REPRESENTING the UN-REPRESENTABLE - Call for Papers

This is a call for papers for the first symposium for Psychoanalysis in Our Time, a new 3 year trans-disciplinary research cycle at the  NSU www.nsuweb.net. It is an international research initiative funded by the Nordic Council of Ministers.

 Psychoanalysis in Our Time aims at creating a space for a dialogue between clinicians, academics and practitioners of psychoanalysis as well as scholars of other fields , including film, post-colonial studies, and literature with the aim of investigating and elaborating ways psychoanalytic thinking can assist in understanding  events and developments of our times  Our ambition is to be rigorous and outrageous, scholarly and radical.

The first session is entitled Representing the Un-Representable and will be taking place in Copenhagen between 14th-16th March 2014. This will be followed by a summer session in Iceland  between  24^th July-30^th August -details tbC.

For the first symposium in Copenhagen we will have the pleasure of welcoming Dany Nobus as the keynote speaker.  He is a Professor of Psychology and the Vice Chancellor at Brunel University, UK; an eminent scholar, and psychotherapist, author of Knowing Nothing, Staying Stupid (2005).

Please send a 300 word abstract as well as a biographical paragraph, including your institutional affiliations to the email address above or my institutional email [log in to unmask] or to Anna Ioannou, a psychoanalytical psychotherapist on  [log in to unmask] or Dr Rene Rasmussen at the University of Copenhagen on [log in to unmask].

The deadline for  submission  is 22^nd November 2013. The registration fee is £145 (£75 for  full time students -  proof depended ) to include two meals with wine! There will be an additional accommodation and/or travel subsidy.

 Further Details

Trauma, , and other ‘unsayable’ can resist representation and ‘symbolization’, both in the clinic and outside. Instead these unconscious, unrepresented  memories or traces of them can make themselves known on the individual level via  symptomatology creativity, dreams and religiosity and,  and  socially via  rituals, eruptions or acts of violence; Lacan says “Truth has a structure of Fiction’ (Lacan 1956); and Bion “The only point of importance in any (psychoanalytic) session is the unknown” (Bion, 1967). On a more contemporary note Anna Potamianou speaks of traumatic routes that bypass representation and lead to eruptions in mental functioning often resulting to violent acts towards the self and others(Anna Potamianou,2011).

Post-1968 applied psychoanalytic thinking was significantly influenced by structuralism. In film-theory it featured highly abstract interrogations of the relationship between the spectator and the screen, focusing on apparatus, identification and the gaze. It produced important and lasting work (Baudry, Metz, Mulvey) but, as a mode of interrogation, it has now almost been abandoned in cultural studies, being replaced by seemingly more relevant analytical tools such as, cognitive psychology and recently neuroscience. Further, in some circles at least psychoanalysis is associated with patriarchal thinking and conservative politics.

 And yet, psychoanalysis can also be seen as a radical philosophy, which privileges a subjective bodily experience, dislodges tradition and acknowledges the unknowable.  

The work of this research group will be to explore different modes of applying psychoanalysis to embodied encounters in culture and in the clinic.

 Dr Agnieszka Piotrowska

Senior Lecturer, Media Arts