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All registrants will receive their link to join via ZOOM. Course material will be sent 1 day before the event. The course will start at 13:30pm and end at 17:00pm on both days and includes a tea break. All attendees will also receive access to the recording, available to watch back for 3 months.
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The three thinkers we will study on this course are among the most important contemporary voices challenging traditional psychoanalytic ideas on sexuality and gender, and offering new ways of understanding the questions these key notions raise.
Judith Butler is known (and celebrated) for her groundbreaking and provocative re-thinking of the fundamental categories through which we view sexuality and gender, and for her radical critique of the notion of sexual difference. Although not a psychoanalyst, her thought is deeply engaged with Freud and Lacan, and we will review her appropriation of, and re-interpretation of psychoanalytic ideas, as well as her broader critique of the ‘heterosexual matrix’ upon which relationships in contemporary Western societies are based.
Julia Kristeva and Luce Irigaray are the most powerful thinkers to emerge from the generation of female analysts who first trained with and then became critics of Jacques Lacan.
Kristeva works within a broadly Lacanian framework, but insists that Lacan’s conception of the ‘Symbol Order’ needs to be supplemented by her own notion of the Semiotic. She demonstrates that the crucial role of the father – both in individual development and in culture – presupposes the earlier and more fundamental role of the mother. We will study her important and influential notionof the ‘Abject’, her brilliant re-interpretation of ‘Narcissism’, and her radical re-thinking of the notion of the feminine.
Irigaray, on the other hand, absolutely rejects Freud and Lacan. She argues that psychoanalysis is merely the most recent development of the Western tradition of thought which assumes that there is only one kind of human subject – the male. We will study her brilliant re-thinking of the foundations of Western philosophy from the point of view of the feminine, and explore the new kind of philosophy which emerges from her insistence that we begin our thinking from the fundamental fact of sexual difference. We will bring her ideas into dialogue with the thinking of Judith Butler, who questions the reality of sexual difference.
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Speaker:
Keith Barrett BA PhD received his first degree in philosophy from Oxford University after having spent three years working as a nursing assistant in psychiatric hospitals. It was in this practical context that Keith first encountered existentialism and psychoanalysis. He then began postgraduate studies on both Freud and Heidegger, leading finally to a PhD from the Wellcome Centre for the History of Medicine at UCL for a dissertation on ‘Freud’s Self-Analysis’. Keith has been a philosophy teacher for over 20 years, and has been delivering courses at the Freud Museum for over a decade, where he has developed a series of introductory lectures on Freud, psychoanalysis after Freud, and the overlap of philosophy and psychoanalysis.
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Tickets: £ 45
Freud Museum Members and Patrons receive 20% off the standard ticket price on all events, courses, conferences and On Demand programming.
A limited number of £20 bursary tickets will be available for those unable to pay the full amount. Please email [email protected] to apply for a bursary.