Psychoanalysis in the Age of Totalitarianism

Frans Tassigny

Description

Psychoanalysis in the Age of Totalitarianism conference At the Beyond the Couch Center of the Institute of Psychoanalysis, London which took place on September 22, 2012
This two-day conference, supported by the Pears Institute for the study of Antisemitism (Birkbeck, University of London), Birkbeck College, University of London and the Centre for Psychoanalytic Studies of the University of Essex, will bring together historians, social theorists and psychoanalysts to explore the impact of the Second World War and totalitarianism on psychoanalysis, and of psychoanalysis on the understanding of the war and totalitarian systems
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Informations

• Publié par: Une-Universite-de-la-Psychanalyse
• Nombre de lectures: 34
• Langue: English

Extrait

Psychoanalysis in the Age of Totalitarianism

Psychoanalysis in the Age of Totalitarianism conference At the Beyond the Couch Center of the Institute of Psychoanalysis, London which took place on September 22, 2012. The program of the conference, speakersa is available for download here.

Psychoanalysis in the Age of Totalitarianism

Half day Friday, all day Saturday

Tickets: £95 (tickets at the concessionary rate are now sold out)

This two-day conference, supported by the Pears Institute for the study of Antisemitism (Birkbeck, University of London), Birkbeck College, University of London and the Centre for Psychoanalytic Studies of the University of Essex, will bring together historians, social theorists and psychoanalysts to explore the impact of the Second World War and totalitarianism on psychoanalysis, and of psychoanalysis on the understanding of the war and totalitarian systems.

The conference programme is now available to download - see below.

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the role of psychoanalysis in the war eort, military intelligence and in postwar reconstruction

the crisis of psychoanalysis in Central Europe

the work of Hannah Arendt and other theorists of totalitarianism

cultural anthropology, fascism and the Cold War

visions of the child and the creation of the War Nurseries

the psychoanalytic sociology of the Frankfurt School

war and the origins of group therapy

neo-Freudianism

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the psychoanalytic theorization of anti-Semitism

mourning, memory and trans-generational trauma

Winnicott and the social democratic vision.

Presentations will be 20-minutes arranged in panels, followed by discussion, all in a plenary format. Conîrmed speakers include

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Jan Abram (British Psychoanalytic Society and Essex University)

Sally Alexander (Goldsmith's College)

David Armstrong (Tavistock Consultancy Service)

José Brunner (Tel Aviv University)

Matt Ffytche (Essex)

John Forrester (Cambridge University)

Stephen Frosh (Birkbeck College)

Joel Isaac (Cambridge University)

Ruth Leys (Johns Hopkins University)

Peter Mandler (Cambridge University)

Knuth Müller (Free University, Berlin)

Daniel Pick (Birkbeck and BPAS)

Jacqueline Rose (Queen Mary College, London)

Michael Roper (Essex)

Michael Rustin (Tavistock/UEL)

Michal Shapira (Barnard/Columbia University)

Suzanne Stewart-Steinberg (Brown University)

Lyndsey Stonebridge (University of East Anglia)

Eli Zaretsky (New School for Social Research, New York).

Ticket prices: £95

This event is now fully booked.For all enquiries please contact Marjory Goodall ([e-mail]).

Download the conference programme, abstracts and speaker biographies

Psychoanalysis in the Age of Totalitarianism PROGRAMME

All sessions at the Wellcome Collection Conference Centre, 183 Euston Road,

London

Friday 21 September 2012

1.30-2.00 Registration

2.00-2.15 Introduction

Matt ytche (Essex), Daniel Pick (Birkbeck/BPAS), Michael

Rustin (Tavistock/University of East London)

