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Dear Colleague,
The deadline is coming up soon (December 10th) for this exciting conference.
However, you still have 10 days to submit your abstract of 200-300 words. We
encourage you to share your ideas and to participate in this important
event. Please send an abstract ASAP to
psychoanalysis.politics@libraryofsocialscience.com.
This conference poses a fundamental question: given the revival of
nationalist ideology, what fantasies do these ideas give voice to? One theme
is the fantasy of the nation as a body— and the Other (or heretic) as a
foreign body that must be extirpated.
DETAILS—AND THE COMPLETE CALL FOR PAPERS APPEAR BELOW.
The Facebook page for Psychoanalysis and Politics is:
http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=168892079514
A book is planned based on papers presented at the conference.
With regards,
Hugh Galford, Marketing Director
Library of Social Science
718-393-1104
P. S. LIBRARY OF SOCIAL SCIENCE—recognized as the premier firm organizing
book exhibits for scholarly conferences—also promotes and distributes
calls-for-papers for meetings we consider significant. For details, see
http://www.libraryofsocialscience.com/cfps.html and/or call 718-393-1104.
PSYCHOANALYSIS AND POLITICS:
'NATIONALISM AND THE BODY POLITIC'
CALL FOR PAPERS – WINTER SYMPOSIUM
OSLO 25th to 27th of MARCH 2011
Venue: The Norwegian Psychoanalytical Society.
Confirmed speakers thus far include:
MEENAKSHIE VERMA, Anthropology EHESS, Paris, "Violence, Memory, Amnesia and
Propitiation: Anthropological Knowledge of Partition"
MARTYN HOUSDEN, Reader in Modern History, University of Bradford, UK, "Erich
Fromm on Politics And the Nation"
SVEIN TJELTA, Group Analyst/Clinical psychologist, Norway, "The Making of
the Iso-Type"
EARL HOPPER, Psychoanalyst, British Psychoanalytical Society, Group Analyst,
International Association of Group Psychotherapy, "Traumatised Social
Systems and the Basic assumption of Incohesion: Aggregation/ Massification
or (ba) I:A/M"
SZYMON WRÓBEL, Associate Professor, Inst. of Philosophy and Sociology,
Polish Academy of Sciences, Inst. for Interdisciplinary Studies, University
of Warsaw, "Populist Logic and the Concept of the Political. The Case of
Poland"
CALL FOR PAPERS
We cannot, argued Gullestad in Plausible Prejudice (2006), "understand the
appeal of right-wing politics if we do not take into account how this
rhetoric is underpinned by and embedded in rearticulated neo-ethnic ideas."
She argued that politicians from other than the right-wing populist parties
have resisted specific ways of talking that are considered too extremist,
rather than their underlying frame of interpretation. Recent news stories
appear to lend support to her view: Civil rights campaigners have accused
governments, not just in France but across Europe, of adopting
anti-immigrant and anti-Roma policies to win popular support. The issue of
the so-called 'Ground Zero mosque' has caused agitation in the US. The
Sweden Democrats has been battling up in the recent elections, appealing to
hostility towards immigrants and Muslims in particular, employing the slogan
"Tradition and Security".
In relation to the Wolf-man's phantasies, where the passive role he had
played towards his sister had been envisioned as reversed, Freud (1914)
wrote that they "corresponded exactly to the legends by means of which a
nation that has become great and proud tries to conceal the insignificance
and failure of its beginnings." Given that we are witnessing a revival of
nationalist ideas, this conference poses the question of what fantasies
these give voice to. It encourages thinking about the nature of the iconic
images celebrated and to what forms of violence and what losses are
derealized within this framework of interpretation.
One might think in terms of 'cultures of fear' (Moïsi (2009) in reference to
recent developments in USA and Europe), of fantasies of fusion or 'imagined
sameness' (Gullestad). Alongside the image of the nation as a mother and/or
father, Reich (1933) called attention to the fantasy of the nation as a
body. This metaphor is echoed in Money-Kyrle's (1939) characterization of
'group hypochondria' in connection with the burning of witches and heretics;
"The Church, and State united to it, could tolerate no foreign body within
itself, and turned ferociously upon any that it found."
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, literary theorists, historians and others. Perspectives
from different psychoanalytic schools will be most welcome. Papers must not
be previously published and must be available for publication in the planned
conference book. Presentations are expected to take half an hour; another 30
minutes is set aside for discussion.
Please send an abstract of 200 to 300 words to
psychoanalysis.politics@libraryofsocialscience.com by December 10th 2010.
Organising Committee
Lene Auestad, Research Fellow, Philosophy, University of Oslo/Centre for
Studies of the Holocaust and Religious Minorities/ currently London.
Jonathan Davidoff, Psychologist and Postgraduate Student in Psychoanalytic
Psychotherapy at the Tavistock Centre, London. Karl Eldar Evang,
Psychologist from the University of Oslo, Psychoanalyst. Board member of the
Norwegian Psychoanalytic Society. Håvard Nilsen, Intellectual Historian from
the University of Oslo.
