[ecrea] CFP: Psychoanalysis and Ideology

Psychoanalysis and Ideology 5th-7th October 2018, Gdansk, Poland


Dear Friends and Colleagues

We are very pleased to re-advertise the next session of Psychoanalysis 
in Our Time, which will take place in association with the University of 
Gdansk in the beautiful resort of Sopot from 5th-7th October 2018. The 
theme for this transdisciplinary symposium will be: "Psychoanalysis, 
Nationalism and Ideology".  Our keynote is the notable philosopher and 
psychoanalyst Alenka Zupancic.  Professor Thomas Elsaesser will be 
present too with a book launch of his new collection in Polish and a 
talk about ideology and abject in cinema.  We welcome films and theatre 
presentations too.
Please note that we aim to create an atmosphere of fun as well as 
collegiality and to this effect we have one dinner included in the 
registration fee and one drinks party too! As many of you know, we have 
an excellent track record with publications inspired by these meetings. 
Please see full details in the CFP below.

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*CFP: Psychoanalysis in Our Time 2018 – Psychoanalysis, Nationalism and 
Ideology, Sopot/Gdansk, Poland, 5^th -7^th  October 2018*
Now in its fifth year – and following the great success of sessions 
across Europe – the Psychoanalysis in Our Time research network is 
delighted to announce the call for papers for our next event, which will 
take place in association with the University of Gdansk, Poland from 
5^th  to 7^th  October 2018. The topic for this symposium will be 
“Psychoanalysis, Nationalism and Ideology”.
We are very pleased to be able to say that the internationally acclaimed 
philosopher of the Slovenian School, Prof. Alenka Zupančič will be our 
keynote for this event.
This research initiative funded by the Nordic Council of Ministers and 
supported by the British Association of Film, Television and Screen 
Studies aims to initiate and develop trans-disciplinary conversations. 
We believe in deep and ardent discussions in sessions and over meals and 
wine – which will be flowing freely. We have published a first edited 
collection stemming from meetings in Copenhagen and Tallinn, entitled 
/Psychoanalysis and The Unrepresentable: from Culture to the 
Clinic/ (Routledge, 2016), and are currently working on a second 
collection, /Psychoanalysis and Femininity/, due for publication with 
Routledge next year.
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.
Please send an abstract (max. 300 words) and a short biographical 
statement to the coordinators: Agnieszka Piotrowska 
((agnieszka.piotrowska /at/ beds.ac.uk) 
<mailto:(agnieszka.piotrowska /at/ beds.ac.uk)>), Ben Tyrer 
((ben.tyrer /at/ gmail.com) <mailto:(ben.tyrer /at/ gmail.com)>) or Charlotta Lund 
((lund.charlotta /at/ gmail.com) <mailto:(lund.charlotta /at/ gmail.com)>).
*The deadline for submission is 31st July 2018.*
We welcome submissions for 20-minute presentations from artists, 
academics and clinicians, and would invite different approaches to this 
subject through films, performances or creative writings 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):
·A move to the right? Current trends in Poland and in the world 
vis-à-vis the notion of interpellation
·Cinema, ideology, spectatorship – new trends in film theory
·Fake news, social media and ideology
·Television drama, ideology and interpellation
·Freud and group psychology: ego, libido and the “mass”
·Psychoanalysis and fascism (e.g. Wilhelm Reich – /The Mass Psychology 
of Fascism/)
·Freudo-Marxism and the Frankfurt School (Marcuse, Fromm)
·Lacan and Marx / “How Marx invented the symptom”
·The Slovenian School and contemporary ideology critique (Žižek, Dolar, 
Zupančič)
·Lacan and the political Left/the Essex School (Laclau and Mouffe, 
Stavrakakis, Glynos)
·Psychoanalysis and Historical Materialism (Raymond Williams, Frederic 
Jameson)
·Marxism, Maoism and psychoanalysis in Paris (Althusser, Badiou)
·Ideology, interpassivity and belief (Robert Pfaller)
·Psychoanalysis and Neoliberalism (Todd McGowan, Paul Verhaeghe, Mark 
Fisher)
·Colonialism, anti-colonialism and ideology through psychoanalysis 
(Fanon, Octave Mannoni)
·Intersectionality and ideology in cinema and culture – new ideas
·Ideological critique of psychoanalysis (Foucault, Deleuze and Guattari)
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:*
Sigmund Freud was, from the outset, interested in belief systems, 
individual and group dynamics, and the organisation of (Western) 
society. In /Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego/ (1921), he 
theorised the binding force of identification with a leader, which thus 
allows the group to take on a shared ideal and act in irrational ways. 
Further, in /The Future of an Illusion/ (1927) he characterises religion 
as a sort of “false consciousness” – even while Marx had rather 
different ideas about the origins of this phenomenon – defining it as: 
“certain dogmas, assertions about facts and conditions of external and 
internal reality which tells one something that one has not oneself 
discovered, and which claim that one should give them credence”. He, 
moreover, noted the /libidinal /dimension of such an “illusion”, which 
differentiated it from a simple “error” and accounted for the subject’s 
profound attachment to the system.
In his later work, these interests took on more sociological – even 
cosmological – dimensions, as Freud saw the fundamental conflicts of the 
psyche to be at the very heart of any notion of “civilisation”. His 
