Research Lectures and Conferences

May 1-2, 2008

2008 Pembroke Center Roundtable

“Self Among Others: The Social Fabric of Subjectivity”

Participants
James Hopkins –Philosophy, King’s College London
Lynne Layton –Psychiatry and Women’s Studies, Harvard
Ona Nierenberg –Apres-Coup Psychoanalytic Association, Bellevue Hospital Center
Charles Shepherdson –English, SUNY-Albany
Robert D. Stolorow –Psychiatry, UCLA
Lyndsey Stonebridge –Literature and Creative Writing, University of East Anglia

The New York Times recently reported that psychology textbooks describe psychoanalysis as "dessicated and dead." Nevertheless, psychoanalytic theory continues to inform vigorously both large strands of clinical practice and the theoretical work of academic literary and cultural studies. Clinicians and academic scholars both find in psychoanalytic theory support for the fundamental claim that selfhood
or subjectivity is not an innate given, but an on-going process essentially determined-and therefore potentially disrupted, corrupted, or otherwise troubled-by the relational and more broadly social context. This surface agreement notwithstanding, the theoretical paradigms from psychoanalysis on which clinicians and academic scholars rely remain quite different, thus leading them to offer very different interpretations of this fundamental claim and to draw very different implications from it. For instance, academic scholars tend to take their bearings from Freud and Lacan, whereas clinicians prefer to draw on various forms of "relational" psychoanalysis, initiated by British object-relations theory.

The roundtable will examine and discuss explicitly the contrasts and convergences between these theoretical paradigms, as they bear on the general question of the relation between the psychic and the social (particularly, between subjectivity and intersubjectivity), looking for example at what is invited and what is foreclosed in each discourse. Specific issues that might be addressed in this context include the role of Freudian notions of narcissism and melancholia in the formation of identity; the contrast between Freudian identification and relational (provision/deficit) models of subject formation; the formation and incitement of desire by relational or social configurations; conceptions of otherness and corresponding conceptions of intersubjectivity; theories of the formation, development, or constitution of subjectivity. The roundtable will bring together clinicians accomplished in psychoanalytic theory and academic theorists whose research has been informed by psychoanalytic ideas.

April 30, 2008

Hannah Arendt Lecture Series

Lyndsey Jane Stonebridge
Professor of Literature and Critical Theory
University of East Anglia

"Judging in a Lawless World: Hannah Arendt and the Eichmann Trial"

5:00 pm, Crystal Room, Alumnae Hall

Public reception will follow

Lyndsey Stonebridge’s research is on the inter-relations between literature, psychoanalysis and history. Her most recent publications, The Writing of Anxiety and Fiction after Modernism (edited with Marina MacKay), are concerned with the legacies of wartime in mid twentieth-century culture. She is currently working on a new book on writing about war crime trials (Law Writing: Fiction after Nuremberg). Lyndsey Stonebridge is also the one of the co-organisers of W.G. Sebald: In Memoriam, an Interdisciplinary Conference, to be held at University of East Anglia, September 5-7, 2008.

April 3, 2008

Pembroke Seminar Research Videoconference

John Forrester
Department of History and Philosophy of Science
University of Cambridge

"Women and the Reception of Psychoanalysis in Cambridge in the Early Twentieth Century"

CIT Room 269
115 Waterman Street

John Forrester is Professor in the Department of History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Cambridge. He is the author of numerous books and articles on psychoanalysis, including Truth Games: Lies, Money, and Psychoanalysis; Dispatches from the Freud Wars: Psychoanalysis and Its Passions; and The Seductions of Psychoanalysis: Freud, Lacan and Derrida.

March 7, 2008

Gender and the Politics of "Traditional" Muslim Practices

9:00 am - 6:30 pm
Crystal Room, Alumnae Hall

In cases where Muslim women and girls are seen as needing to be rescued and advocacy seems imperative—as with honor crimes, female circumcision, early marriage—structural analyses of issues apart from gender can fall away, thus producing little new knowledge and reinforcing stereotypes of Muslim backwardness versus Western modernity. The participants in this conference will look at alternative ways to view so-called “traditional” Muslim practices. They will look at instances where everything from local politics to transnational economics might contribute to a given practice, and where the political, the socio-economic, or the cultural might be the most important factors to consider.

Click here for additional information and a list of conference participants

December 4, 2007

Pembroke Seminar Research Lecture

Judith Guss Teicholz

"A Strange Convergence: Postmodern
Theory, Infant Research, & Psychoanalysis"

5:30 pm, Crystal Room, Alumnae Hall

Public reception will follow

Judith Teicholz is a Supervising Analyst and Faculty member at the Massachusetts Institute for Psychoanalysis (MIP), and on the adjunct faculty of the Boston Psychoanalytic Society and Institute. She is the author of Kohut, Loewald, and the Postmoderns (1999) and co-editor of Trauma, Repetition, and Affect Regulation (1998)

October 9, 2007

Pembroke Seminar Research Lecture

Arnold H. Modell

"Identity and the Selection of Value"

5:00 pm, Crystal Room, Alumnae Hall

Public reception will follow

Arnold Modell is Clinical Professor of Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School. He is the author of "The Private Self" (Harvard University Press), and "Imagination and the Meaningful Brain" (MIT Press)