'as convincing as one could wish for'. Notable among these was (and is) the polarization 'tough, challenging, superegoish, "pure" psychoanalysis', deriving its authority from the Freud of the life and death drives, versus 'tender, excusing, cosy psychoanalytic psychotherapy based on environmental factors' (p. 34). Keene carefully charts the points of theoretical divergence between Kleinians and the emerging 'Middle Group', especially around assumptions about mothers and babies, noting significant areas of overlap too, between Klein and Fairbairn, for instance, over the nature of aggression: innate or/and reactive? As he suggests (p. 20), the question of whether Independent objectrelations theory is consistent with the Freudian account of the instincts and drives is still open. Is it, the reader might ask, more than a conceptual sleight of hand to regard libido as object-rather than purely pleasure-seeking, as Fairbairn did, or might we need to learn from group analysis and posit a fourth, social, agency, a 'nos' to supplement ego, id and superego, as another Hungarian, Tom Ormay (2012), has recently done?
An Intervention on Psychoanalysis and Its Movement
Buffalo to give a seminar entitled "Writing, the Pass, and the School: Psychoanalysis and the Task of Transmission." As the title of their collective presentation suggests, these three psychoanalysts were invited and agreed to speak, not only as members of a research group, nor even as psychoanalysts, but also as key actors in a more recent initiative: -the École Freudienne de Québec (EFQ). Whereas discussions of psychoanalysis tend to oscillate between theory and practice, the existence of this school cannot be understood in terms of either of these categories. Apollon, Bergeron and Cantin hasten to specify that the EFQ is the school of GIFRIC-one of the clinico-cultural interventions evoked in the name that this group has given itself. The EFQ is indeed an ongoing intervention in the sense that, although its stakes and its horizon might have been carefully calculated based on previous research and experience, it is a project that a certain number of people undertook at a certain time in a certain place without being able to foresee its outcome. It constitutes a rupture within the lives of its members and its collaborators, and perhaps within North American society, that has yet to be theoretically mastered. Indeed, the structure and activities of the school are designed to maintain this rupture and thereby to provoke an experience that is always "ahead" of any theoretical formalization. Rather than presenting a theory of "writing, the pass, and the school," our guests, as participants in the ongoing experience of the school, came to bear witness to the force of this rupture. As witnesses who remain immersed in the experience of which they speak, they brought this rupture with them "from Québec" into the space of the university. the university at buffalo steven miller an intervention on psychoanalysis and its movement
British Journal of Psychotherapy, 1997
This paper examines the contradiction between the advances of psychoanalysis over the near century since Freud invented it, and its apparent divergence from the procedures of the other sciences. It argues that developments in the sociology and history of science since the 1960s enable the different dimensions of scientific activity to be more objectively identified. The work of Bruno Latour is discussed, focusing on his account of the laboratory as the key site of scientific discovery, and leading to a comparison between the laboratory and the psychoanalytic consulting room. However, significant differences between laboratory-based science and psychoanalysis are also pointed out. The most important of these is the degree to which the control of the outside world routinely sought by normal sciences is made impossible and undesirable for psychoanalysis by its distinctive commitment to the autonomy of its human subjects. This article argues that psychoanalysis has developed since its`revolutionary' invention in the form of a`normal science' (Kuhn 1962). It argues that, through the routinized procedures of its clinical consulting room, psychoanalysis has been fertile in developing new theories and techniques. This model of how psychoanalysis works, grounded in the sociology of science, is illustrated with examples of some key discoveries within the British psychoanalytical tradition. The linked article which follows, by Susan Reid, offers examples of some contemporary new developments in the psychoanalytic understanding of autism. These ideas, like the earlier examples given, are based on the evidence of the clinical consulting room, but also on another setting, infant observation, which is proposed as an additional site for empirical psychoanalytic study. There is a disjunction between the remarkable success of psychoanalysis as an intellectual and professional practice, since its invention by Freud at the end of the nineteenth century, and its lack of legitimation by the conventional canons of scientific method. How can a form of investigation and clinical practice which is, according to its critics, so deeply flawed have not only survived, but grown to assume the appearance of a mature scientific inquiry? Has this been merely a giant deception practised on a gullible and needy public? (The recurrent attacks on Freud's intellectual honesty, e.g. Crews et al. (1995) , display this suspicion.) Or is it, as Ernest Gellner (1985) has suggested, an instance of the attraction of non-rational forms of thinking in a world being transformed by`modernizing' forces-not a form of science but part of a reaction
FROM THE TEXT-AS-SYMPTOM TO THE CRITIC-AS-ANALYSAND: NEW APPROACHES IN PSYCHOANALYTIC CRITICISM
2013
From the critic’s analysis of the author to the text’s analysis of the critic and from thepsychoanalysis of literature to the literature of psychoanalysis, what this paper seeks to offer is a dynamic perspective on the ways in which psychoanalytic criticism expanded and developed novel ways of approaching the literary text. It looks to show how the psychoanalytic reading of literary texts has been perpetually repositioning and reconsidering itself, how the roles between the object and the subject of analysis have been reversed and how the function of interpretation has shifted from a tool of diagnosis to a complex relation between text and interpreter. The main changes in the field are explored in light of three key themes: the perspective on the unconscious in literary study, the roles of the instances involved in the analytical/critical praxis and the relation between literature and psychoanalysis. After reviewing the previous models of critical analysis and their shortcomings, the focus is then turned towards some of the newer developments in the field. The examples from various types of critical readings serve to illustrate, not only the openness of this interdisciplinary approach, but also the plurality which characterizes it.
Necessary violence, necessary pleasure: The common ground of literature and psychoanalysis
The International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 2020
The nature of the intersection between literature and psychoanalysis has been variously theorized since Freud first acknowledged his debt to the “poets and philosophers”. I propose that one way we might conceptualize the shared work of poetry and psychoanalysis is as the working-through of the founding violence of our initiation into language, a working-through sustained by a bonus of pleasure. A detailed reading of “In the village” by the American poet Elizabeth Bishop suggests that she and Piera Aulagnier may be read as parallel theorists of this necessity for a bonus of representational pleasure. Aulagnier’s concept of the pictogram, a primal psychic representation recording the affect present at the moment of the first encounter between mother and infant, places reciprocal pleasure at the origins of the infant’s capacity to invest in the activity of representing. Bishop’s text stages an initial trauma, a maternal scream, damaging her child’s linguistic functioning. It then chart...