Psychoanalysis Archives - Public Seminar

Body & Mind

Driven Mad by a Marxist Daughter

Two billionaire fathers undergo a peculiar, public psychosis

March 25, 2024 • by Justin Joque

What defines Musk and Ackman’s psychosis is no longer their relation to their symbolic fathers, but their relation to that of their daughters’....

Fashion

Fashion, Emotion and the Depths of the Self

February 11, 2020 • by Otto von Busch and Lisa Rubin

Tying fashion to sex is nothing new. Indeed, there is a whole tradition of psychoanalysts since Freud who has never shied away from seeing through clothes and reading sex through dress. Freud famously saw castration anxiety in high heels, and John Flugel recognized how dress is the meandering compromise between ...

Fashion, Emotion and the Depths of the Self

Psyche

Trauma and Race

A Lacanian Study of African American Racial Identity

January 16, 2020 • by Sheldon George

On November 23, 2012, a seventeen-year-old African American boy named Jordan Davis was shot and killed at a gas station in Jacksonville, Florida. During a verbal exchange with Davis over loud music being played by Davis and three friends, the shooter, a forty-seven-year-old white male named Michael Dunn, pulled out ...

Uncategorized

Transsexuality as an Emotional Situation, Aesthetics and a State of Mind

A question of difference.

June 27, 2019 • by Oren Gozlan

--- The problem of sexual difference is, for obvious reasons, of paramount importance in the field of Trans Studies. Historically, the psychoanalytic clinic has leaned on the symbolic oppositions between phallic/castrated, masculine/feminine, and absence/presence in understanding sexual difference. Patricia Gherovici’s recent book “Transgender Psychoanalysis” speaks to the new generation of people ...

Uncategorized

Transgender Psychoanalysis

Lacan, sex, and sinthomes

June 26, 2019 • by Sheila L. Cavanagh

--- On April 20, 2016, Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek described “transgenderism” as an attempt to undermine sexual difference. In other words, he contended that transpeople are reducing what is, for Lacanian psychoanalysis, an unavoidable sexual impasse to an identity-based human rights discourse (that fits nicely into the neo-liberal capitalist order).[i] He suggested that ...

Uncategorized

Matters of Life and Sex

Trans-ing Psychoanalysis

June 25, 2019 • by Patricia Gherovici

In 2010, feeling the need to reflect upon the lessons I learned from my practice, I wrote a book about patients who identified as transgender entitled Please Select Your Gender: From the Invention of Hysteria to the Democratizing of Transgenderism. This book summarized my experience during a time of reform that ...

Feature

An interview with Michael J Feldman

On Ghosts in Contemporary Psychoanalysis

June 5, 2019 • by Michael J. Feldman and Josh Maserow

Ghosts in the Consulting Room: Echoes of Trauma in Psychoanalysis dives into the overwhelming and often unprocessed feelings related to mourning. The book uses clinical examples of people living in a state of marginality or ongoing melancholia. Bringing together a collection of clinical and theoretical papers, Ghosts in the Consulting ...

Feature

Ghosts, Trauma and Travel Fever in Psychoanalysis 2

A reflection on working with the transgenerational transmission of trauma

June 3, 2019 • by Michael J. Feldman

Aaron didn’t connect hunger or continuous travel with the flight of his father’s family during the Second World War. He didn’t relate a director ordering him around now with a domineering father bossing him around as a boy without protection from a depressed mother. Cutting ties to any childhood past, ...

Feature

Ghosts, Trauma and Travel Fever in Psychoanalysis

A reflection on working with the transgenerational transmission of trauma

June 3, 2019 • by Michael J. Feldman

Ghosts in the Consulting Room: Echoes of Trauma in Psychoanalysis, published by the Relational Perspectives Book Series, delves into the overwhelming feelings related to mourning. Bringing together a collection of clinical and theoretical papers, it features accounts of the unpredictable effects of trauma that emerge within clinical work, often unexpectedly, in ways ...

Ghosts, Trauma and Travel Fever in Psychoanalysis

Feature

How to Bring Emotion back into Psychoanalysis

An excerpt from “Minding Emotions”

May 15, 2019 • by Elliot Jurist

In memory of Lew Aron, psychoanalyst, scholar, teacher and friend. Mentalization -- the effort to make sense of our own and others' actions, behavior, and internal states -- is something we all do. And it is a capacity that all psychotherapies aim to improve: the better we are at mentalizing, the more ...

How to Bring Emotion back into Psychoanalysis

Feature

Psychotherapy, Emotions, Communication and The Search For Truth

An interview with Elliot Jurist

May 13, 2019 • by Elliot Jurist and Josh Maserow

In memory of Lew Aron, psychoanalyst, scholar, teacher and friend. Mentalization -- the effort to make sense of our own and others' actions, behavior, and internal states -- is something we all do. And it is a capacity that all psychotherapies aim to improve: the better we are at mentalizing, the more ...

Psychotherapy, Emotions, Communication and The Search For Truth

Feature

Minding Race and Class in Psychodynamic Psychotherapy

Identity in Transference-Focused Psychotherapy

March 7, 2019 • by Daniel Gaztambide

This essay was originally published on March 7 2019. Psychoanalysis in the Barrios: Race, Class, and the Unconscious demonstrates that psychoanalytic principles can be applied successfully in disenfranchised Latino populations, refuting the misguided idea that psychoanalysis is an expensive luxury only for the wealthy. As opposed to most Latin American countries, where ...