Month: December 2024

by Marita Vyrgioti

Psychoanalysis has always had a closer relationship with the psychosocial than commonly acknowledged. Many of Freud’s own writings explicitly engage with issues such as religion, war, sexuality, and the pitfalls of sociality. And social themes abound in various iterations of post-Freudian psychoanalytic thought. By emphasizing the struggle between destructiveness and the propensity for love and reparation, Melanie Klein offered an account of human subjectivity that is both psychological and sociological. And D. W. Winnicott discussed democracy in relation to both the family and the larger society. Historians and psychosocial theorists have appraised Klein’s and Winnicott’s contributions to the formation of social democracy in Britain during the modern era. Indeed, from the beginning, psychoanalysis has been frequently engaged with the sociopolitical world.

Yet certain tensions between the intrapsychic and the psychosocial have also increased over time. Few psychoanalysts enter the public sphere directly to engage with social issues. For the most part, their interventions are applications of psychoanalytic models to social phenomena. Many analysts are still reluctant to consider closely the implications of war, neoliberalism, violence against women, colonialism, racism and racial oppression, climate destruction, and technological determinism in theorizing the psychoanalytic subject.

Continue reading “Reflections from the BA in Psychosocial and Psychoanalytic Studies at the University of Essex”

The following press release comes to us from our friends at ROOM: A Sketchbook for Analytic Action and will be of special interest to readers of Psyche on Campus. This hour-long film–free to view at ROOM‘s Web site–captures an extraordinarily moving and exigent dialogue between two psychoanalysts: one Palestinian and one Israeli.

Continue reading “Special announcement of a film-release: “Speaking of Home: An Intimate Exchange on Israel-Palestine””