2.15-2.30 Joel Isaac (Cambridge University): Totalitarianism: A

Preliminary Sketch

2.30-4.00 Panel 1: Totalitarian States, Totalitarian States of Mind

Chair: Joel Isaac

Jacqueline Rose (Queen Mary): Hannah Arendt and the Perils

of Psychoanalysis

Lyndsey Stonebridge (University of East Anglia): ‘Inner

Emigration’: On the Run with Hannah Arendt and Anna Freud

Nick Temple (BPAS): Totalitarianism – The Internal World and

the Political Mind

Discussion

4.00-4.30 Tea/coee

4.30-5.30 Panel 2: The Third Reich, Anti-Semitism,

Psychoanalysis

Chair: Matt ytche

José Brunner (Tel Aviv University): National Socialism on the

American Couch: Prejudice, Projection and the Flourishing of

Psychoanalysis in Post-War USA Stephen Frosh (Birkbeck):

Studies in Prejudice: Theorising Anti-Semitism in the Wake of

the Nazi Holocaust

Discussion

5.30-5.45 Short break

5.45-7.00 Discussion: Totalitarian Century? Freudian Century?

Writing the History of Psychoanalysis

Chair: Daniel Pick

John Forrester (Cambridge) and Eli Zaretsky (New School for

Social Research, New York) in conversationSaturday, 22 September

9.00-9.30 Registration

9.30-10.30 Panel 3: War and Infancy

Chair: Jan Abram

Michael Roper (University of Essex): The Nervous Child and the

Shell-shocked Soldier: child psychology in the aftermath of

war, Britain 1920-35 Michal Shapira (Barnard/Columbia

University): Psychoanalytic Criminology, Childhood, and the

Democratic Self between War and Peace

Discussion

10.30-10.50 Tea/Coee

10.50-11.50 Panel 4: Psychoanalysis, Politics and the Social

Sciences

Chair: Sally Alexander

Matt ytche (University of Essex): The Superego as a Historical

Crisis

Peter Mandler (Cambridge University): Totalitarianism and

Cultural Relativism: The Dilemma of the Neo-Freudians

Discussion

11-50-1.20 Panel 5: Reconstructing Democracy

Chair: Michael Rustin

Sally Alexander (Goldsmiths): Winnicott and the Social

Democratic Vision

David Armstrong (Tavistock Consultancy Service): The

‘Tavistock Group’ within War Psychiatry in Britain

Suzanne Stewart-Steinberg (Brown University): Anna Freud

and the Democratic Experiment

Discussion

1.20-2.30 Lunch Break

2.30-3.30 Panel 6: Cold War Psychoanalysis

Chair: TBC

Derek Hook (Birkbeck College): Psychoanalysis in the Time of

Apartheid Knuth Muller (Free University, Berlin): From the Hot

to the Cold War: Psychoanalytic Collaboration with the USIntelligence Community, 1941-1953

Discussion

3.30-4.00 Tea/Coee/Biscuits4.00-5.20 Final Discussion: The Legacies of the Past - Is the

Problem of Totalitarianism Still Central to

Psychoanalysis?

Chair: Sally Weintrobe

Ruth Leys (Johns Hopkins University), Daniel Pick (Birkbeck

College/BPAS), Michael Rustin (Tavistock/University of East

London)Psychoanalysis in the Age of Totalitarianism: Abstracts

Panel 1: TOTALITARIAN STATES, TOTALITARIAN STATES OF MIND

Jacqueline Rose

Hannah Arendt and the Perils of Psychoanalysis

This paper will argue that despite her known lack of sympathy for psychoanalysis,

Arendt’s thinking, notably on totalitarianism, shows unexpected aïnities with

Freudian thought, and can throw signiîcant light on the perils of group adhesion.

