Teaching Psychoanalysis: What can sixth formers and undergraduates make of Freud, Jung and co?

Annual Conference at the Centre for Psychoanalytic Studies, University of Essex

Date/Time: 13 February 2016, 09:30
Venue: Essex Business School, Colchester Campus

 

From its beginnings psychoanalysis has had much to say about the lives of young people. But as a profession it has been associated with mature insight, and in the academy psychoanalysis has been a postgraduate subject. So what does it mean to teach psychoanalysis to young people, rather than applying it to them? Tied to the launch of our new BAs in Psychoanalytic Studies and in Therapeutic Care, we bring together academics, sixth-form teachers, psychoanalysts and psychotherapists to debate teaching Freud, Jung, Klein or Lacan to younger people: how do we do it, what are the challenges, and what changes does this bring. 

Themes discussed will include psychoanalysis in schools, in the street, in the media; experiments in pedagogy; explaining psychoanalytic and Jungian ideas through film and literature; and psychoanalysis in the neoliberal university.

Speakers include:  Dr Aaron Balick (Essex), Jackie Chitty (The Colne Secondary School), Hannah Curtis (essex/BPF), Dr Chris Nicholson (Essex), Professor Michael Rustin (UEL), Dr Nick Stratton, Professor Candida Yates (Bournemouth), Ivan Ward, Stefan Marianski, Emilia Raczkiwska (The Freud Museum).

Booking can be made online here.

This event is open to the general public.

Tickets
Cost: £75 for the day (£40 students/unwaged).

http://www.essex.ac.uk/cps/

A TRAUMA MONTAGE, and other video work by Ian Magor

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

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

The Maudsley Lectures and Seminars in Psychoanalysis

A new term of lectures and seminars in contemporary psychoanalysis begins January 11th, 2016 at the ORTUS learning and events centre in Camberwell, South London. The series, run by the Institute of Psychoanalysis and Maudsley Learning, features some internationally renowned psychoanalysts, who are at the forefront of psychoanalytic thinking today.  Continue reading