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A TRAUMA MONTAGE, and other video work by Ian Magor

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Today, we present the first in a series of entries showcasing member profiles and psychoanalytic research projects at CHASE institutions. 

We feature the work of Ian Magor, a PhD student at Birkbeck. Magor’s research examines the pooling of expertise between American psychiatrists, filmmakers and the military during the Second World War and its influence on Cold War concepts of brainwashing and thought control. Ian recently completed an MA at Birkbeck in Psychoanalysis, History and Culture, during which he began to make work on video. His work A TRAUMA MONTAGE, (the first video embedded in the full length post below), was recently selected as one of the best video essays of 2015 by online film critics.

If you are a researcher (postgraduate or faculty) working on psychoanalysis in a CHASE institution and would like to join the network and publish your profile at this website, please contact us on repsychoanalysis@gmail.com. Thank you.

 

A TRAUMA MONTAGE

By Ian Magor (Birkbeck, University of London)
The research I am carrying out for my PhD project is focused particularly on the enthusiasm of the post WWII American psychiatric profession to shift the cause of the country’s extensive psychoneurotic war casualties away from the battleground and into the home. Such a debate highlights how overwhelmingly trauma is associated with war and its associated conditions of shellshock, combat exhaustion and PTSD. I wanted to think about what we might call everyday trauma, the kind that takes us by surprise through an unexpected trigger. A flock of birds, a shake of the head, a wave on a rock.  Continue reading →

Black Psychoanalysts Speak

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Black Psychoanalysts Speak (Basio Winigrad, 2014, PEP Video Grants 2014): a fascinating online film, exploring the history, theory and practice of psychoanalysis through the experience of black analysts:

In the field of psychoanalysis, it’s been minimized how profound the trauma of racism actually is.
–Anton Hart

The issue of race so prompts excessive anxiety that it blocks off our capacity to think. …. The mind, to me, has a social context to it. It’s always social. It’s always relational. …. Women begin to challenge a lot of the sexist theoretical constructs and analyze psychoanalysis. I think that’s what other folks  can do as well. People of color can show psychoanalysis its inherent racist structure.
–Kirkland Vaughans

Yet our psychoanalytic institutes have largely turned away from the big picture, the ills and inequalities of our cultures, and instead have focused on training and treating the relatively privileged. People whose problems can be narrowly conceptualized as stemming from their family relationships. People who seem, at least for a time, to be relatively immune to the traumas of history and cultural conflict. …. Psychoanalysis was for very long, and I think correctly seen, as patriarchal. And that’s really changed enormously. The issue of gender and sexuality is central to psychoanalytic curriculum. Whereas the issue of race, class, ethnicity is not
–Michael Moskowitz

Freud understood that poverty and racism can profoundly affect a person’s well being. And he said, I never expected to go so far because of the poverty and conditions of my youth.
–Dorothy E. Holmes

I point out to my white liberal friends that never have they ever made a white referral to me. It’s always black folks. I refer all kinds of folks to them all the time. Part of it is, I think, racism. And part of it is also economics. Because as I said, if that person’s got good insurance, they could come from the Saharan Desert. They’re going to keep that person. This needs to be interrogated. This needs to be looked at. And that has not happened in psychoanalysis.
–C. Jama Adams

The video is online at http://www.pep-web.org/document.php?id=pepgrantvs.001.0001a and https://vimeo.com/65901234

Remote psychoanalysis?

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‘…psychoanalysis would not have been what it was (any more than so many other things) if E-mail, for example, had existed. And in the future it will no longer be what Freud and so many psychoanalysts have anticipated, from the moment E-mail, for example, became possible.’
— Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression (1995)

‘When can a screen relation substitute for the experience of being bodies together? When can it not?’
— Tod Essig, Foreword to Gillian Isaacs Russell, Screen Relations: The Limits of Computer-Mediated Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy (2015)

Can you ‘do psychoanalysis’ by telephone, Skype, email? As Russell points out in her recent Screen Relations, the questions – fuelled by what she describes as ‘enchantment with technology, fear of professional obsolescence, and economic anxiety’ – are now urgent for the theory and practice of psychoanalysis. Questions of environment, contact, silence, connection, reliability, presence, access, embodiment, equality and diversity, professional survival … the list could go on.  Continue reading →