The British Psychoanalytical Society and The Freud Museum
at the University of Westminster, LondonFreud 150th Anniversary Conference
January 27th, 28th, 29th 2006FREUD YESTERDAY
FREUD TODAYSigmund Freud shaped the twentieth century idea of what a person is; we would not recognise ourselves without him; his influence reverberates in Henry James and Virginia Woolf, Alfred Hitchcock and David Lynch, the art of the Surrealists and the lure of advertisements. Freud's stories have become our stories, his map our map, his questions our questions ... Marina Warner (introduction to 20 Maresfield Gardens, the Freud Museum guide book)
If 2005 was the year of Einstein, 2006 was a year to celebrate the impact of that other great 20th century intellectual figure, Sigmund Freud.
For Freud's 150th anniversary the British Psychoanalytical Society and the Freud Museum initiated worldwide celebrations with a major international conference held at the University of Westminster in London's Regent Street.
Freud's impact is incalculable. As W H Auden said at the time of his death, he has become a 'whole climate of opinion'. The burgeoning impact of 'talking therapies' of different kinds are a direct legacy of Freud, but his work extends beyond the confines of the 'inner world' to the world of politics, culture and society. The conference reflected that influence by bringing together psychoanalysts, historians, anthropologists, politicians, writers and others for a weekend of exploration and dialogue. As befitted Freud's global influence, the event included eminent participants from Germany, France, the USA and Britain, who together showed the continuing relevance and vibrancy of Freud's thought in the 21st century. The weekend began on Friday evening with a screening at Tate Britain of Secrets of a Soul: A psychoanalytical drama (Geheimnisse einer Seele; Germany, 1926, 57mins). A new print of the film by G W Pabst was introduced by psychoanalyst Ron Baker. We would like to thank all of the speakers and chairs who gave their time and expertise to honour Freud and support the Freud Museum. Special thanks should go to Ken Robinson, Susan Loden (chair of the conference committee) and Allie Dillon (administrator) from the archives of the British Psychoanalytical Society and Riccardo Steiner (scientific advisor), without whom this conference would not have taken place.
Conference themes and Programme
Abstracts
Speakers biographiesPlease use back button to return to this menu.
Clinical psychoanalysis
Anthropology
Feminism, Sexuality and gender
Cultural history and the history of psychoanalysis
Literature and art
Politics, power and citizenship
Programme
Saturday 28 January 2006
Opening address
Michael Molnar (Freud Museum)
Ken Robinson (Honorary Archivist, BPAS)Introductory Talk
Ilse Grubrich-Simitis (Psychoanalyst, Germany)
Freud as a writer
Riccardo Steiner (Psychoanalyst, UK) ChairClinical Psychoanalysis
André Green (Psychoanalyst, France)
Clinical psychoanalysis after Freud in FranceHarold Blum (Psychoanalyst, USA)
Reclaiming Interpretation and InsightRoger Kennedy (Psychoanalyst, UK)
What will emerge?Anne-Marie Sandler (Psychoanalyst, UK) Chair
Anthropology
Maurice Godelier (Anthropologist, France)
Freud and Anthropology : Inspiration or Pretext?Jack Goody (Anthropologist, UK)
Untitled TalkRosine Perelberg (Psychoanalyst, UK) Chair
Feminism, sexuality and gender
Juliet Mitchell (Psychoanalyst, UK)
Psychoanalysis and Feminism/Feminism and Psychoanalysis: from Sexual Difference to Gender DiversityRachel Bowlby (Professor of literature, UK)
'Generations'Felicity Dirmeik (Psychoanalyst, UK) Chair
Sunday 29 January 2006
Introductory talk
Alain de Mijolla (Psychoanalyst, France)
On some 'bad' images of Freud
Ronald Baker (Chair)
Cultural history and psychoanalysis
Peter Loewenberg (Psychoanalyst, USA)
Cultural History and PsychoanalysisPeter Burke (Historian, UK) - interlocutor
Riccardo Steiner (Psychoanalyst, UK) Chair
Literature and art
A S Byatt (Novelist, UK)
Al Alvarez (Writer and critic, UK)
Ignes Sodre (Psychoanalyst, UK) Chair
Short presentations and free discussionPolitics, power and citizenship
Paul Hoggett (Professor of politics, UK)
Politics, the Emotions and PsychoanalysisFakhry Davids (Psychoanalyst, UK) Chair
Ilse Grubrich-Simitis
On Freud as a writer
