[ecrea] CFP Psychoanalysis in Our Time

The Psychoanalysis in Our Time research network is proud to announce 
*Professor Elizabeth Cowie* as the keynote for our next meeting which 
will be held in Sopot, Poland, *7-9th April 2017.* Professor Cowie is 
one of the most notable scholars in film studies today. She has devoted 
most of her working life to interrogating relationships between 
psychoanalysis and cinema and has written extensively on the subject. I 
was proud to have her contribution to /Embodied Encounters: new 
approaches to psychoanalysis and cinema/ (2015) 
https://www.routledge.com/Embodied-Encounters-New-approaches-to-psychoanalysis-and-cinema/Piotrowska/p/book/9781138795259. 
Professor Cowie will also be contributing to our forthcoming volume on 
psychoanalysis and femininity.Our sessions are working seminars aimed at 
producing new research and new publications in a supportive environment 
which allows for a dialogue and a discussion of ‘work in progress’, 
without a fear of hostile encounters.

We hope to see you there, and please do forward this CFP to your 
networks and to other interested parties.

Best wishes,

Agnieszka and Ben

*CFP: Psychoanalysis in Our Time 2017 – Psychoanalysis and the Symptom, 
Sopot, Poland, 7**^th **-9**^th ** April 2017*

Now in its fourth year – and following the great success of sessions in 
Copenhagen, Sauðárkrókur, Tallinn, Druskininkai, Gdansk and Orivesi – 
the Psychoanalysis in Our Time research network is delighted to announce 
the call for papers for our next event, which will take place on the 
Baltic coast in Sopot, Poland from 7^th  to 9^th  April 2017. The topic 
for this symposium will be “Psychoanalysis and the Symptom”.

This research initiative funded by the Nordic Council of Ministers aims 
to initiate and develop trans-disciplinary conversations. We believe in 
deep and ardent discussions over meals and in sessions. We have recently 
published our first edited collection stemming from the meetings in 
Copenhagen and Tallinn, entitled /Psychoanalysis and The 
Unrepresentable: from Culture to the 
Clinic/https://www.routledge.com/Psychoanalysis-and-the-Unrepresentable-From-culture-to-the-clinic/Piotrowska-Tyrer/p/book/9781138954984

The registration fee is £145, or £75 for students. There will be a 
possibility of a reduced fee for local participants. We will be working 
in a relatively small group and lunches and coffees will be provided, as 
well one dinner with wine as part of the registration fee. There will be 
no parallel sessions. Sopot is a beautiful resort not far from Gdansk. 
Our symposium will be held in a hotel next to the beach and the 
participants will be encouraged to stay in the same hotel where the 
comfortable rooms will cost about €50 with breakfast.

Please send an abstract (max. 300 words) and a short biographical 
statement to Dr Agnieszka Piotrowska ((agnieszka.piotrowska /at/ beds.ac.uk) 
<mailto:(agnieszka.piotrowska /at/ beds.ac.uk)>) or Dr Ben Tyrer 
((b.tyrer /at/ exeter.ac.uk) <mailto:(b.tyrer /at/ exeter.ac.uk)>).

*The deadline for submission is 16**^th ** January 2017.*

We welcome submissions for 20-minute papers from artists, academics and 
clinicians, and would invite different approaches to this subject from, 
for example, historians, film and literature scholars, or natural 
scientists with an interest in psychoanalysis.

Possible topics could include (but are not limited to):

•Conversion symptoms, hysteria and the mind-body problem

•Symptoms as “the outcome of a conflict”

•Inhibitions, Symptoms, Anxiety

•The symptom and language: signifier, signification, metaphor and message

•Phobia: symptom or structure?

