Conferences, Interviews and Videos


Interviews | Papers | Videos 


VIDEOS

The following short addresses to camera were recorded at the 2015 conference held in Rome: Psychoanalysis in the World- Crosses Between Cultures which looked at the interconnections between psychoanalysis and various cultures. The interviews are with IPA President Stefano Bolognini, Lorena Preta, Sudhir Kakar, Fakhry Davids, Lin Tao and Jalil Bennani. You can read a full report on the conference here.








INTERVIEWS


Derek Hook

Apartheid came to existence in South Africa in 1948, but the segregation laws between black and white had been effective already from the beginning of the 20th century. On February 11, 1990 Nelson Mandela was released from prison. This date is considered the end of Apartheid. On May 09, 1994 Mandela was elected the first black president of South Africa. But from 1948 to 1990 the racial conflict touched points of tremendous violence. In the past 20 years South Africa has been trying to become effectively the Rainbow Country. Psychoanalysis is developing in that country, and now South Africa has the first Psychoanalytical Study Group in Africa, inside the International Psychoanalytical Association. How is it possible for the new generations of Psychoanalysts to face the history of their country? What does it mean to be born in a place where the racial segregation was so hard ? And now, what are the consequences of all that? Derek Hook introduces very important research on the themes of Apartheid and post Apartheid from a Psychoanalytical and Psychosocial point of view.

Ashis Nandy

Ashis Nandy (born in 1937 in Bihar into a Bengali family) is a major figure of contemporary Indian critical thought. He is considered to be one of the pioneers of cultural and post-colonial studies in the Subcontinent and his prolific works have, for the most part, been published by Oxford India. His book, The Intimate Enemy. Loss and Recovery of Self under Colonialism – published in 1983 and translated into French, German and Italian –, represents a turning point in Post-Colonial studies. It builds on the idea (put forward by Octave Mannoni in 1947) of an internalization of the colonial complex by the colonized and the colonizer, and offers a subtle investigation of the dialectical movements brought about by such an interdependency.

Long-time head of the influential Centre for Studies of Developing Societies in New Delhi, Nandy is a clinical psychologist who likes to call himself a «political psychologist» and who constantly applies psychoanalysis to the unconscious dimensions of mass-culture in India and Southern Asia.




CONFERENCE PAPERS

  • 2016: Naples 
  • 2016: Vienna 
  • 2015: Rome
  • 2014: Tehran | Rome
  • 2012: Pavia



Naples, November 5, 2016: Il volto e il velo: identità e nuove geografie culturali (The face and the veil: identities and new cultural geographies) 

Organised by the Neapolitan Centre of Psychoanalysis

English flyer | Conference report

Vienna 21-22 October 2016 The Dislocated Subject”

 
This event took place at the Sigmund Freud Museum and focused on the theme of the “new subjectivity”.

In a world which is dominated by new ways of communication, by technology that subverts the perception of the body, by the new organisations of the family and groups and by global violence, we are witnessing  an overflowing of the subject. The cult of the body and of youth, the desire to procreate also without the shared will of the couple, the lack of a collective conscience, etc. tell us about a “dislocated” subject, a new individual, a hybrid, the fruit of blending of diverse cultures.

 Abstracts

Keynote Lecture by Paolo Fabbri

Yes, we zombies can

The imagination of the global mediascape  is occupied by a figure: the not Dead. A viral monster at the the intersection of various mythologies and beliefs on changing limits between life and death. The strange collective behavior of zombies and their mutant physical and mental properties are among the multiple signs of the present angst on future of humankind. 


Introduction by Lorena Preta

Introduction: “The Time is out of joint” New subjectivities

For the interconnections created by global culture  we find ourselves in front of a new subject, a hybrid, the fruit of blending of diverse cultures. A subject that more than ever before represents the intersection of various mythologies, religions, and beliefs. 

The contaminations and borders concern the different cultures and countries but also the subject at his or her interior. We are always talking about the crisis of the subject as if it were becoming extinct but it is also true that we observe in the actual world an overflowing of the subject: the cult of the body and of youth, the desire to procreate even without the shared will of the couple, the lack of a collective conscience, the revolution in communication due to virtual information, the deep sense of terrorism.  The subject in this form is not disappeared but rather "deformed" and "dislocated" without the possibility to be a real actor on the world scene.

Time and space are altered and the present collapsed on the past and seems to have no future.

Can the Psychoanalysis interpret these phenomena?


