Berlin programme

FASCIST IMAGINARIES
SYMPOSIUM IN THE BERLIN PSYCHOANALYTIC INSTITUTE,
JUNE 3rd-5th 2022

Address: Berliner Psychoanalytisches Institut, Karl-Abraham-Institut,
Körnerstr. 11, 10785 Berlin

Register for this conference by May 25th

“Since it would be impossible for fascism to win the masses through rational arguments,” wrote Adorno, “its propaganda must necessarily be deflected from discursive thinking; it must be oriented psychologically, and has to mobilize irrational, unconscious, regressive processes.” In line with this reasoning, this conference is concerned with fascist images, the fascist imagination, how this ideology appeals to and aims to stir up affects and fantasies, conscious and unconscious, about self and others, pasts and futures, bodies, boundaries, threats and desires, hardness and fluidity. It includes contributions that consider fascism and fascist movements and tendencies from different geographical perspectives and locations, and that engage with different aspects of this theme, not just in the past, but in our present.

 

FRIDAY 3rd

09.00-09.30 Opening address with presentation round

Chair: Amelie Klambeck

09.30-10.20 CLAUDIA THUßBAS – Mothers made of steel, steeled babies: National socialist fantasies about motherhood

10.30-11.20 LENE AUESTAD – Stereotypes and magical thinking in fascist rhetoric

11.30-12.20 ANGELIKA EBRECHT-LAERMANN –The destructiveness of art and beauty. Superego perversions in dreams about fascist imaginaries

12.20-14.00 Lunch

Chair: Jonathan Sklar

14.00-14.50 JOHN SWEDENMARK – A call for “humanity”: Modernist art as resistance to and interpretation of Fascism

15.00-15.50 BARNABY B. BARRATT – Notes on Authoritarian Imaginaries: The Relevance of Libidinality to the Vicissitudes of Belonging, Othering and Hating

16.00-17.20 AMNON BAR-OR/ GABY BONWITT – Absence and Erasure as an Expression of a Fascist-Monumental Non-Construction in Israel

 

SATURDAY 4th

Chair: Claudia Thußbas

10.00-10.50 JONATHAN SKLAR – Apocalyptic life and the missing debate

11.00-11.50 KAREN SZTAJNBERG, RODRIGO BRANDĂO – Fascism as Embodied Praxis

12.00-12.50 Open discussion/reflection

12.50-14.30 Lunch

Chair: Eva Öhrner

14.30-15.20 CHRISTOS PANAGIOTOU – Imagining nationalism through Arnold Böcklin’s painting, The isle of the dead

15.30-16.20 ROTRAUT DE CLERCK – Dawning: Fascist Ideologies and the emergence of M. Klein’s thinking in Berlin 1924/25.

16.30-17.20 CLAUDIA FRANK – “Fascism is more of a natural state than democracy” (N. Mailer). On disquieting clinical and social dynamics of non-thinking as manifestations of the death drive

17.30-18.20 DAPHNA BAHAT – Social dreaming matrix (experiential activity)

(Joint dinner, covered by the organizers, in the evening)

 

SUNDAY 5th                                                                                                                                                                             

Chair: Angelika Ebrecht-Laermann

10.00-10.50 RENÉE DANZIGER – Fascism, Populism, and The Big Lie

11.00-11.50 ALEX SIERCK – Inner-Enfranchisement and the Right to Vote: On Desire, the Psychoid, and the Practice of Democracy

12.00-13.00 Closing discussion, feedback about the conference

 

The time frame for each paper is 30 min for the presentation itself + 20 min for discussion, 50 min in total, and with a 10 min break in between each paper. This is an interdisciplinary conference. Perspectives from different psychoanalytic schools will be most welcome. We promote discussion among the presenters and participants; the symposium series creates a space where representatives of different perspectives come together, engage with one another’s contributions and participate in a community of thought. Therefore, attendance of the whole symposium is obligatory. We would like to thank the Berlin Psychoanalytic Institute.

Register to participate in this conference by May 25th

 

ABOUT THE PRESENTERS:

LENE AUESTAD, Dr. of Philosophy from the University of Oslo, founder of Psychoanalysis and Politics, Associate member of the Norwegian Psychoanalytic Society

AMNON BAR-OR, GABI BONWITT, Amnon Bar-Or is a Prof. Arch. Architect, Senior Lecturer, Tel Aviv University Azrieli School of Architecture, Israel. Gaby Bonwitt is a Training analyst, Israeli Psychoanalytic Society, prev. Board member, Director of Group Relations conferences

BARNABY B. BARRATT, PhD, DHS, Training and Supervising Analyst, South African Psychoanalytic Association; Supervising Analyst, Indian Psychoanalytic Society; Senior Researcher WITS Institute for Social and Economic Research, University of Witwatersrand (Johannesburg); Director of Doctoral Studies, Parkmore Institute

ROTRAUT DE CLERCK, Psychoanalyst in private practice. Training analyst at the Frankfurt Psychoanalytic Institute (FPI) and the Mainz Psychoanalytic Institute (mpi). Post graduate training in Kleinian Psychoanalysis at the Tavistock Clinic and the Institute of Psychoanalysis in London 1985/86. Associated with the Institute of Psycho-analysis as long term guest Chair of the EPF group: “Psychoanalysis in Literature – Literature in Psychoanalysis”; Consultant IPA in Culture Committee.

