SSCP Curriculum 2020/21

All Seminars take place on alternate Saturdays at The Choristers Building (the green room, 1st floor), Cathedral Green, Truro or via Zoom when necessary due to covid19

Morning seminar: 10.00 am – 1.00 pm

Afternoon seminar: 2.00 pm – 5.00 pm

Autumn term: October 17, 31, November 14, 28, December 12

Morning seminars: Sally Sales — Clinical position after Lacan: affect, entanglement and enjoyment ‘beyond’ injury

The SSCP training places a central importance on the idea of taking up a clinical position.  This stands in marked contrast to the majority of other UK trainings where there is a clinical position taught and installed with no critical engagement with how that position has been formed and structured. The idea of position was inaugurated by Lacan with his emphasis on our dual formation within language and eroticised kinship relations. Lacan’s structuralism introduced into psychoanalysis a much needed focus on the systems that produce subjects and how those systems – linguistic, familial –position and structure subjectivity.  In these seminars we will explore the legacies of Lacan’s work in two contrasting thinkers, Laplanche and Roustang.  Drawing on these 2 thinkers, the seminars will explore how we understand the process of situating ourselves in the analytic space, a process that cannot be separated from how we understand the purpose of psychoanalysis. Whilst both Laplanche and Roustang are critically astray of Lacan, their work has clearly passed through the thinking that characterise this tradition.   Laplanche’s concept of primal seduction remains close to Lacan’s privileging of adult enjoyment as always an effect of the erotic field of early infancy.  Roustang’s trajectory is more critical but his emphasis on the lures of recognition signify his debt to Lacan but as we will trace, he was increasingly less interested in the erotic frameworks of psychoanalysis.  The seminars will conclude with Foucault’s critique of the ‘erotic fatality’ at the heart of French psychoanalysis.  We will discuss his view that by confining the clinic to this ‘erotic fatality’ psychoanalysis limits the possibilities of a going astray of this imprisoning form of subjectivity. Is there enjoyment beyond its articulation as a form of eroticised suffering?

Seminar 1: Seduction as the affective field

In this seminar we will critically explore Laplanche’s concept of primal seduction with its privileging of the affective field of earliest infancy.  Drawing broadly on the selection of Laplanche’s work below, we will trace out the key theoretical concepts in his reformulation of Freud’s account of seduction and its implications for clinical practice.  

Laplanche, J (1999) pp. 14-23 in The Unconscious and the Id, London:Rebus Press

Laplanche, J (1989) pp.124-130 and p.154-162 in New Foundations for Psychoanalysis, Oxford: Blackwell

Laplanche, J (1999) ‘Interpretation between Determinism and Hermeneutics’, pp. 161-165 , ‘Seduction, Persecution, Revelation’, pp. 167-173, ‘A short treatise on the unconscious’ and ‘The Drive and its Source object’,  all in Essays on Otherness, London: Routledge

Laplanche, J (2014) ‘Exigency and Going-Astray’ and ‘Sublimation and/or inspiration in Fletcher, J & Ray, N (eds), Seductions & Enigmas, London: Lawerence & Wishart

Seminar 2: Re-thinking vulnerability in Laplanche  

In the second seminar, we will critically interrogate the universalism implicit in Laplanche’s account of ‘the fundamental anthropological situation’ of the human being.  Drawing on Butler’s work, can Laplanche offer a radical counter to the normative kinship narratives within psychoanalysis? Can his account of a foundational vulnerability be class, race and gender inflected?

Laplanche, J (2011) ‘Starting from the Fundamental Anthropological Situation’ in Freud and the Sexual, International Psychoanalytic Books

Butler, J (2014) ‘Seduction, Gender and the Drive’ in Fletcher, J & Ray, N (eds), Seductions & Enigmas, London: Lawrence & Wishart

Butler, J (2015) ‘Bodily vulnerability, coalitional politics’pp.145 -152 in Notes Towards a performative Theory of Assembly

Seminar 3: Roustang, affective involvement and affect as ‘cure’

In this seminar we will explore Roustang’s break with and critique of Lacan’s emphasis on representation and talking as cure. In ‘Game of the other’ Roustang prioritises the analysts affective involvement as key to patients recovery.  Developing this theme, Roustang’s later work embraced early Freud’s emphasis on hypnosis and how the trance like state of transference is foundational to psychic recovery.  We will read a selection of his papers from How to make a paranoid laugh where affect as cure is elaborated.  It may be helpful as b/g reading to look at Borch Jacobsen’s paper on hypnosis in The Emotional Tie.

