Psychoanalysis Today: Relationships, Authenticity and the Social World
Thursday 25 July 2019 - London
Dr Stephen Seligman in interview with Dr Anne Alvarez
Psychoanalysis has fallen on hard times. It’s unpopular among psychiatrists, leftists, and rightists alike, and the main attention it gets in universities is from a handful of literature professors. But the analytic sensibility offers a foundational ethic for the construction of a more humane, communicative society. Amidst a multiplicity of cultural pressures to not know what is going on, the psychoanalytic ethic of authenticity stands for the recovery of history, and against concealed repressions and distractions. It insists that emotional cruelty and trauma are as real as physical pain, that the truth matters, and that the deeper truths matter the most.
READ MORE...Psychoanalysis can be a powerful resource for subversive thinking, even if it has sometimes fallen into complacency and been too quick to affirm the prejudices of the cultures within which it has functioned. New developments in the field are affirming the humanism and compassion which was always part of its project. Contemporary psychoanalysis is reaching out beyond its traditional rigidities to affirm the value of relationships and direct responsiveness to basic human needs. Race, gender, history, and political economy are increasingly taken into account in both its theories and practices.