Help

Events and Seminars

Event	:	Cultural Imagination in Psychoanalytic Theory and Practice with Sudhir Kakar
Venue	:	Online
Date	:	18/11/2023
Duration	:	10:30 am - 1pm GMT
Extra Info	:	The mental representations of culture, our cultural imagination, has been a relatively unexplored territory in psychoanalytic discourse. And yet, it is disseminated through myths, legends, iconic artworks and in tales told to stories. Equally, cultural imagination can be seen in parenting, in the future vistas they hold out to their children and even in the way their children are touched, fed and carried about. If the ego is a skin ego, dependent upon the physical body to find its mental representation, then the early life of skin—shaped after all by culture—impacts how ego gets constructed in different cultural contexts. For more than a century, the cultural imagination of psychoanalysis has been assumed and largely continues to be assumed as being Western, despite Western culture being clearly distinguishable from the cultural imaginations of Indian, Chinese, Japanese, Iranian and other non-Western civilizations. The rise of the multi-cultural movement in many Western societies, has resulted in more and more calls from analysts to re-examine the issue of culture in psychoanalysis. Yet despite this, it is the cultures of race and class rather than that of a society or even a civilization that continue to draw most psychoanalytic attention. The continuing resistance in psychoanalysis to acknowledge the crucial role of cultural imagination in the constitution of the psyche is due to the way psychoanalysis imagines itself. Psychoanalysis’ self-understanding is as a unique, ‘depth’ psychology, in contrast to the more ‘superficial’ psychologies that are oriented towards cultural and social surround of the person. Psychoanalysis considers itself unique in that it can access the instinctual forces operating in the depth of the human psyche, in the unconscious; these are forces of a person’s biological nature that antecede culture. But what if this bedrock of psychoanalytic thought is susceptible to doubt? If we can show how culturally specific and socially constructed our ideas of nature , and thus human nature actually are? This talk will seek to address questions raised for psychoanalytic theories and models, as also for clinical practice, by the cultural imaginations of non-western civilizations.
Organised By	:	Hallam Institute of Psychotherapy
Web Link	:	https://www.hallaminstitute.org/product/ticket-cultural-imagination/