Lyndsey Stonebridge

‘Inner emigration’: On the Run with Hannah Arendt and Anna Freud

The idea of a resistance to totalitarianism through an ‘inner emigration’ had become

something of a bad joke for Hannah Arendt by the time of the Eichmann trial. The

defence of ‘inward opposition’ in the face of so much evidence of outward collusion

was a slap in the face to moral and political understanding; more evidence of a

popular psychoanalysis of the private self obfuscating the urgent task of imagining a

new anti-totalitarian politics. But in an earlier lecture, Arendt oered a more nuanced

account of ‘inner emigration’. What the inner emigrant is in ight from is not just a

bad conscience, she claimed, but a ‘seemingly unendurable reality’ that cannot, in the

end, be escaped. While inner emigration is a retreat from the political into the refuge

of the psyche, then, at the same time it bears traces of the reality of the political world

from which the inner emigrant is in ight. A defence that betrays its historical

circumstance in its very form: the idea of a migration into the places Arendt found

most politically suspect (the psyche, fantasy, the inner world) turns out to have a

more complicated, and more psychoanalytic, story to tell about the politics of the

personal under totalitarianism. In this paper, I ask what happens to Arendt’s famous

antipathy to psychoanalysis if we place her account of inner emigration alongside

what psychoanalysis has to say about how the psyche brooks an unendurable world.

Following the path taken by the late Elisabeth Young-Bruehl and, most recently, by

Suzanne Stewart-Steinberg, from Hannah Arendt to Anna Freud, I ask how we might

bring an understanding of the ego’s defences together with Arendt’s determination to

understand the ‘reality’ of totalitarian existence. Exemplary refugee writers in all

senses, what is at stake for both women in the wake of totalitarianism is the task of

reuniting the migrant mind with a new reality (Arendt would call it a new political

reality), that can be neither escaped nor mastered, but must be endured with others.

Nick Temple

Totalitarianism – The internal World and the Political Mind

This paper uses a psychoanalytical perspective to explore the development of

totalitarianism as a state of mind. It views totalitarianism as a mental organisation that

draws its power from the death instinct, containing many elements of sadism and

defences against guilt. The paper will draw on clinical psychoanalytical experience to

demonstrate how individuals can assert their power through the use of omnipotent

destructiveness, which is most eective when the patient is freed from guilt and when

the mental mechanisms of psychic retreats are used to maintain a totalitarian mental

system. The paper will also draw on Shakespeare’s Macbeth to illustrate the universal

nature of the temptations which power brings with it, which can lead to totalitarian

domination. It will suggest analogies between totalitarian states of mind in

individuals, and those of totalitarian states and their leaders. The aim of the paper will be to show the relevance of psychoanalytic ideas found useful in the clinical

consulting room to the understanding of totalitarianism as a historical and

contemporary political phenomenon.

Panel 2: THE THIRD REICH, ANTI-SEMITISM, PSYCHOANALYSIS Jose Brunner

National Socialism on the American Couch: Prejudice, Projection and the

Flourishing of Psychoanalysis in Post-War USA

Among other things, the rise of Nazism brought about the destruction of the human

and cultural base of psychoanalysis in central Europe, the disbandment of most of its

institutes and associations, as well as the forced migration of its leading practitioners.

But it did not cause a crisis in psychoanalysis as a discipline. This fact is in need of

explanation, which this paper provides with reference to the extra-clinical theorizing

of psychoanalysis in postwar USA, in which psychoanalysts addressed issues related

to the rise of Nazism. The argument of this presentation is structured around a slightly

modiîed version of the ‘ecological niche’, a concept developed by Ian Hacking. It

delineates four vectors: (1) professional, (2) scientiîc, (3) social and (4) theoretical.

Their coming together in a particular time at a particular place, i.e. in the US of the

1940s, allowed individual émigré psychoanalysts as well as psychoanalysis as a

discipline to gain strength rather than to enter into a crisis despite severely adverse

circumstances: (1) Although they had to become refugees, central European

psychoanalysts could rely on a professional network with a strong international as

well as national – i.e. North American – support structure, facilitating their integration

in the US; (2) At the time, the concept of ‘prejudice’ became central to social

psychological theorizing. This topic lent itself well to an expansion of psychoanalytic

thinking; (3) The focus on prejudice allowed leading émigré intellectuals, among

them psychoanalysts, to join research programs of the American Jewish Committee;

(4) Addressing the question of prejudice allowed psychoanalysts to trace defense

mechanisms back to unconscious mechanisms stemming from authoritarian family

dynamics, above all to ‘projection’. In sum: by suggesting projection as the

unconscious core of prejudice, thus portraying anti-Semitism as a particular

manifestation of a general mental mechanism, the oedipal grid of the psychoanalytic

gaze remained intact, while generating a general framework of explanation in line

with the agenda of the American Jewish Committee. This conjunction allowed

psychoanalysis to gain strength in the US in the 1940s.