Two aspects of Sigmund Freud's fascination with language are discussed: (1) Freud observed, described, explained and interpreted throughout his career, from On Aphasia to Moses and Monotheism, verbal phenomena of all kinds. His linguistic genius is illustrated by several quotations. In fact, one could say that the study of language and speech was in the analytical process the royal road to the unconscious and to psychoanalysis. (2) How Freud worked, as the superb writer he was, is shown by projecting and commenting some of his manuscript pages. A reconstruction of the three stages of his writing process - notes, drafts and fair copies - affords a glimpse into the microcosm of his creativity.Alain de Mijolla
On some bad images of Freud
For more than a century the image of Freud was the object of criticism, insults
and calumnies. Recently a book was published in France, containig some of
the worst writings about the personality of Freud, signed by some well known
names. In this paper we will study some examples of it for the best and the worst...
CLINICAL PSYCHOANALYSIS
Roger Kennedy
What will emerge?
I look at the influence of Freud today, how psychoanalysis may survive in the current cultural atmosphere, obsessed by positivist scientific standards. I look at the anxiety about Freud's influence on us, as central as he still is in psychoanalysis today, and imagine what discontents he might find in our culture if he were alive today.I then look at a specific clinical issue - the question of what might emerge in a session, and the nature of emergent states. I use Freud's fort/da observation to try and make sense of their origin in childhood and in the parent-child relationship, leaning on some of Winnicott's ideas, as well as my own on the nature of human subjectivity.
Andre Green
Clinical psychoanalysis after Freud in France
André Green will present the current situation in France and consider the following topics:
(1) The relationship of French psychoanalysts to the work of Freud. (2) The indication for treatment in psychoanalysis and psychotherapy. The usual setting in France, with the questionable three times a week. (3) The general conception on psychoanalytic cure and its aims.Harold P. Blum, M.D.
Reclaiming Interpretation and Insight
Psychoanalysis has developed as a theory, therapy, and mode of research into mental processes, primarily involving the unconscious. Psychoanalysis was created by one individual, Sigmund Freud, who integrated findings from his monumental self-analysis, work with patients, and from an extraordinary variety of other disciplines. Currently, however, Freud is frequently depicted as dead, psychoanalysis as dying, and psychoanalysts as dinosaurs destined for extinction. Within psychoanalysis there has been a proliferation of theories and a decline in practice linked to a loss, if not a crisis of confidence and conviction. While there are serious external challenges, I will highlight a particularly significant area of challenge and controversy within the field.The psychoanalytic theory of therapy was fundamentally based on making the unconscious conscious, on making latent content manifest, on finding the hidden determinants and meanings of symptoms and symptomatic behavior. The primary agent of change was interpretation, with the goal of insight into unconscious conflict and fantasy. Now interpretation and insight are all too readily relegated to a minor role in clinical psychoanalysis compared to that of the inter-subjective, interpersonal relationship. Relational and attachment theory, actually a constellation of viewpoints, which include valuable contributions, have uncritically tended to marginalize traditional interpretation and insight. These views converge toward a major over-simplification and distortion of the analytic process, which detracts from analytic consideration of the patient's pre-treatment personality and psychopathology. The past is not considered terribly relevant, transference is co-created, and the analyst formulates a co-created narrative with the patient. In some quarters, the analyst's subjectivity is presumed to override relative neutrality and good-enough objectivity. I regard interpretation and insight as essential to and central to psychoanalysis, without disregarding or devaluing non-interpretive agents and influences. The Delphic Oracle's ancient analytic maxim "know thyself" endures through the centuries, today and tomorrow.
ANTHROPOLOGY
Maurice Godelier
Freud and Anthropology : Inspiration or Pretext?