RENÉE DANZIGER, Psychoanalyst, British Psychoanalytic Society, D.Phil in Politics, Honorary Senior Lecturer, Psychoanalysis Unit, University College London

ANGELIKA EBRECHT-LAERMANN, Prof. Dr. phil., Training analyst, Berlin Psychoanalytical Institute, DPV

CLAUDIA FRANK, Priv.-Doz. Dr. med.; Training analyst, DPV, Stuttgart

CHRISTOS PANAGIOTOU, Department of Fine Arts, Cyprus University of Technology

ALEX SIERCK, Attorney-at-Law, Analyst-in-Training, Jungian Psychoanalytic Association, New York

JONATHAN SKLAR, Training analyst, British Psychoanalytic Society

JOHN SWEDENMARK, Translator and freelance Schriftsteller, living in Stockholm. He has published the books Kritikmaskinen and  Baklängesöversättning. Member of the editorial board of the psychoanalytic/cultural journal Divan since 1992

KAREN SZTAJNBERG, RODRIGO BRANDĂO, Karen Sztajnberg is a working artist and doctoral candidate at the Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis, researching spectatorship, reception, and Latin American Cinema. Rodrigo Brandão is Senior Director, Communications and Strategy at The Intercept

CLAUDIA THUßBAS, Dr. phil., Training analyst, Berlin Psychoanalytical Institute, DPV

 

Psychoanalysis and Politics is registered as a non-profit organization
in Norway with the org.no. 998 503 221.
Conferences have been held in 10 European countries since 2010.

Which Identity? Tribalism and Humanism

Which Identity? Tribalism and Humanism

Call for papers

Spring symposium in the rooms of the Institute of Group Analysis,
May 29th-31st 2020

1 Daleham Gardens, London, NW3 5BY, UK

“I knew that I had experienced the dream, but I do not know who wrote it. I wanted desparately to be introduced to the writer who could write those lines”, declared James Grotstein (1981). The statement points towards a questioning of personal identity, opening up to experiences at once alien and familiar. Relating to the essay The Uncanny and the self-reference it contains, Mark Fisher (2016) noted, “Freud’s unheimlich is about the strange within the familiar, the strangely familiar, the familiar as strange – about the way in which the domestic world does not coincide with itself. […] Psychoanalysis itself is an unheimlich genre; it is haunted by an outside which it circles around but can never fully acknowledge or affirm”.

In The Ego and the Id, we encounter the traces of this outside as an inside in the description of introjection as a setting up of the object inside the I, perhaps “the sole condition under which” the it can give up its objects. This account leads to a characterisation of the I as “a precipate of abandoned object-cathexes” which furthermore contains those object-choices’ history. The same text offers another definition in stating that the I is first and foremost a bodily I, and adding in a footnote that it “is ultimately derived from bodily sensations, chiefly from those springing from the surface of the body” (26). Thus, aside from the body as an object, an objective entity, there is the idea of the body as that through which the rest is experienced, as a sensing subject. The inner object or objects represent another duality, as core parts of the I, yet originally other.

We might think of Erik Erikson’s (1950) framing of identity development in terms of a series of stages with the potential for crises, distinguishing personal and social or cultural identity. Drawing on D. W. Winnicott (1951), Farhad Dalal (2002) emphasises how groups come together on the basis of illusory experiences, transitional phenomena. “In other words, group identity is always an abstraction, a reification, its basis being the shared ‘similarity of illusory experiences’. And it is precisely because of its illusory nature that it needs to be defended so vigorously.”