•From the symptom to the sinthome, the Borromean knot and jouissance

•“Joyce the symptom”, the sinthome and psychosis

•Žižek, enjoying one’s symptom and “permissive biopolitics”

•“How Marx invented the symptom”

•“Woman is a symptom of Man”

•Edelman, queer theory and the “sinthomosexual”

•Deleuzian symptomatology

•Symptomatic readings of texts (psychoanalysis, ideology and the symptom)

•The “symptomatic” place of psychoanalysis in relation to other discourses

We look forward to receiving your proposals.  As always we aim to be 
outrageous but scholarly and rigorous. We welcome 
psychoanalytically-inspired performance pieces too.

*Further details:*

The symptom is perhaps /the/ vital concept around which psychoanalysis 
is articulated both as a clinical practice and as a body thought 
relevant to culture and society.

Freud’s first investigations were of course into hysteria, which 
considered perhaps the symptom par excellence at the birth of 
psychoanalysis. In his rethinking of hysterical illness, the notion of 
conversion symptoms brought the question of the mind-body connection to 
the fore for Freud and thus laid the groundwork for much of the clinical 
and metapsychological development of his project for psychoanalysis. And 
it is the symptom, that troubling blockage, that bungled action, the 
thing unsaid and unsayable that often brings the analysand to the clinic 
in the first place.

Lacan, in his /return to Freud/, first posed his conception of the 
symptom in broadly linguistic terms, differentiating it from the 
conventional medical understanding of symptom as a straightforward index 
of pathology, the direct surface manifestation of underlying illness. 
For Lacan, the symptom was a sort of signifying knot, a metaphor or a 
message for the subject as a formation of the unconscious.

This Lacan rethought radically in his later work: far from being an 
aberration to be dissolved or dispelled in order to “cure” the subject, 
the sinthome came to be seen by Lacan as the very identity of the 
subject – who is now defined by their particular organisation of 
jouissance. The sinthome is thus the “fourth ring” that holds the 
Borromean knot of Real, Symbolic and Imaginary together for the 
individual. For Lacan, this was most clearly demonstrated in the 
extraordinary writing of James Joyce, which served – he suggested – to 
stabilise a potential psychosis, giving us, for instance, /Finnegan’s 
Wake/ in the place of acute breakdown.

(And the recent publication, by Polity, of a new English translation of 
Lacan’s twenty-third seminar on /The Sinthome/, marks our turn to 
consider once again the importance of the symptom in psychoanalysis as a 
particularly timely intervention!)

In the contemporary context, Slavoj Žižek has taken the psychoanalytic 
notion of the symptom into cultural analysis and dialectical 
materialism, explaining “How Marx invented the symptom”, and pointing to 
a regime of permissive biopolitics where the subject is enjoined to, 
“Enjoy your symptom!”. Building on this in the direction of queer 
theory, Lee Edelman’s radical polemic, /No Future/, theorises the 
“sinthomosexual”: the figure of the queer as social symptom, which binds 
a community together through its abjection. While Catherine Malabou’s 
work on the “new wounded” argues that traditional psychoanalytic ideas 
of the symptom and interpretation no longer hold in an age of widespread 
neurological trauma.

And if one indication of the symptom in psychoanalysis is that which is 
missed out, passed over, or must remain unsaid, then a significant 
aspect of our focus (both for this session, and for our network in 
general) will be on the symptomatic status of psychoanalysis today: a 
potential /absence/ in discourses on mental health, for example, as well 
as in theoretical and philosophical paradigms. What does the /absence/ 
of psychoanalysis say about our times? If the symptom is a “message from 
the future”, what is it telling us?

Psychoanalysis in Our Time (http://psychoanalysisinourtime.wordpress.com 
<http://psychoanalysisinourtime.wordpress.com/>) is an international 
research initiative with the Nordic Summer University and the Nordic 
Council of Ministers (http://nordic.university 
<http://nordic.university/>), with the aim of providing psychoanalytic 
interrogation of social, cultural and academic issues. It is a 
trans-disciplinary network that aims to create a space for a dialogue 
between clinicians, academics and practitioners of psychoanalysis as 
well as scholars in other fields, including film, post-colonial, and 
literary studies in order to investigate and elaborate ways in which 
psychoanalytic thinking can assist in understanding the events and 
developments of our times.


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