A Freudian Perspective on What Ails the World Today

A Colloquium of

The Helix Center for Interdisciplinary Investigation

and

L’ Association Des Amis de Passages (ADAPes) Comité Freud

December 5th and 6th, 2015

at the Helix Center

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Participants:

Marilia Aisenstein

Psychoanalyst; Former President, Société Psychanalyste de Paris

(Paris Psychoanalytic Society)

Ian Buckingham

Psychoanalyst; President, New York Psychoanalytic Society & Institute

Vincent Crapanzano

Distinguished Professor of Anthropology and Comparative Literature,

Graduate Center of the City University of New York

Philippe Douste-Blazy

United Nations Under-Secretary-General

Paul Fry

Professor Emeritus of English and Literature, Yale University

Lynn Gamwell

Writer, Professor of Humanities, School of Visual Arts, New York

Claude Landman

Psychoanalyst; Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes en Psychopathologies (EPhEP)

(Practical School of Higher Studies in Psychopathologies)

Patrick Landman

Psychoanalyst; Professor, Université de Paris VII (Paris Diderot University)

Emile H. Malet

Psychoanalyst; Director, Passages magazine and ADAPes

Charles Melman

Psychoanalyst; Founder, Association Lacanienne Internationale

(International Lacanian Association); Co-Founder, Fondation Européenne pour La Psychanalyse (European Foundation for Psychoanalysis);

Dean, Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes en Psychopathologies (EPhEP)

(Practical School of Higher Studies in Psychopathologies)

Paola Mieli

Psychoanalyst; President, Après-Coup Psychoanalytic Association

Jean-Jacques Moscovitz

Psychoanalyst; Founding Member, Psychanalyse Actuelle (Current Psychoanalysis)

Edward Nersessian

Psychoanalyst; Director, Helix Center for Interdisciplinary Investigation

Gérard Pommier

Psychoanalyst; Professor, Université de Paris VII (Paris Diderot University);

Co-Founder, Fondation Européenne pour La Psychanalyse

(European Foundation for Psychoanalysis)

Jean-Michel Rabaté

Professor of English and Comparative Literature, University of Pennsylvania

George Schwab

Co-founder, National Committee on American Foreign Policy;

Professor Emeritus of History, City College and Graduate Center

of the City University of New York

Pierre de Senarclens

Author; Professor of International Relations, Université de Lausanne

(University of Lausanne) (UNIL)

Mark Smaller

Psychoanalyst; President, American Psychoanalytic Association

Manya Steinkoler

Psychoanalyst; Assistant Professor of English,

Borough of Manhattan Community College

Anne Videau

Professor of Latin Language & Literature, Université Paris Ouest Nanterre La Défense

(Paris West University);

Director, Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes en Psychopathologies

(EPhEP) (Practical School of Higher Studies in Psychopathologies)

Joel Whitebook

Psychoanalyst; Assistant Clinical Professor, of Medical Psychology (in Psychiatry),

Columbia University Center for Psychoanalytic Training & Research

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THIS PROGRAM WILL BE LIVE STREAMED

OR RECORDED FOR LATER VIEWING

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Saturday, December 5th

Introduction: 10:00 -10:30 am

Education: 10:30 – 12:00 pm

Education and Civilizational Crisis: 2:00 – 3:30 pm

Identity: 4:00 – 5:30 pm

Sunday, December 6th

Culture: 9:30 – 11:00 am

Conclusion: 11:30 am – 1:00 pm

For the further illumination of and greater appreciation for the ideas of the father of psychoanalysis, the The ADAPes Freud Committee, founded in 2014, is organizing its first colloquium abroad in order to fight against contemporary ills: crises of identity, religious and nationalist extremism, and failures in education…Freud’s thinking appears to us to be a key to an understanding of these global realities.

The distinguished members of the Comité and the Freud Fund are thus most pleased to inaugurate a series of international conferences in dialogue with American peers, through the joint sponsorship of the Helix Center for Interdisciplinary Studies.

Professors in the humanities and social sciences, psychoanalysts, and cultural and political personages will hold roundtable discussions on three themes:

• Identity formation
• Education and the thirst for knowledge
• Knowledge to overcome religious and nationalist extremism

The ordinary, psycho-physiological preconditions of identity formation, which characteristically belong to a closed system (whether familial, national, linguistic, or religious), are, in effect, all encompassing and exclusionary.  Freud’s teachings on the psychology of the masses – usually far removed from educational programs – are required  to make a clear distinction between the homeland (patrie, the open political system decided by the will of the citizens) and the nation (a closed, blood-related system embodying a will ascribed to a hypothetical ancestral founder). The latter definition is even more applicable to religious communities, accounting for the possible integration of civil and religious powers.

Freud held that education was one of the impossible professions, along with government and psychoanalysis. The growing secularization of the individual world leads to the belief that one can expect more gratification from an organic connection to the environment than from spiritual and communal connections. If that is the case, what is there to teach other than technological pragmatism, that is to say, tools adapted to mere organismic life, and the idea of “every man for himself”?

The voice of God-as-Savior, which was heretofore hoped for and beloved, has no more currency in our world, now obscured or extinguished by the din of the music and the messages blaring continuously through our headphones. The voice of the teacher is lost, stifled by that of entertainment. If, as Hegel put forth, the primary desire of man is not to satisfy basic needs, but rather to be recognized, then his last recourse – which was once the guiding voice of God – is the desire to know.

Perhaps we are now tasked with facilitating access to, or rather, midwifing the rebirth – since it was present at our Hellenic origins – of something akin to the ruckus of the gods.

In a context of globalizing consumerism, the cultural uniformity of lifestyles and behaviors may provoke an exacerbation of identity problems, an autarchic withdrawal, the selling out of law, and manifold social violence. Such phenomena are found almost everywhere, in conjunction with an unprecedented and unrelenting economic and social crisis, tied to resurfacing nationalism and populism, and to the brutal expression of religious fundamentalism. The world’s democracies are in jeopardy. Nationalism feeds off of a double illusion: the ego-ideal joins with the momentum of the crowds led by lawless leaders, and with a view towards satisfying uninhibited drives (desires) without exterior constraint.

As a consequence, the fringes of the population are further marginalized and are ready to “withdraw from reality.” In the face of this malaise, the political response is muffled by the noises and resentments of the masses. “Whenever I have expressed feelings of national exaltation,” wrote Freud, “I have tried to suppress them as disastrous and unfair.” He wrote elsewhere, “Fools, visionaries, sufferers from delusions, neurotics and lunatics have played great roles at all times in the history of mankind and not merely when the accident of birth had bequeathed them sovereignty. Usually they have wreaked havoc; but not always.”

Freudian knowledge represents a return to reason, against the downward slide of identity crisis, religious and nationalist extremism; it gives meaning to humanism and cosmopolitanism.