In the first part I list a number of theoretical positions developed by Freud, the discovery of the unconscious part of the Self, the identification process necessary for the construction of the Self, and the notion of substitutive objects and processes, all these points tell a lot to an anthropologist. In the second part I show how Freud has used the ethnological texts he has read and I demonstrate that he knew in advance what he was going to conclude from his readings: the universality of the Oedipus complex and the foundation of religion, ethics, art and law from this ultimate source. At the same time I show how Freud 40 years before Levi-Strauss gave an explanation of the origin of the incest taboo as the foundation of exogamy and exchange of women. But in order to do that, Freud, against Darwin, selected the hypothesis that the prehistoric human beings were not living in a society, were not social animals, but were living in a horde dominated by a supermale, the despotic father. This hypothesis is erroneous as we know now from our knowledge of the evolution of the social primates. At the same time, I analyse the deep link between the myth of the murder of the father and the myth of the ritual devouring of his body after. Most of the anthropologists and psychoanalysts who consider this issue comment on the murder of the father but forget the theoretical importance for Freud of the cannibal ritual which took place after the murder. But without this second story Freud was unable to found religion, ethics and law as substitutive formations of the primal sacrifice.Jack Goody
Untitled Presentation
My paper deals with the way I myself came to read Freud and the way his work influenced anthropology after the Second World War. Regarding Freud, it discusses Totem and Taboo, matriliny, the incest taboo and various works on ambivalence, the unconscious and myth.
FEMINISM, SEXUALITY AND GENDER
Juliet Mitchell
Psychoanalysis and Feminism/Feminism and Psychoanalysis: from Sexual Difference to Gender Diversity
My paper will examine the extraordinarily extensive influence of psychoanalytical theory on a wide range of feminist practices and gender analyses. More controversially it will ask questions about the influence of feminism on psychoanalysis. The enquiry will be framed by a discussion of the possible antagonism between the concepts of sexual difference and gender diversity.Rachel Bowlby
'Generations'
The past generation has seen unprecedented changes in both reproductive possibilities and typical family forms: generations are not what they were. These changes seem to me to have shifted the focus of what we might want to talk about under labels like 'feminism, sexuality and gender'. They cast a different light on the nuclear theory that Freud formulated a hundred years ago, as well as on how we might look upon the typical family forms of Freud's own time, or those that appear in Sophocles' *Oedipus*.
CULTURAL HISTORY
Peter Loewenberg
Cultural History and Psychoanalysis
I shall talk about psychoanalysis in Western culture, how it is a new discipline, that has points of methodological reference with the work and thought of historians Wilhelm Dilthey, R.G. Collingwood, Marc Bloch, Jacob Burckhardt, and the modern self-reflections of Joel Williamson. I will close with an Winnicottian analysis of the functioning of a seminal modern cultural institution, the Bauhaus, Weimar, Dessau, Berlin, 1919-1933.
LITERATURE AND ART
Wide-ranging discussion between A S Byatt and Al Alvarez, with contributions from Ignes Sodre (chair) and members of the audience.
POLITICS AND POWER
Paul Hoggett
Politics, the Emotions and Psychoanalysis
For over fifty years now the discipline of Politics has been dominated by positivist and `rational actor' models, consequently the potential insights of Psychoanalysis have been treated with scorn or suspicion. But the assumptions of Political Science have become increasingly dissonant with contemporary reality. We seem to live in a fear-filled world riven by resurgent apocalyptic fantasies and marching noisily towards ecological catastrophe and yet one also characterised by remarkable acts of forgiveness, courage and generosity. People simply don't seem to act in the way in which political science tells us they should do. Journalists and politicians know this, at least implicitly. They know about the importance of image, and about the power of appeals to emotion or identity.Fortunately there are signs of change, particularly of a renewed interest in the role of emotion in politics, within which psychoanalytic thinking is playing an important role. My contribution will sketch some of the developments now occurring and will select two contrasting political issues - the role of envy in inter-group conflict and the importance of early identifications in the commitment to public service - from among many possibilities as a way of demonstrating the contribution psychoanalytic theory and practice can make to politics.