essay, /Das Unbehagen in der Kultur/ (1930) – perhaps more accurately 
translated as “The Unease in Culture” than “Civilisation and Its 
Discontents” – examined the perpetual tension between the individual and 
the group, suggesting that social bonds were founded on the necessary 
repression of drive forces and an imposed conformity to certain norms.
Rapidly, these notions fused with the tenets of Marxism – group fantasy 
meeting notions of the “ruling ideas”, etc. – in a heterogeneous body of 
work that sought to reconcile Freudian insights with Marxian materialist 
analysis. Freudo-Marxist thinkers such as Wilhelm Reich and Otto 
Fenichel attempted to understand social and psychodynamic forces shaping 
their worlds, with the former (in)famously tying the rise of fascism to 
sexual repression. Members of the Frankfurt School were similarly 
influenced by Freud, with Herbert Marcuse’s /Eros and 
Civilization/ (1955) elaborating a vision of a non-repressive society 
and a utopian system of social relations, and his later /One Dimensional 
Man/ (1964) assessing the ideological landscapes of both capitalist and 
communist life.
Jacques Lacan similarly explored ideas of belief and fantasy – and as 
Samo Tomšič delineates in his own work,/The Capitalist 
Unconscious/ (2015) – consistently engaged with Marx and Marxian ideas 
throughout his career. In his analysis of the Symbolic and the notion of 
the big Other, Lacan gave accounts of the individual experience of the 
social order and laid the groundwork for an anti-authoritarian theory of 
psychoanalysis. He was himself radically anti-authoritarian and 
suspicious of dogma and doctrine when it came to Freudian training and 
practice, while also running his own School(s) in the expectation of 
strict obedience: perhaps best summed up by his support of the students 
during the May ’68//uprising, warning them “not to be seduced by the 
government’s attempts to cool them out with the promises of dialogue and 
participation: ‘There is no such thing as dialogue, it is a swindle’”, 
while telling his own students a year later at Vincennes, “What you 
aspire to as revolutionaries is a master. You will get one” (cf. Turkle 
1992).
The impact of Lacan on a generation of academics and students has shaped 
the Western intellectual landscape for the last 50 years, particularly 
in the realm of political philosophy and theories of ideology: from 
Louis Althusser’s ground-breaking synthesis of Gramsci and Lacan in his 
essay, “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses” to Alain Badiou’s 
critique of ideology in/and the unconscious and his later, Lacanian 
ethics of the Event. And in a UK context, the Essex School of political 
theorists – such as Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe – established a 
profoundly influential centre for rethinking Marxist notions of class, 
identity and social structure through a Lacanian analysis of discourse: 
summed up in their foundational work, /Hegemony and Socialist 
Strategy/ (1985).
Slavoj Žižek has shown the particular effectivity of psychoanalysing 
ideology through popular culture, as strikingly illustrated by his 
discussion – for example – of the “critique of ideology glasses” 
discovered by John Nada – the protagonist of John Carpenter’s 1988 cult 
classic, /They Live!/ – which reveal the fundamental ideological fantasy 
of contemporary LA capitalism (Obey! Consume! Reproduce!). He has even 
taken to the screen himself to demonstrate what a Lacanian analysis of 
/The Sound of Music/ or a bottle of Coca Cola can reveal about our 
spontaneous experience of the world, the power structures and dominant 
beliefs of our times. Together with his colleagues, Alenka Zupančič and 
Mladen Dolar, the so-called Slovenian School presents arguably the most 
vital manifestation of this conjunction of psychoanalysis and ideology 
critique.
Of course, psychoanalytic discourses themselves are not neutral and have 
been the subject of critique – if not direct attack – by a number of 
contemporary thinkers: from Foucault’s deconstruction of the “repressive 
hypothesis” (cf. Marcuse) to the Deleuze and Guattari’s Capitalism and 
Schizophrenia project, which was openly hostile to a Freudian, “Oedipal” 
society. Indeed, psychoanalysis has been put, throughout its history, to 
conservative – even oppressive ends – from the rigidly normative 
practices of 1950s North American psychiatry to AMP and ECF 
member Abdoulaye Yerodia Ndombasi’s complicity in the Congolese genocide 
of the 1990s. What are the responsibilities of psychoanalysis, of the 
analyst, of the analysand, of the theorist, of the clinician, in such cases?
We open the forum to discuss all of these topics and more. What are the 
ideological coordinates of psychoanalysis? In what ways could we 
consider psychoanalysis to be ideological? In what ways do 
psychoanalytic theory and practice support the dominant systems of 
today? How can they be used to challenge them? Does psychoanalysis have 
revolutionary potential? How can engagement with arts and culture help 
us to explore these wider contexts?
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/>), and a collaboration with the British 
Association of Film, Television and Screen Studies Psychoanalysis and 
Film Special Interest Group (http://baftss.org/). It has the aim of 
providing psychoanalytic interrogation of social, cultural and 
scientific 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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