Archived: PAD Speaker Programme (2013/14)
Thurs 24th Oct, 16.30-18.00 in room R1.03 (Ramphal Building, Library Road)
Network Launch
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Thurs 14th Nov, 17.00-18.30 room R0.14 (Ramphal Buidling)
Dorothee Bonnigal-Katz, 'The Place of Psychosis in Freudian Metapsychology and
Technique: Topographical and Clinical Reflections'
Psychosis occupies a complex and paradoxical place in the Freudian corpus. While Freud explicitly
acknowledges that the psychoanalytic technique he develops is not an effective tool in the area of
psychosis, he also refers to psychosis in key places in his metapsychology. This presentation offers
to explore the pivotal relevance of psychosis in Freudian metapsychology, while accounting for its
irrelevance in terms of Freudian technique. More specifically and in the light of concrete clinical
illustrations, this discussion will strive to elucidate the place of psychosis within Freud’s first and
second topography, as well as its relation to trauma and the somatic sphere.
Dorothée Bonnigal-Katz is a psychoanalyst working in private practice in London and Leamington
Spa and a member of the Site for Contemporary Psychoanalysis. Since January 2013, she has
been leading a project at Islington Mind, with a view to develop access to long-term talk therapy
for individuals suffering from psychosis. She is also a translator specialised in psychoanalytic
theory and continental philosophy.
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Thurs 28th Nov, 17.00-18.30 in room R0.14 (Ramphal Buidling, Library Road)
Susannah Wilson (University of Warwick), 'The Medical Iconography of Anorexia
Nervosa: Psychoanalytical Approaches to Early Case Studies in England and France'
Anorexia nervosa was first named as a disease in the late nineteenth century, simultaneously in
France and England. During the period 1873-1914, published papers in both countries were
commonly illustrated with clinical portraits, usually in the optimistic hope of demonstrating the
efficacy of treatment. In the twentieth century, the fashion for photographing anorectics waned
along with the credibility of the study of physiognomy in the diagnosis of mental disorders, and as
awareness of the intractability of the disease grew. Whilst these early case studies are well known
to historians, little critical attention has been paid to the function of medical iconography. Focusing
on thirteen clinical portraits, this paper argues that the visibility of anorexia generates a
profoundly ambivalent response to the anorexic body, akin to the Freudian ‘uncanny’. Whilst it
fascinates us, it also disrupts gender norms, institutional hierarchies and sacred social rituals.
Central to this ambivalent response is the concept of the viewer’s ‘gaze’ and the question of
control. Drawing on Gilman’s proposition that ‘picturing’ disease provides a means of distancing
ourselves from our own frailty, this paper suggests that the anorexic body—far from being
controlled by either patient or doctor—emerges as an uncontrollable and yet highly meaningful
entity.
Susannah Wilson is based in the Department of French Studies, University of Warwick. Further
information about Susannah's research can be found here.
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Thurs 23rd Jan, 17.00-18.30 in room R0.14 (Ramphal Buidling, Library Road)
John
Fletcher
(University
of
Warwick),
Freud
and
the
Scene
of
Trauma
John Fletcher will be talking to us about his recent book Freud and the Scene of Trauma
(Fordham University Press, 2013)
Please email femke.molekamp@warwick.ac.uk for a short extract of this book to read in
advance
Abstract:
This is a study of the central role of trauma in Freud’s thought and practice. It argues that it is
Freud’s mapping of trauma as a scene, the elaboration of a scenography of trauma, that is central
to both his clinical interpretation of his patients’ symptoms and his construction of successive
theoretical models and concepts to explain the power of such scenes in his patients’ lives. This
attention to the scenic form of trauma, and its power in the determination of symptoms, presides
over Freud’s break from the neurological model of trauma he inherited from Charcot. It also helps
to explain the affinity that Freud and many since him have felt between psychoanalysis and
literature (and artistic production more generally), and the privileged role of literature at certain
turning points in the development of his thought.
In both these moments of theoretical crisis and change (1897 and 1919) Freud turns to literary
texts that exemplify a repeated pattern of traumatic scenes and that dramatize precisely a
traumatic scenography. He then submits his chosen texts to an ‘Oedipal’ reading that marginalizes
or excludes the traumatic repetition that characterizes them. Along with his study of Leonardo da
Vinci, they constitute thought experiments in an imaginary space of literature and painting. When
the chosen works of Sophocles, Shakespeare, Hoffmann and Da Vinci are read in the light of the
tension verging on conflict in Freud’s thought, between what Jean Laplanche has called a
‘Copernican’ or the other-centred model of trauma and a ‘Ptolemaic’ or self-centred model of
development, the insights of his rejected ‘traumatology’ return to challenge and disturb his
dominant developmentalist framework.
Overall the book develops the thesis of Jean Laplanche that in this shift from a traumatic to a
developmental model, along with the undoubted gains embodied in the theory of infantile
sexuality, there were crucial losses: specifically, the recognition of the role of the adult other and
the traumatic encounter with adult sexuality that is entailed in the ordinary nurture and formation
of the infantile subject. It also argues that Freud’s attention to the power of scenes – scenes of
memory, scenes of fantasy – persists, along with the recurrent surfacing, at different moments of
his thought, of key elements of the officially abandoned model of trauma.
John Fletcher is a member of the Department of English and Comparative Literary Studies at
Warwick. He has edited volumes on film melodrama, the work of Julia Kristeva and Jean
Laplanche, and has also edited and co-translated from the French Laplanche's most recent volume
Freud and the Sexual (International Psychoanalytic Books, 2011).
***
Thurs 6th March, 17.00-18.30 Room R1.03, Ramphal Building
Philip Hill, Are phobias allergies? Is there a difference between immunology and
psychoanalysis?
What might be common to immunology and psychoanalysis? Is there sufficient justification for a
research program that sets out to identify common structures in immunology and psychoanalysis?
There are parallel structures in three closely related categories: in the histories of immunology and
psychoanalysis, in the clinical techniques of immunology and psychoanalysis and in their theories.
I sketch here two aspects of one structure as it is currently theorised: allergy and phobia.
Trauma is for Lacan ‘that which resists symbolisation’ and so is an every sentence phenomenon,
not exclusively the kind of event that lawyers and accident and emergency departments are
interested in. This broad notion of trauma equates with Quine’s ‘radical indeterminancy of
translation’ and has applications in mainstream immunology in the relations between antigen
presenting cells and T cells, and between the psi and phi neurones of Freud’s Project. Allergy,
phobia (and psychosis and autoimmunity) are caused by too little trauma. ‘Trauma’ here is a
category of repression that has quantities and when metamorphosed, qualities. Freud’s theory is
that psyche is a device for metamorphosing quantity into qualities, the undifferentiated spectra of
energy into the universe of human culture and cognition. This generation of diversity includes the
production of antibodies, words and sentences by structures such as phobia and allergy.
Philip Hill is a psychoanalyst in private practice in London and a member of the Site for
Contemporary Psychoanalysis, and of the Centre for Freudian Analysis and Research. His research
interests are biology and psychoanalysis, feminine sexuality, the philosophy of science and of
mathematics and psychoanalysis.