BIOGRAPHIES (PANELLISTS & CHAIRS):
Al Alvarez
Al Alvarez is a poet, novelist, literary critic, anthologist and author of many non-fiction books. His works have explored themes of human experience - such as suicide in The Savage God (1972), divorce in Life After Marriage (1982) and dreams in Night (1995) - and many other topics, including mountaineering, poker and the oil industry. His most recent books include an autobiography, Where Did It All Go Right? (1999), New & Selected Poems (2002) and The Writer's Voice (2005).Ronald Baker
Ron Baker is a Fellow of the Institute of Psychoanalysis and a Fellow of the Royal College of Psychiatrists. He is a training and supervising psychoanalyst, now retired from clinical practice except for a few hours of supervision each week. He has served on a wide range of committees of the British Psychoanalytical Society, including secretary of the Society and chairman of both the Membership and Scientific Committees. He has also held office in the IPA and the EPF. He has published papers on various clinical issues, humour, cinema, adolescence and selection of supervised cases.Harold Blum
Harold Blum is director of the Sigmund Freud Archives and formerly a vice-president of the International Psychoanalytical Association and an editor-in-chief of the Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association. He was the winner of the inaugural Mary Sigourney Prize for Psychoanalysis and of a second Sigourney award on behalf of the Freud Archives for the Freud exhibit at the Library of Congress. He is the author of Reconstructions in Psychoanalysis: Childhood Revisited and Recreated (1994) and numerous psychoanalytic papers.Rachel Bowlby
Rachel Bowlby is Northcliffe Professor of English Literature at University College London. Apart from its focus on literature, Bowlby's work has crossed between feminism, psychoanalysis, critical theory and the history of consumer culture. Her books include Just Looking: Consumer Culture in Dreiser, Gissing and Zola (1985), Still Crazy After All These Years: Women, Writing and Psychoanalysis (1992), Shopping with Freud (1993), Feminist Destinations and Further Essays on Virginia Woolf (1997) and Carried Away: The Invention of Modern Shopping (2000). She has translated books by contemporary French philosophers, most recently Jacques Derrida's Paper Machine (2005). She is completing a book entitled Freudian Mythologies.Peter Burke
Peter Burke is Emeritus Professor of Cultural History at Emmanuel College, Cambridge, and was part of the School of European Studies at the University of Sussex for sixteen years before joining Cambridge University. Much of his work has focused on the contemporary relevance of social and cultural history and he has published over twenty books, including Popular Culture in Early Modern Europe (1978), The Art of Conversation (1993), A Social History of Knowledge (2000), Eyewitnessing (2000) and What is Cultural History? (2004).A S Byatt
A S Byatt taught at the Central School of Art and Design and was Senior Lecturer in English and American Literature at University College London, before returning to full-time writing in 1983. A distinguished critic as well as a novelist, she was appointed a CBE in 1990 and made a Dame in 1999. Her novel Possession (1990) won the Booker Prize and Irish Times/Aer Lingus International Fiction Prize. Her other fiction includes Angels and Insects (1991), the quartet ending in A Whistling Woman (2002) and The Little Black Book of Stories (2004). Her critical works include Degrees of Freedom (1970), a study of the novels of Iris Murdoch, and Passions of the Mind (1991), a volume of selected essays.Fakhry Davids
Fakhry Davids is a psychoanalyst in private practice in London. He qualified as a clinical psychologist at the University of Cape Town where he was subsequently Lecturer in Psychology. He trained as an adult psychotherapist at the Tavistock Clinic and as a psychoanalyst at the Institute of Psychoanalysis in London. Until recently, he was honorary consultant psychologist at the London Clinic of Psychoanalysis. He has a long-standing special interest in the psychology of racism, on which he consults and lectures widely.Felicity Dirmeik
Felicity Dirmeik is a psychoanalyst in private practice. She was formerly a Senior Lecturer in Psychotherapy at Middlesex and UCH School of Medicine. Her interests include assessment for treatment and she was formerly a member of the Clinic Directorate at the London Clinic of Psychoanalysis.Maurice Godelier