Roustang, J (1982) ‘The game of the other’ in Psychoanalysis Never Lets Go, John Hopkins University press

Roustang, F (2000) ‘On Transference Neurosis’, ‘On the end of Analysis and Self-Hypnosis as a cure’, ‘Dream, Imagination, Reality’ in How to make a paranoid laugh, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania press

Borch-Jacobsen, M (1993) ‘Hypnosis in Psychoanalysis’ in The Emotional Tie, Stanford: Stanford University Press.

Seminar 4: The question of transmission

Psychoanalytic trainings have their own cultures and orthodoxies, their modes of suggestibility and the SW training is no different in this respect.  How is it then possible to find ‘your own position’ within this field of institutional transference?  To help with this question we will look at Roustang's work on the lacanian school in Dire Mastery

Roustang, F (1976) Dire Mastery: Discipleship from Freud to Lacan, Washington: John Hopkins University press,   chapter 2 In Advance and chapter 4 On the transmissibility of Analytic theory

Seminar 5: Foucault’s critique of the hermeneutics of desire

“..to put behind us the great psychoanalytic theatre of an arcane libido; the truth of our Eros need not be thought to have this tragic essence, for desire is not prior to history, but only one of its singular inventions…” (Rajchman, 1991, p.98)

Foucault’s late work was engaged with finding a new ethical basis for living which was inextricably tied to a refusal of the individuality of western subjectivity.  For Foucault, psychoanalysis was too embedded in the conditions of its production in western regimes of power to ever be a space of transformation. Yet, if following Foucault, our salvation lies in freeing ourselves of our contemporary subjectivity, where else might one be able to undertake such a task, if not in the consulting room?  This seminar will think about what kind of analytic position such a project might imply? 

Foucault, M (2005) The Hermeneutics of the Subject, London: Picador, P. 10-19

Foucault, M (1994) ‘Friendship as a way of life’ and ‘Sex, power and the Politics of identity’ in Essential works of Foucault, Volume 1 Ethics, ed Paul Rabinow, London: Penguin

Rajchman, J (1991) Truth and Eros, Foucault, Lacan and the Question of Ethics, London: Routledge especially the chapter on Foucault

Butler, J (1997) ‘Between Freud and Foucault’ in The Psychic Life of Power, Stanford: Stanford University press

Afternoon seminars — Ilric Shetland: rethinking the case history in clinical work 

How do we talk about clinical work? What is the history behind the ‘case history’ that so often frames our presentations? 

In this series of seminars we will explore how the case history first emerged as a mode of categorising western subjects.  Psychoanalysis is rooted in this history, in spite of some variations in how that history may be theorised.  We will discuss Freud’s early case histories and the legacies of this mode of description in subsequent psychoanalytic traditions.  Is it possible to work psychoanalytically outside of the structuring nature of the case history? Are there other ways of thinking a life?

Seminar 1: The emergence of the case history

In this seminar we will track the emergence of the new way that human life came to be categorised in the 18th century.  The idea of having a history and a biography will be contrasted with the earlier period of the pre Enlightenment which had a very different framework for thinking about who we are.

Foucault, M (1994) ‘The lives of Infamous men’ in J. Faubion ed. Essential works of Foucault Volume III, London: Penguin

Foucault, M (1970) The Order of Things, London :Tavistock (Preface and chapter 5)

Seminar 2: Freudian case history

In this seminar we will discuss the early case history in Freud and how far it has structured how we think about clinical presentations today.

Freud, S (2001) SE Volume ii case of Anna O, Vintage: London 

Seminar 3: Lacanian clinical work

We will draw upon 2 clinical cases by Bruce Fink to consider how a diagnostic framework structures lacanian case histories

Fink, B (1997) A clinical Introduction to lacanian psychoanalysis, Harvard University Press, pp 135 to 160

Seminar 4: Object Relations case history

We will compare how differently this tradition accounts for clinical work by looking at a case from Bollas

Bollas, C (1995) Cracking up, London: Routledge pp.119 to 134

Seminar 5: Kleinian case history

We will conclude with the rather different contribution of Klein by discussing a contemporary kleinian piece of work. We will also draw the series together and think about how you describe and present your own clinical cases.

Malcolm, R R (2001) ‘Interpretation: the past in the present’ in Melanie Klein Today ed Elizabeth Bott-Spillius, London: Routledge

Spring term: January 23, February 6, 20

Morning seminars — Linda Buckingham: Critical Theory, Prejudice and the Nature of Freedom

These seminars start off with Marcuse’s paper on Critical Theory which discusses the philosophical method of the Frankfurt School. 

