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Access: Please note this event is taking place upstairs. Unfortunately, the Museum does not currently have wheelchair access.
The symposium will be followed by a drinks reception. All registrants are welcome.
A symposium and book launch dedicated to the volume Ferenczi Dialogues: On Trauma and Catastrophe (Leuven University Press, 2023), by Raluca Soreanu, Jakob Staberg, and Jenny Willner. To mark Sándor Ferenczi’s 150th birthday, on July 7 the three authors will be in conversation with cultural theorists, psychoanalysts and the audience on Ferenczi’s contemporary relevance for psychoanalysis and social theory. We will celebrate Ferenczi’s birthday, while thinking through his enduring voice. This event will also mark the acquisition of the Sandor Ferenczi’s Archives at the Freud Museum.
With the participation and commentaries by: Lisa Baraitser, Antal Bókay, Ana Minozzo and Ana Tomcic.
Click here to view speakers’ biographies.
Ferenczi Dialogues: On Trauma and Catastrophe presents the contribution of Sándor Ferenczi to a psychoanalytic theory of trauma and discusses the philosophical, political and clinical implications of Ferenczi’s thinking. Ferenczi’s work pluralises the notion of catastrophe, as being both destructive and a turning point. Ferenczi Dialogues addresses Ferenczi’s work in terms of thinking in times of crises, by considering contemporary situations in constellation with various scenes from the past: the outbreak of the First World War, the crisis of psychoanalysis as an institution, the crisis-ridden relation between Ferenczi and Freud, the rise of Fascism and National Socialism, and the impending exile of the founding members of the psychoanalytic movement. Against this backdrop, the authors discuss insurgent insights in Ferenczi’s theory and situate his legacy within a broad interdisciplinary landscape. Ultimately, the Ferenczi that we encounter in these pages is a Ferenczi of our times, ridden with questions about how to encounter the Other in an ethical manner.
In the book, the authors are in dialogue with one another, within three sets of triangular exchanges around the idea of catastrophe. Each set combines different disciplinary angles and methods: clinical psychoanalysis, history of science, literary theory, and philosophy. The first part explores the complex relation between Ferenczi and Freud, departing from a scene of missed encounter. It develops a Deleuzian reflection of the theoretical positions of Ferenczi and Freud, as it crystallised in the transference that developed between them. The second part presents a new reading of Thalassa. By analysing Ferenczi’s popular scientific sources it challenges the notion that Ferenczian ‘bioanalysis’ sought for a biological foundation for psychoanalysis: In a historical moment of danger, Thalassa intervenes in the ideologically charged debates over evolutionist thought. The third part examines Ferenczi’s ‘metapsychology of fragmented psyches’. For Ferenczi the catastrophe is not a single, unitary event, but a ‘scene’, where several elements hold together and interact. Proposing a phenomenological reading of the creativity of psychic fragments, the book discusses ten distinct ‘moments’ of the scene of trauma.
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