Maurice Godelier is a noted anthropologist and director of research at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales. He is a specialist on the societies of Oceania and significant themes in his research have included the role of the idéel (mental constructs) in social relations, the distinction between the imaginary and the symbolic. He is also involved in scientific policymaking and is a member of the French National Council of Science and vice-president of the French National Co-ordination Board for the Sciences of Man and Society. His recent English language publications include Transformations of Kinship (1998) and The Enigma of the Gift (1999), an investigation on the things you sell, the things you give and the things you do not sell or give but you keep for yourselves. He has been awarded the Prize of the French Academy in 1982, the Alexander von Humboldt International Prize for Social Sciences in 1990 and the Golden Medal of the French National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS) in 2001.Jack Goody
Jack Goody is the Emeritus William Wyse Professor of Social Anthropology at St John's College, Cambridge. His research has examined the history of literacy and how writing and communication influence social and cultural change. His work has also explored the study of kinship, inheritance and succession and in recent years he has addressed, within the framework of comparative anthropology, the issue of socio-economic transformation and interaction between different cultures. He is widely published and his most recent works include Islam in Europe (2003), Capitalism and Modernity (2004) and Comparative Studies in Kinship (2004).André Green
André Green is a training analyst at the Paris Psychoanalytic Society, honorary pprofessor at Buenos Aires University and a member of the Moscow Academy of Humanities Research and the New York Academy of Sciences. He has previously been president of the Paris Psychoanalytic Society, director of the Paris Psychoanalytic Institute, vice-president of the International Psychoanalytical Association and holder of the Freud Memorial Chair at University College London. His English language publications include The Tragic Effect (1979), On Private Madness (1986), The Work of the Negative (1999), The Chains of Eros (2000) and Psychoanalysis: A Paradigm for Clinical Thinking (2005).
Ilse Grubrich-Simitis
Ilse Grubrich-Simitis is a widely published psychoanalyst and a well-known scholar and editor of Freud's works. She has long advocated a return to Freud's original texts in order to comprehend fully the power and innovative force of his theories. Her work includes Back to Freud's Texts: Making Silent Documents Speak (1996), Early Freud and Late Freud: Reading Anew Studies on Hysteria and Moses and Monotheism (1997) and Michelangelos Moses und Freuds 'Wagstück' (2004).Paul Hoggett
Paul Hoggett is Professor of Politics and director of the Centre for Psycho-Social Studies at the University of the West of England, Bristol. He is a psychoanalytic psychotherapist, a member of the Lincoln Clinic & Centre for Psychotherapy and Severnside Institute for Psychotherapy and recently retired Chair of Trustees of the Bridge Foundation for Psychotherapy and the Arts. He has a longstanding interest in the role of unconscious and affective forces in organisational and political life and is co-editor of the journal Organisational and Social Dynamics. He currently leads an ESRC-funded research project examining the way in which 'regeneration workers' negotiate the ethical dilemmas of their jobs. His books include Partisans in an Uncertain World (1992) and Emotional Life and the Politics of Welfare (2000).Roger Kennedy
Roger Kennedy is a Consultant Psychotherapist in the Family Unit at the Cassel Hospital. He is also a training & supervising analyst and president elect of the British Psychoanalytical Society. He originally trained as a physiologist, physician and child psychiatrist. Among Dr Kennedy's recent publications are Libido: Ideas in Psychoanalysis (2001), Psychoanalysis, History and Subjectivity: Now of the Past (2002) and Psychotherapists as Expert Witnesses: Families at Breaking Point (2005).Peter Loewenberg
Peter Loewenberg was trained at the University of California, Berkeley, and the Free University of Berlin. He is co-dean and chairman of the Education Committee and director of the Training School of the New Center for Psychoanalysis (NCP) in Los Angeles. He studies and teaches psychoanalysis at NCP and European history and political psychology at UCLA. The author of Decoding the Past: The Psychohistorical Approach (1983, 1985, 1996), Fantasy and Reality in History (1995) and numerous articles, he has lectured around the world and has received many honours for his work, including the 1999 Edith Sabshin Award. He maintains a clinical practice as a psychoanalyst.Alain de Mijolla