 
Panel I       Embodied Dislocation

Vittorio Lingiardi No maps for these territories. Being cartographers of sexualities today.
Our sexualities and genders are both developmental and relational constructions: simultaneously biological and social, inventive and defensive. They result from genetic and hormonal predispositions, family expectations and social pressures, conflicts and defences, fantasies, identifications and counteridentifications, projections and introjections. They arise from the incessant attempt to come to terms with one’s own pleasures, anxieties, identities and compromising solutions.

Rapid and unpredictable transformations are now changing our cultures and sexualities: lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, transsexual, and queer identities; cybersexualities; new family forms resulting from new possibilities of conception and filiation. Today more than ever, quoting the challenging title of a 1995 paper by André Green, we could ask: “Has sexuality anything to do with psychoanalysis?”.

Throughout my talk I will address some questions. Does the orientation of our sexuality have to do with the construction and expression of our gender? How are sexual practices and identities related each other? Will our sexualities be driven by straight/gay binarism or bisexual inclusiveness? How does the globalization of “gay rights” will impact on non-Western cultures and, in general, on major religions such as Christianity, Judaism, Islam?


Gohar Homayounpour 
Trans-embodiments in Iran 
A binary approach towards the transsexual trajectory is becoming perceptible within contemporary psychoanalysis.

On one hand, psychoanalysts applying a reductionist reading of Freud have tended to apply a heteronormative discourse, of pathologizing and moralizing attitudes. On the other hand, in more recent years, psychoanalytic literature has taken a turn towards a transgenderity filled with a politically correct, at times superficial humanitarian discourse of sameness. It is the author’s assertion that both of these approaches continue to speak in the name of sameness and normalizing, a long way from a subversive psychoanalytic discourse of difference. This paper will use some clinical material of trans-embodiments in Iran in an attempt to move towards a subversive psychoanalytic discourse of unfamiliarity, from the standpoint of geographies of Trans-genderity. 


Panel ii     
Disembodied Dislocation

Jeanne Wolff Bernstein The intimacy of trans-lives
It requires a great deal of openness and tolerance for intimacy to accept a foreign organ from another person, to have  another man’s heart or lungs  beat in one’s own body. A similar readiness for accepting a foreign body is needed from a woman who provides her own womb for  other couples  to have gestated  their babies in her own body.  What sense of  foreignness and otherness has to be overcome or  be desired to allow for another  internal part of an Other to become part of one’s own . My paper will focus on the phantasies and internal dynamics dispatched by such intimate trans-positions.

 

Mariano Horenstein Into the darkness. A trip through virtual spaces

When Dante went into Hell, guided by the poet Virgil, he was able to see the sinners in different levels -according to the seriousness of their sinns- in eternal suffering. I will begin a journey into another Hell, that is, the world of new technologies and social networks. For that voyage, which is apparently far from our centenary practice, I will choose another poet as a guide: a blind and anachronic one, Jorge Luis Borges. With the guidance of this visionary writer, Argentine and universal at the same time, I will try to carve out some features of this underworld. As a consequence of this trip into the darkness of the Internet, Google and Wikipedia, Facebook and Instagram, Youtube, Snapchat and Second Life, I will try to isolate two of Borges` main characteristics -blindness and anachronism- as capital concepts to rethink Psychoanalysis in our contemporaneity.



Rome 3 October 2015: Psychoanalysis in The World- Crosses Between Cultures 

Final Report by
Alfredo Lombardozzi available in ENGLISH and ITALIAN

The conference will address the issue of interconnections between psychoanalysis and the various cultures of the world. Right now psychoanalysis, despite being     questioned by many or shelved in favor of pharmacological interventions and new therapies, paradoxically  at the same time, is seeing  huge growth Asia, the Arab countries, and countries in the east where once it did not  have easy access. The  analytical demand has a different value in the different contexts and is intertwined with the culture of the place, raising the unavoidable yet interesting question:  are there universal principles that support the vision of the mind that psychoanalysis offers? One wonders how distant cultures from the West, where psychoanalysis developed, can bring new contributions, through their specific mythologies and their peculiar characteristics, to the vision of man proposed by psychoanalysis. The question also arises whether the necessary and inevitable hybridization of languages, typical of a global society, may help explain the uncunny phenomena of our times. Speakers: Luiss University Rector - Massimo Egidi | IPA President – Stefano Bolognini | SPI President- Antonino Ferro | SPI Scientific Secretary – Tiziana Bastianini | Lorena Preta | Sebastiano Maffettone |  Andrea Baldassarro | Sudhir Kakar | Jalil Bennani | Paolo Fonda | Maria Teresa Hooke | Fakhry Davids | Lin Tao