“As children we realized that we were different from boys and that we were treated different—for example, when we were told in the same breath to be quiet both for the sake of being ‘ladylike’ and to make us less objectionable in the eyes of white people. In the process of consciousness-raising, actually life-sharing, we began to recognize the commonality of our experiences and, from the sharing and growing consciousness, to build a politics that will change our lives and inevitably end our oppression”, wrote anti-racist feminist Zillah R. Eisenstein (1978). Identity politics are closely connected to the ascription that some social groups are oppressed (such as women, ethnic minorities, and sexual minorities), the claim that people who belong to those groups are, by virtue of their social identities, more vulnerable to forms of oppression such as cultural imperialism, violence, exploitation of labour, marginalization, or powerlessness. Identity politics can be right-wing as well as left-wing, with white supremacist and fascist movements exemplifying the former. Different forms of identity politics and debates about them are prominent in today’s political landscape, as do questions of how to define it, and of forms of identity politics that are unrecognized and unacknowledged. “When “identity politics” is practiced in such a way that it allows a small group to access and maintain power, it gets labeled as “norms” and treated as simply the way the world works,” wrote Helaine Olen (2019). Identity politics might for instance be based on religion, social class, culture, language, disability, education, race or ethnicity, language, sex, gender identity, or sexual orientation. Ethical and political questions include – Who is allowed to challenge someone’s professed identity? – Who gets to play with a social identity?

The word “tribe” can be defined as an extended kin group or clan with a common ancestor, or it can be described as a group with shared interests, lifestyles and habits. While tribal societies have been pushed to the edges of the Western world, tribalism, in the second sense, – in the sense of the tendency to identify, associate wih and support people who are seen to resemble oneself – is arguably undiminished. One sense of the word ‘humanism’ describes an opposite tendency to that of ‘tribalism’, signifying a recognition and benevolence towards all human beings without distinction.

The line from a drama by Terence, African and a former slave, and quoted by among others Cicero, Seneca and Saint Augustine, declared the message of universalism, “Homo sum: humani nihil a me alienum puto.“, “I am a human being: and I deem nothing pertaining to humanity is foreign to me.” After the Second World War, The United Nations Charter (1945) committed all member states to promote “universal respect for, and observance of, human rights and fundamental freedoms for all without distinction as to race, sex, language, or religion”. As these ideas of universality are once again being challenged in today’s world, we might ask about the basis for feelings of commonality between human beings, and about the grounds for identification.

This is an interdisciplinary conference – we invite theoretical contributions and historical, literary or clinical case studies on these and related themes from philosophers, sociologists, psychoanalysts, psychotherapists, group analysts, literary theorists, historians, anthropologists, and others. Perspectives from different psychoanalytic schools will be most welcome. We promote discussion among the presenters and participants, for the symposium series creates a space where representatives of different perspectives come together, engage with one another’s contributions and participate in a community of thought. Therefore, attendance to the whole symposium is obligatory. Due to the nature of the forum audio recording is not permitted.

Presentations are expected to take half an hour. Another 20 minutes is set aside for discussion. There is a 10 min break in between each paper. Please send an abstract of 200 to 300 words, attached in a word-document, to psychoanalysis.politics[at]gmail.com by February 22nd 2020. We will respond by, and present a preliminary programme on March 1st 2020. If you would like to sign up to participate without presenting a paper, please contact us after this date.

This is a relatively small symposium where active participation is encouraged and an enjoyable social atmosphere is sought. A participation fee, which includes one shared dinner with wine, of £ 299 before March 20th 2020 – £ 383 between March 20th 2020 and May 1st 2020 – £ 449 after May 1st, is to be paid before the symposium.

Your place is only confirmed once we have received your registration including payment is completed. Additional information will be given after your abstract has been accepted or after the programme has been finalized.

We would like to thank the Institute of Group Analysis.

Unfortunately, we are unable to offer travel grants or other forms of financial assistance for this event, though we will be able to assist you in finding affordable accommodation after March 1st 2020. Please contact us if you wish to make a donation towards the conference. We thank all donors in advance!

NB: Please make sure you read the Guide for abstracts thoroughly.

Non-exclusive list of some relevant literature

Abraham, N./Torok, M./Rand, N. ed. (1975) “The Lost Object – Me: Notes on Endocryptic Identification” in The Shell and the Kernel, vol 1. Chicago/London: University of Chicago Press, 1994, pp. 139-156.

Adorno, T.W./Horkheimer, M. ([1944]1997) Dialectic of Enlightenment. London/New York: Verso.

Adorno, T.W/Frenkel-Brunswik, E./Levinson, D. J./Sanford, R. N. (1950) The Authoritarian Personality. N.Y: Harpers & Brothers.

Auestad, L. ed. (2012) Psychoanalysis and Politics. Exclusion and the Politics of Representation. London: Karnac/ Routledge.

Auestad, L. ed. (2014) Nationalism and the Body Politic. Psychoanalysis and the Rise of Ethnocentricm and Xenophobia. London: Karnac/ Routledge.

Auestad, L. (2015) Respect, Plurality, and Prejudice. A Psychoanalytical and Philosophical Enquiry into the Dynamics of Social Exclusion and Discrimination. London: Karnac/ Routledge.

Auestad, L. ed. (2017) Shared Traumas, Silent Loss, Public and Private Mourning. London: Karnac/ Routledge.

