Events archive
Psychoanalysis, Culture and Political Life
Wednesday 18 October 16:00 until 18:00
University of Sussex Campus : Arts A108
Speaker: Catherine Humble, Jacob Johanssen, Hannah Proctor
Part of the series: English Colloquium
This event will explore the connections between psychoanalysis, culture and political life across the twentieth century and into the present day.
Catherine Humble – ‘Women in the Shadow of Psychoanalysis’
Jacob Johanssen – ‘Psychoanalysis and Resistance Today: Another Age of Hysteria?’
Hannah Proctor – ‘The Bolshevik Unconscious: Nathan Leites' Operational Code of the Politburo’
Speakers will present papers for 15-20 mins each with time for questions and discussion at the end. Further details about the speakers and their talks can be found below.
This event is co-sponsored by the Centre for Cultural Studies, the Centre for Modernist Studies, the Centre for the Study of Sexual Dissidence, and the English Colloquium.
Everyone is welcome!
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Catherine Humble – ‘Women in the Shadow of Psychoanalysis’
Dr Catherine Humble will read from the introduction of her forthcoming book Women in the Shadow of Psychoanalysis. Sabina Spielrein, Lou Andreas-Salomé and Joan Riviere are often remembered for the famous men—including Freud, Nietzsche, and Jung—who loved, mentored or exploited them. But these women were groundbreaking intellectuals in their own right: the lost first generation of psychoanalysts, whose intersecting lives and transgressive ideas about sexuality, trauma and consciousness disrupted Vienna and beyond, resonating to this day.
Bio - Dr Catherine Humble works at the Institute of Psychoanalysis as Executive Editor of the International Journal of Psychoanalysis. She holds the posts of Honorary Associate Lecturer at the UCL Psychoanalysis Unit and Short Course Tutor in Creative Writing at Goldsmiths University. Her first book, Women in the Shadows of Psychoanalysis, will be published by Faber in the UK, FSG in the US and in other territories in 2025.
Jacob Johanssen – ‘Psychoanalysis and Resistance Today: Another Age of Hysteria?’
If in political vocabularies, resistance is the passage to freedom, for psychoanalysis, it is repetition, blockage, blind obeisance to crushing internal constraint. … In this vocabulary, then, resistance is not the action of the freedom fighter, the struggle against tyranny, the first stirring of the oppressed; it is the mind at war with itself, blocking the path to its own freedom and, with it, its ability to make the world a better, less tyrannical, place. (Rose, 2007, p. 21)
My talk takes the above quotation from Jacqueline Rose as a starting point to think about the status of resistance today as a psychosocial formation that could be seen as symptomatic of wider socio-cultural change. At first glance, resistance, denial and disavowal are everywhere: from climate change denial to right-wing narratives against migration and many other forms of public discourse. From a different perspective, resistance is also seen as progressive action of speaking truth to power, fighting against different forms of discrimination and ideologies. While resistance can mark a productive moment in the consulting room which patient and analyst can work with, if left unexamined, it may constitute intense pain or blockage for the patient. Resistance is thus an ambivalent notion. In this talk, I am interested in thinking about resistance today in combination with the concept of hysteria. One of the central early building blocks of psychoanalysis, Freud saw hysteria as a symptomatic response to the repression of (female) sexuality. A problematic and complex idea which has largely fallen out of fashion in and beyond the clinic, hysteria is nonetheless useful to further unpack the specific dynamics of some moments of resistance today. I focus on two examples to do so: hysteria in relation to the growth of ‘thinspiration’ and eating disorder content on TikTok; and hysteria of the incel and femcel online communities as resistance to contemporary ideas of heterosexuality. Both show how questions of identity are shaped by the digital and negotiated on social media. While both embody hysterical modes of performance and existential dynamics of an absent / present body, they also point to questions of resistance of the present conjuncture and a desire for recognition.
Bibliography
Rose, J. (2007). The last resistance. London. Verso.
Bio - Jacob Johanssen is Associate Professor in Communications at St. Mary's University in London. His research interests revolve around digital media and psychoanalysis. His most recent books are Media and Psychoanalysis: A Critical Introduction (Karnac Books, with Steffen Krüger) and Fantasy, Online Misogyny and the Manosphere: Male Bodies of Dis/Inhibition (Routledge).
Hannah Proctor – ‘The Bolshevik Unconscious: Nathan Leites' Operational Code of the Politburo’
In the immediate aftermath of the Second World War just as the Cold War was beginning, a cluster of research projects funded by US institutions were set up to analyse the ‘Soviet mind’. Many of the social scientists involved in these projects pivoted from working on Germany or Japan to focus on the new enemy, while others were emigres from the USSR. Anthropologist Margaret Mead received funding from the RAND Corporation for the project Studies in Soviet Culture. Unable to conduct research in the USSR she and her team of researchers instead relied on what they called 'anthropology at a distance'. Two psychoanalytically informed publications emerged from her group: The People of Great Russia by anthropologist Geoffey Gorer and the Kleinian analyst John Rickman and The Operational Code of the Politburo by Nathan Leites (who was the project's co-director). Gorer and Rickman argued that contemporary Soviet authoritarianism could be made sense of via an analysis of culturally specific swaddling practices in early infancy. This paper will focus on Leites' less well-known text, The Operational Code of the Politburo. Leites offered a psychoanalytic reading of works by Lenin and Stalin, which he argued gave insights into Bolshevik mentality, which he characterised as paranoid, compulsively attached to order and terrified of annihilation. Though this might sound like an eccentric and methodologically flimsy historical artefact, Leites' work was seen as offering insight not only into the 'Soviet mind' specifically but the 'Communist mind' more broadly. The text was distributed to armistice negotiators in Korea. This paper will return to Leites' strange text, situating this peculiar anti-Communist application of psychoanalysis within the context of the early Cold War.
Bio - Hannah Proctor holds a Wellcome University Award at the Centre for the Social History of Health and Healthcare, University of Strathclyde where she is working on a project called 'Depathologising dissent' about the international repercussions of revelations of the psychiatric abuse of dissidents in Soviet psychiatric hospitals, situated in the context of the Global Cold War. Her second book, Burnout: The Emotional Experience of Political Defeat is forthcoming with Verso in 2024.
Posted on behalf of: School of Media, Arts and Humanities
Last updated: Tuesday, 19 September 2023