Rome April 2015  Geografie della Psicoanalisi

Una Psicoanalista a Teheran 


Tehran 16-17 October 2014

English Programme | Persian Programme

The idea of organizing an international conference on the Geographies of Psychoanalysis in Tehran arose during various meetings with Gohar Homayounpour, the Iranian analyst and founder of the Freudian Group in Tehran, moreover, this group of psychoanalysts has been working on clinical and theoretical psychoanalysis for many years in the city. In the Geographies project, which is aimed at favouring the coming together of psychoanalysis and cultures from various countries around the world, there is a special space that is occupied by the relationship of psychoanalysis and the Muslim culture and, in more general terms, with the Eastern world as a whole. The meeting in Tehran will not be directly centred on Islamic culture but will use the city and contradictory experience that will arise from the practice of psychoanalysis in Iran as a sort of container of a profoundly problematic character, and which, thus, reverberates with the complexity of the psychoanalytic experience. We thought about offering both our Iranian colleagues and public topics for discussion that will touch upon problematic areas that face Western analysts as well, or at least topics that lend themselves to equipping the analyst who is able to question himself and who is willing to absorb other language and other models of life.

In moments like the current times, within the heart of violent and brutal conflict, where amongst various geo-political reasons we can see uncontrolled inflammation and illogical aggression, the trip to Iran can’t not include the spirit of research that is aimed at preserving the capacity of thinking even through the tools of psychoanalysis.   

(Lorena Preta)     

Papers
The conference papers below can be found included in the book:  Geographies of Psychoanalysis: Encounters Between Cultures in Tehran. Edited by Lorena Preta; Publisher: Mimesis International 2015

-    Lorena Preta, Psychoanalysis: An Updated Map Of The Psyche
-    Gohar Homayounpour, Geography of Proximity (Borrowing from Derrida)
-    Sudhir Kakar, Culture In Psychoanalysis
-    Anna Ferruta, Constructing Or Deconstructing Histories And Cultures
-    Alfredo Lombardozzi, Which Geographies? Psychoanalytic Anthropology Of Human Diversity
-    Felix De Mendelssohn, I. Freud And The Djinns. Doing Psychoanalysis in Algeria
-    Felix De Mendelssohn, II. Globalization And Development Of Psychoanalysis
-    Tiziana Bastianini, The Subject Of The Affect: How The “Actual” Can Be Expressed In Different Cultures
-    Mariano Horenstein, Psychoanalysis In Minor Language
-    Sophie de Mijolla-Mellor, The Invariants Of The Couple
-    Silvia Ronchey, Chalk Lines
 


Rome 5 April 2014

Introduction 
“I am convinced of the universality of the Oedipus complex, and the struggle for power and control it represents while embodying within it the universal fear of castration; however the culturally specific element seems to be the reaction to this fear. My premise is that the Iranian collective fantasy is anchored in an anxiety of disobedience that wishes for an absolute obedience. The sons desiring to rebel know unconsciously that if they do so they might get killed, and so in a way they settle for the fear of castration. I find that this is characteristic of the traditional cultures"...Read further
 

Papers:
- Lorena Preta, The reason for Geographies of Psychoanalysis
- Giancarlo Bosetti, The sense of the distances
- Lorena Preta, Conclusions
- Andrea Baldassarro, A few short remarks about Gohar Homayounpour's work
- Gohar Homayounpour, Una psicoanalista a Teheran - Silvia Ronchey, Le frontiere sono linee di gesso
- Tiziana Bastianini, Conserviamo forme d'esperienza psichica


Pavia 6 October 2012

Introduction 
“In our globalised world it is certainly no longer a question of exporting science or technology, but rather of asking ourselves once again and in ever greater depth about the universality of the assumptions that we use to think and organise our view of reality, or their translatability. This also means that we must continually place ourselves in a position to pick up the changes and cross-fertilisation that are generated by contacts between different cultures and mentalities”. Read more
 
Papers
-    Marco Francesconi, Opening
-    Lorena Preta, Cartographies Of Psychoanlysis
-    Fausto Petrella, Geographies Of Psychoanalysis: Introduction
-    Livio Boni, De la psychanalyse à l'Inde, et retour. Formes et raisons de la réévaluation du féminin dans la modernité indienne
-    Daniela Scotto di Fasano, Dialogue With Livio Boni
-    Fethi Benslama, L’islam au regard de la psychanalyse
-    Maurizio Balsamo, Conversations with Fethi Benslama
-    Gohar Homayounpour, The Paradox Called Iran
-    Vanna Berlincioni, Dialogue With Gohar Homayounpour