We studied Hannah Arendt’s thesis on Totalitarianism in the last Spring term. This time we will discuss a paper on Nazism by Martyn Housden who is influenced by Erich Fromm, another member of the Frankfurt School.

Last, we look at Angela Davis’s paper on race, class and the oppression of women in capitalist society. 

Over several years I have been examining theories of knowledge starting with Descartes and resting in the field of Marxism. I have tried to show that, while some of these philosophers, like Locke, Engels and Lenin insisted on their empiricism, they were also, inconsistently, idealist, relativist and held representational/picture theories of knowledge. Last Spring term, rather than continuing to examine explicit philosophies of knowledge, we looked at the engagement of philosophers with history, society and politics. The Frankfurt school departed somewhat from the supposed materialism and empiricism of Marxism to embrace the issue of subjectivity. The philosophies of the Frankfurt School, founded in 1922, were seriously concerned with the understanding of society though Marxist critics, like Lukacs,  thought that the Frankfurt group should have been more committed to applying their views to political action. Martyn Housden shares the Frankfurt School’s interest in oppression and freedom. He departs from their method by taking a historian’s view of Nazism, combined with psychoanalytic observation. In this he resembles Hannah Arendt who influenced the Frankfurt boys’ club but was given little credit for it. Angela Davis was a student of Marcuse. She has had a strong influence on Marxist feminism and is a powerful critic of the endemic racism of the USA. She, too, is engaged with the problem of freedom. 

This is not a lot of reading. Please make time to do it.

Seminars:

1. ‘Philosophy and Critical Theory’, Herbert Marcuse (1937) Ch. 11 of ‘Subject and Object – Frankfurt School Writings on Epistemology, Ontology and Method’, (Bloomsbury, Ed. Ruth Groff)

2. ‘True believer: racism and one Nazi ideologist’, Martyn Housden, 2012, in ‘Psychoanalysis and Politics – Exclusion and the Politics of Representation’, (Karnak, ed, Lene Auestad)

3. ‘Women and Capitalism: Dialectics of Oppression and Liberation’ (1977), Ch. 11 of The Angela Y. Davis Reader, (Blackwell, Ed. Joy James). 

Recommended in the same book: Ch.3, ‘Unfinished Lecture on Liberation’ (1969).

Ch. 7, ‘Reflections on the Black Woman’s Role in the Community of Slaves’, (1971)

Marcuse (1898-1971) was on last year’s reading list but we didn’t get around to him, so he has first place this time. He was a German - American philosopher and prominent member of the Frankfurt School. He appreciated Marxism but believed that social change cannot be reduced to class struggle alone. Economic class is one structural position among many. He was influenced by Freud and investigated the psychological mechanisms that made the proletariat complicit in their own domination. He thought that the roots of radical change must lie in the subjectivity of individuals. Subjectivities are located in repression and dehumanisation as well as in tolerance and liberation. 

Martyn Housden (1962 -) is a Reader at the University of Bradford. His research interests include the history of Germany over the two world wars, the history of European refugees and the social theory of the Psychoanalyst, Erich Fromm, a member of the Frankfurt School.

Angela Davis (1944 - ) is a black American philosopher and political activist. She knew Marcuse and was influenced by him. She has been engaged in feminist and anti-racist politics since she was a teenager. She has tirelessly advocated gender equality, prison reform and alliances across race and colour. She has written papers and books on these themes since 1971. Commenting on the protests against racism since the murder of George Floyd in June 2020, she said we are finally “recognising that racism is indeed institutional and structural.” “It is embedded in the very fabric of this country.” (The US)

Afternoon seminars — Andrew Bryant: Repetition

Theories of repetition tend to traverse the axis biological—social, with at one end Freud’s ‘death instinct’, which transcends not only social difference but species and even classes of species; and at the other theories of subjectivation which locate repetition in the register of the social, where categories of class, gender, race and economic position determining the forms repetition can take.

Over the course of three seminars we will look at various theories that address the notion of repetition in relation to human subjectivity. Beginning with Freud, then opening the discussion out to the social field, we will try to address the following very complex questions: What is it that is being repeated? Who is doing the repeating? What are the forces that drive repetition? Are they social, biological, or psychological? Is repetition simply a repeating of the same, like a stuck record, or is the very act of repetition itself potentially productive? 