Auestad, L., Treacher Kabesh, A. eds. (2017) Traces of Violence and Freedom of Thought. London/ New York: Palgrave.

Bion, W. R. (1961) Experiences in Groups and Other Papers. London: Tavistock.

Butler, J. (2005) Giving Account of Oneself. New York: Fordham University Press.

Dalal, F. (1998) Taking the Group Seriously. Towards a Post-Foulksian Group Analytic Theory. London/ Philadelphia: Jessica Kingsley.

Dalal, F. (2002) Race, Colour and the Proceses of Racialization. London/New York: Routledge.

Eisenstein, Z. R. (1978) The Combahee River Collective Statement http://circuitous.org/scraps/combahee.html

Erikson, E. (1950) Childhood and Society. New York: W. W. Norton & Co.

Fischer, M. (2016) The Weird and the Eerie. London: Repeater Books.

Freud, S. (1900a) The Interpretation of Dreams, SE, vol. 4 & 5.

Freud, S. (1912-13) Totem and Taboo. SE, vol. 13.

Freud, S. (1914c) On Narcissism: An Introduction. SE, vol. 14.

Freud, S. (1919h) The Uncanny SE, vol. 17.

Freud, S. (1921c) Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego. SE, vol. 18.

Freud. S. (1923b) The Ego and the Id. SE, vol. 19.

Freud, S. (1939a [1937-39]) Moses and Monotheism: Three Essays, SE, vol. 23.

Goffman, E. ([1959]1971) The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. London: Penguin Books.

Grotstein, J. (1981/1983) “Who Is the Dreamer Who Dreams the Dream and Who is the Dreamer Who Understands It?” in J. S. Grotstein ed. Do I Dare Disturb the Universe? A Memorial to W. R. Bion. London: Karnac.

Hopper, E. (2003) Traumatic Experience in the Unconscious Life of Groups. The Fourth Basic Assumption: Incohesion: Aggregation/Massification or (ba) I:A/M. London/Philadelphia: Jessica Kingsley Publishers.

Hopper, E./Weinberg, H. (2011) eds. The Social Unconscious in Persons, Groups and Societies. Vol. 1. Mainly Theory. London: Karnac.

Hopper, E./Weinberg, H. (2016) eds. The Social Unconscious in Persons, Groups and Societies. Vol. 2. Mainly Foundation Matrices. London: Karnac.

Hopper, E./Weinberg, H. (2017) eds. The Social Unconscious in Persons, Groups and Societies. Vol. 1. The Foundation Matrix Extended and Re-Configured. London: Karnac.

Kaës, R. (2007) “The question of the unconscious in common and shared psychic spaces” in J. C. Calich/H. Hinz eds. The Unconscious. Further Reflections. London: International Psychoanalytical Association, pp. 93-119.

Lacan, J. (1949) “The Mirror Stage as Formative of the I Function, as Revealed in Psychoanalytic Experience” in Écrits. The First Complete Edition in English. London/New York: Norton, 2006, pp. 75-81.

Laplanche, J. (1999[1992]) “The Unfinished Copernican Revolution” in Essays on Otherness. London/New York: Routledge.

Layton, L. (2008) “What Divides the Subject? Psychoanalytic Reflections on Subjectivity, Subjection and Resistance” in Subjectivity no. 22, pp. 60–72.

Meyers, D. T. (1994) Subjection & Subjectivity. Psychoanalytic Feminism & Moral Philosophy. New York/London: Routledge.

Olen, H. (2019) “The left embraces identity politics. But the right practices it much more effectively”, Washington Post, May 24th https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2019/05/24/left-embraces-identity-politics-right-practices-it-much-more-effectively/

Rickman, J. (1951) “Number and the human sciences” in John Rickman/Pearl King ed. No Ordinary Psychoanalyst. London: Karnac, 2003, pp. 109-115.

Sedgwick, E. K. (1985/2016) Between Men. English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire. New York: Columbia University Press.

Sinclair, V./Steinkoler, M. (2019) On Psychoanalysis and Violence. Contemporary Lacanian Perspectives. London/ New York: Routledge.

Taylor, C. (1989) Sources of the Self. The Making of the Modern Identity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Taylor, G. (1985) Pride, Shame and Guilt. Emotions of Self-Assessment. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Tubert-Oklander, J. (2014) The One and the Many. Relational Psychoanalysis and Group Analysis. London: Karnac.

UN (1945) Charter of the United Nations https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charter_of_the_United_Nations

Winnicott, (1951) “Transitional objects and transitional phenomena” in Through Paedriatrics to Psychoanalysis. London: Hogarth Press.

Winnicott, D. W. (1968) “The Use of an Object and Relating through Identifications” in Playing and Reality. London/New York: Routledge, 1971/2005, pp. 115-127.