Events and Seminars
| Event | : | The Political Mind Seminars 2017 / April 25th Lecture with Rod Tweedy & Kate Pugh - The Political Self: Understanding the Social & Psychological Context for Mental Illness |
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| Venue | : | The Institute of Psychoanalysis, Byron House, 112a Shirland Road, London W9 2BT |
| Date | : | 25/04/2017 |
| Duration | : | 8.15 - 9.45pm (Tuesdays - April 25 - 25 July 2017) |
| Extra Info | : | A series of fourteen seminars. The role of the unconscious in political and social life. In times of political turmoil, where does one turn for insight? "Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold”? (Yeats). “The old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear”(Gramsci) “Everything must change so that everything can stay the same." (Tancredi in The Leopard) Introduction: Freud's contribution to political thinking cannot be underestimated. He questioned the origin and structure of society in Totem and Taboo, unmasked illusions and dogmas in The Future of an Illusion and Civilization and its Discontents, criticised Bolshevism in the New Introductory Lecture on Psychoanalysis, and described the foundation of a people, in Moses and Monotheism. He criticised "civilised sexual morality" as the source of "the nervous illness of modern times." In Mass Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego he dismantles the concepts of leader, crowd, and power. In the agency of the superego, Freud ascribed values, ideals, and imperatives associated with morality and society to the psyche. In fact the sexual drive, the death drive, and the instinct for mastery exercises an implacable determinism throughout existence, social and political, individual and psychological. Political thought as in Machiavelli, Hobbes, Marx, Weber, and others — intersect and illustrate many of Freud's ideas. e.g. the radical rejection of all forms of illusion, the will to lucidity based on a flexible rationality, the dismantling of connections within communities, the emphasis on the autonomy and responsibility of the individual subject. These seminars will explore Psychoanalysis and Politics in the light of contemporary issues such as racism, terrorism, totalitarian thinking, NHS ,the market economy, ecology, gender and sexuality. |
| Organised By | : | The Institute of Psychoanalysis |
| Web Link | : | http://www.psychoanalysis.org.uk/civicrm/event/info?id=469&reset=1 |