THE STATE, SCIENCE AND THE DISCOURSE OF PSYCHOANALYSIS
Against the Commodification of (Un)happiness
Saturday 23 June, 2007,
Fifth Floor, 120 Belsize Lane, London NW 3
£40/30 (cons) Lunch included, if pre-booked.
Further information: 07748 144459
E-mail: [email protected]
PROGRAMME
9.30 – 10.00 Registration
SESSION I
10.00 – 11.30 Chair: Penny Georgiou
Gustavo Dessal (Keynote speaker)
Unhuman Sciences
Heidegger’s warning about the progressive implantation of science as the only path to the revelation of the truth, has not restrained the will to impose knowledge in all the dimensions of the real thing. In the third millennium of civilisation, science and religion share the prestige of being the dominant discourses and can generate an immense mass of belief that feeds the public opinion. Far from considering it an objective knowledge, Lacan described science as ideology, a set of representations destined to guarding a real one, in this case the one of the subject. “Ideology of the suppression of the subject” is the name of a practice with the deliberate or unconscious intention to eliminate the subjective difference, which includes the sexual difference. The practices of desubjectivisation, like those of CBT, are parasitic within scientific speech and it would not be enough to call them a product of science. Psychoanalysis has always been limited to defending its paradigm against the effectiveness of those practices, but perhaps the moment has arrived for taking the offensive and for demonstrating the unhuman of all those practices.
SESSION II
11.30 – 12.30 Chair: Vincent Dachy
Veronique Voruz
Strategies of Resistance
This paper is inspired by a recent conversation between Colin Gordon and Jacques Donzelot, published in France in 2005. In his interview with Gordon, a key figure in the dissemination of Foucault’s work on governmentality, Donzelot takes issue with what he sees as a certain failure of the critical project of governmentality studies in the English-speaking world. This claim deserves to be taken seriously: what do we owe to governmentality studies, and in what sense do they fail? I will argue that, thanks to the work carried out in governmentality studies, we can organise “late modern” strategies of government according to three axes of analysis: the “principle of intelligibility” of a modality of government, the status of the knowledge which supports strategies of power, and the techniques for managing subjects who are ‘non-governable’. Thus risk, expertise and risk-welfare hybrids, psychiatrisation, ethopolitics and CBT have come to the fore of recent governemental analyses striving to conceptualise late modernity. According to Donzelot, however, these critical analyses can hardly be distinguished from the governmental practices under scrutiny. This paper will interrogate the counter-productivity of these seemingly critical analyses.
Bogdan Wolf
Science of the State and the Secret of Psychoanalysis
Since the time of separation of the State from the Church, the former developed an ambiguous relation to science to secure its power. But the power and authority of the secular State derives neither from replacing religion with science nor from its representative, the government, whether democratic or not. The position of the State comes from occupying the position of exception in the discourse as constructed by Lacan. At the same time the State maintains an ambiguous relation to science relying, on the one hand, on the apparatus of measurement that guarantees the presence of the objects of satisfaction and, on the other, on the ‘ideal’ of sameness. The discourse of psychoanalysis, and within it the analysand’s right to the secret – incidentally uncontested for millenia as integral to the Catholic Church – is oriented around the lack in the knowledge about satisfaction and happiness. Psychoanalysis thus gives a chance to ‘for each his/her own unhappiness’.
LUNCH – 12.30 – 14.00
SESSION III
14.00 – 15.30 Chair: Gabriela van den Hoven
Richard Klein
The Atypical Citizen Under Threat by New Labour
The status of atypical citizen is the best we can hope for, says this speaker after Lacan, at the end of an analysis. To achieve its heresy is the duty of every analyst. It’s a Freudian duty against the right-to-jouissance built into the Health Professional Council based on the principles of redemption and of greatest happiness. Certain Freudian principles are indicated that seem to be post colonial when attempts are made to clarify the structure of the HPC and of New Labour in general.
Alan Rowan
The Value of the Negative
This talk will focus on how in the era of the « regulatory state » and the objectifications introduced by modern science it has become all the more essential to elaborate a vision of the subject that allows us to grasp the anguish of subjectivity alongside the difficulties of the social bond without which it seems we risk sinking ever more into a world of delusions.
Roger Litten
The State, Science and the Discourse of Risk
I will focus on recent developments on the regulation front to try to suggest that the notion of risk based regulation is a way of integrating previous uses of evidence based practice and total quality control into an ever more inclusive form of regulation. I will then show how the theme of risk provides a catch-all rhetoric that aligns perfectly with the discourses of state and science.
15.30 – 16.00 COFFEE BREAK
SESSION IV
16.00 – 17:30 Chair: Roger Litten
A Round Table: The Future of Talking Therapies in Contemporary Society
Speakers:
Sally Aldridge,
malcolm allen
Holger Auner
Haya Oakley
Ian Parker
17:30 Wine reception and Film Showing: ‘Life XP’
Conference:
The State, Science and the Discourse of Psychoanalysis
Speaker Profiles
Gustavo Dessal:
A.M.E of the WAP (AME -Analyste Membre de l’Ecole)Chairman of the NUCEP (Nuevo Centro de Estudios de Psicoanálisis) del Instituto del Campo Freudiano en España.
Richard Klein
Practicing Analyst
Member of the LS, NLS, WAP, ALP
MD, working in the NHS
Dr Roger Litten
Practicing Analyst
Member of the LS, NLS, WAP, ALP
Counselling Psychologist working in the NHS
Alan Rowan
Practicing Analyst
Member of the LS, NLS, WAP
Clinical Psychologist working in the NHS
Lecturer MA Psychoanalysis at Middlesex University
Member of the governing board of the College of Psychoanalysts – UK
Dr Veronique Voruz
Practicing psychoanalyst,
Member of ALP, LS, NLS and WAP
Lecturer in Law and Criminology at the University of Leicester
Guest lecturer in Criminology at the School of Criminology of the Université Catholique de Louvain-la-Neuve
Dr Bogdan Wolf
Practicing Analyst
Member of the LS, NLS, WAP, ALP
Round Table:
The Future of Talking Therapies in Contemporary Society
Speaker Profiles
Sally Aldridge
Head of Regulatory Policy BACP
Malcolm Allen
Psychoanalytical Psychotherapist
CEO, British Psychoanalytic Council
Holger W. Auner, MD
Gene Regulation and Chromatin Group
MRC Clinical Sciences Centre
Imperial College
Haya Oakley
Psychoanalyst, The Site for the Contemporary Psychoanalysis
Member of the governing board of the College of Psychoanalysts – UK
Professor Ian Parker:
Secretary of Manchester Psychoanalytic Matrix,
Member of the governing board of the College of Psychoanalysts – UK,
Representative from the Centre for Freudian Analysis and Research to the UKCP.