Alain de Mijolla, MD, psychiatrist, is a member of the Psychoanalytic Society of Paris and of the International Psychoanalytical Association, Consultant Member of the History of Psychoanalysis and the IPA Committee, and founder and president of the International Association for the History of Psychoanalysis. He published Pour une psychanalyse de l'alcoolisme (with S A Shentoub, 1973), Les visiteurs du moi, fantasmes d'identification (1981), Les mots de Freud (1981), Freud. Fragments d'une histoire (2003). He is co-editor (with Sophie de Mijolla-Mellor) of Psychanalyse (1996), editor of Évolution de la clinique psychanalytique (2001) and Redactor in Chief of the International Dictionary of Psychoanalysis (3 vols, 2005).Juliet Mitchell
After working in private psychoanalytic practice for twenty years, Juliet Mitchell returned to academia in 1996 and is Professor of Psychoanalysis and Gender Studies at Cambridge University where she is also a Fellow of Jesus College. She is the author of several highly influential studies of the relations between psychoanalysis, gender and culture, including Psychoanalysis and Feminism (1974), which challenged orthodox views of Freud as the enemy of feminism. Her recent books include Mad Men and Medusas: Reclaiming Hysteria and the Effects of Sibling Relations on the Human Condition (2000) and Siblings: Sex and Violence (2003).Rosine Perelberg
Rosine Jozef Perelberg is a training analyst and supervisor of the British Psychoanalytical Society. She trained in Social Anthropology at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro and gained her PhD from the London School of Economics. She is currently chair of the Curriculum Committee and a member of the Admissions Committee and Education Committee. She is Honorary Senior Lecturer in Psychoanalytic Theory at University College London and has edited a number of works including Female Experience (1997, with Joan Raphael-Leff), Psychoanalytic Understanding of Violence and Suicide (1998), Dreaming and Thinking (2000, 2003) and Freud: A Modern Reader (2005).Ken Robinson
Ken Robinson is the honorary archivist of the British Psychoanalytical Society and chair of the Freudian Study Group. He works as a psychoanalyst in private practice in Newcastle upon Tyne. He has a particular interest in the early history of psychoanalysis in Great Britain and is currently working on a book exploring the transmission of the actual technique of Freud and his co-workers into British psychoanalysis. His recent publications include an 'Introduction to Pearl King and her Work' in Time Present and Time Past: Selected Papers of Pearl King (2005) and 'Psychoanalyse in London von 1928-1929' in Sigmund Freud durch Lehrmans Linse (ed. Lynne Lehrman Weiner, 2005).Anne-Marie Sandler
Anne-Marie Sandler is an analyst in private practice and a training analyst in adult, adolescent and child analysis at the British Psychoanalytical Society. She is a former president of the British Psychoanalytical Society and the European Psychoanalytic Federation, as well as vice-president of the International Psychoanalytical Association. Until 1997, she was director of the Anna Freud Centre. She has written a number of articles, alone and with her late husband, Dr Joseph Sandler, including a book written with him entitled Internal Objects Revisited (2000).Ignes Sodre
Ignes Sodre is a training analyst at the British Psychoanalytical Society. She has taught extensively in the UK and abroad and has published several papers on psychoanalysis and on literature. She has co-written a book with A S Byatt entitled Imagining Characters: Six Conversations About Women Writers.Riccardo Steiner
Riccardo Steiner is a member and former honorary archivist of the British Psychoanalytical Society. He has written numerous articles on psychoanalysis and its history and is co-author (with Pearl King) of The Freud-Klein Controversies, 1941-1945 (1991) and author of "It is a New Kind of Diaspora": Explorations in the Sociopolitical and Cultural Context of Psychoanalysis (2000) and Tradition, Change, Creativity: Repercussions of the New Diaspora on Aspects of British Psychoanalysis (2000). He was also winner of the 2001 Sigourney Award.
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