Stephen Frosh

Studies in Prejudice: Theorising Anti-Semitism in the Wake of the Nazi

Holocaust

This paper briey describes three important psychoanalytically-inspired interventions

in theorising anti-Semitism in the immediate wake of the Nazi Holocaust. The

argument is that these texts embody a principled attempt to construct a sophisticated

psychosocial theory in the sense of one that understands the structure of personal life

as inextricably bound up with social forces. However, the relatively crude individualsocial divide deployed in this work inhibits the development of such an account,

eectively polarising the theory so that the social becomes either the true cause of

anti-Semitism, or the ‘container’ for individual pathology. The most famous source is

Adorno and colleagues’ Authoritarian Personality, published as the îrst of the îve volumes of the Institute of Social Research’s Studies in Prejudice project, sponsored

by the American Jewish Committee. The beginnings of a more clinical psychoanalytic

account of anti-Semitism can be seen in the contribution of Nathan Ackerman and

Marie Jahoda to Studies in Prejudice. Finally, Ernst Simmel’s Anti-Semitism: A

Social Disease was mainly the write-up of a symposium commissioned by the San

Francisco Psychoanalytic Society and contains major chapters by Fenichel, Adorno

and Simmel himself. These three major texts have very similar arguments: society is

anti-Semitic in its construction of the Jew as a hate object; and this construction

allows individual anti-Semites to project their unconscious disturbances into that hate

object. One question is, is it possible to go further than this essentially static

presentation of the individual-social divide when considering anti-Semitism and other

forms of social hatred?

Panel 3: WAR AND INFANCY

Michael Roper

The Nervous Child and the Shell-shocked Soldier: Child Psychology in the

Aftermath of War, Britain 1920-35

This paper investigates the growth of psychological expertise on childhood in

interwar Britain in relation to the legacy of the First World War. This period saw the

foundation of the Child Guidance Clinics, the Tavistock Clinic (1920) and its

Children’s Department (1926), Margaret Lowenfeld’s Institute of Child Psychology

(1928) and the Institute for the Scientiîc Treatment of Delinquency (1931). These

institutions, coupled with the cultural impact of Freud’s ideas, the arrival of Melanie

Klein to Britain in 1926, and the work of British psychoanalysts such as Susan Isaacs

and John Rickman, contributed to a new concern with the emotional states of

children. Indeed, such developments lead Harry Hendrick to characterise the interwar

period as one in which ‘mental welfare’ became as important as physical welfare, and

in which the understanding of children’s wishes and anxieties, and of family

relationships in creating psychological subjects, were seen as central to the productive

maturity of future citizens. While this new emphasis on the subjectivity of the child is

usually located within the history of social welfare and ‘psy’ discourses, the

psychological legacies of the First World War were also important. Seth Koven has

noted the ‘representational convergences’ in public responses to the crippled child and

the disabled veteran during the First World War. There were similar aïnities in the

post-war perceptions of psychological experts, the night terrors, bed-wetting,

stammers, and temper-tantrums reported among children bearing a resemblance to the

behaviour of the shell-shocked soldier. Yet, despite the widespread experiences of

loss, disability and mental distress among the families of returned soldiers in interwar

Britain, these psychological experts had little to say about the war’s emotional impact

on children. This paper seeks to understand why, given the increasing recognition of

such psychological legacies in commemoration, literature, theatre and art from the

late 1920s, the war was largely absent from the observations and diagnoses of child

psychology.

Michal Shapira

Psychoanalytic Criminology, Childhood, and the Democratic Self between War

and Peace In the middle decades of the twentieth century, psychoanalysis became key in the