We will discuss specific clinical examples in order to ask what use can be made of the various theories of repetition in our work with patients. 

(Detailed seminar reading to follow).

March 6 — Anastasios Gaitanidis: Relational School

In this seminar I will introduce the work of the main figures of the Relational Psychoanalytic School (Aron, Mitchell, Benjamin, Bass, Bromberg, Harris, etc.) as well as some of their key ideas such as:

  • The centrality of intersubjectivity and the dialectic of recognition

  • Therapy as a two-way, bi-directional process

  • The acknowledgement of both the patient’s and therapist’s vulnerability

  • The continuous process of thoughtful disclosure and collaborative dialogue

  • The importance of co-construction of meaning and the significance of the multiplicity of selves

  • The significance of co-participation and mutual understanding of enactments within the therapeutic relationship. 

Bibliography 

  1. Aron, L. (1992) “Interpretation as Expression of the Analyst's Subjectivity”. Psychoanalytic Dialogues, 2:475-507

  2. Atlas, G. (2015) “Touch me, Know me - The Enigma of Erotic Longing”. Psychoanalytic Psychology, 32 1):123-140

  3. Bass, A. (2007) “When the Frame Doesn't Fit the Picture”. Psychoanalytic Dialogues, 17(1): 1-27

  4. Benjamin, J. (1990) “Recognition and Destruction - An Outline of Intersubjectivity”. Psychoanalytic Psychology, 7: 33-47

  5. Benjamin, J. (2004) “Beyond Doer and Done To - An Intersubjective View of Thirdness”. Psychoanalytic Quarterly, LXIII: 5-45.

  6. Bromberg, P. M. (1996). “Standing in the Spaces: The Multiplicity of Self and the Psychoanalytic Process”. Contemporary Psychoanalysis, 32: 509-535.

  7. Harris, A. (2011) “The Relational Tradition: Landscape and Canon”. Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association, 59: 701-735.

  8. Mitchell, S. A, (1998) “The Emergence of Features of the Analyst’s Life”. Psychoanalytic Dialogues, 8(2): 187-194

  9. Renik, O. (1993) “Analytic Interaction: Conceptualizing Technique in Light of the Analyst's Irreducible Subjectivity”. Psychoanalytic Quarterly, 62: 553-571

  10. Suchet, M. (2007) Unraveling Whiteness. Psychoanalytic Dialogues, 17(6).

March 20 — Helen Swords: Spirituality

Spirit = n. a vital principle: the principles of thought: the soul …: a ghost …: a kidnapper: enthusiasm: actuating emotion: a breath of wind…: verve: real meaning: essence …Spirituality= state of being spiritual: property or revenue received in return for spiritual service (hist.): the clergy (hist.) ..

 “Religion, whatever it is, is a man’s total reaction upon life, so why not say that any total reaction upon life is a religion? Total reactions are different from casual reactions, and total attitudes are different from usual or professional attitudes. To get at them you must go behind the foreground of existence and reach down to that curious sense of the whole residual cosmos as an everlasting presence, intimate or alien, terrible or amusing, lovable or odious, which in some degree every one possesses … it is (…) the completest of all our answers to the question, “What is the character of this universe in which we dwell?”

  • William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience, p.35

“To report an experience is simply to respond to being in a certain brain state with whatever sentences one’s linguistic community has programmed one to use in that situation.”

  • Richard Rorty, William James and a Science of Religions: Reexperiencing The Varieties of Religious Experience, ed. Wayne Proudfoot, p 92.

Thinking spirituality can be notoriously slippery and difficult. Feeling spirituality might be an entirely different matter. This seminar on spirituality will inevitably come from contexts of thriving observance of world religions and sects; faith and dystopia of the digital; popular mindfulness and meditation; therapy as secular confession; paranormal, and mystical activities; museums as contemporary cathedrals; belief in higher purpose through children, pets, nature, transhumanism for starters. 

A self- avowed Pragmatist, William James, philosopher and psychologist, sets out in his 1902 work, The Varieties of Religious Experience, what he believes is important to human life, and explores how religious experiences are borne out of a ‘total reaction to life’, welling up from an inner cosmos that we all contain. He is scathing towards ‘Group Hysteria’ found in religious institutional life, but drawn to individual encounters of religious and mystical experience. His critics include those that wished his pragmatism was carried further, whilst regarding his theology as his weakness. Written a few years after Varieties, Freud’s Totem and Taboo arguably curtailed the space open to experience by relegating religious experience as being either a return to infantile wishes to avoid separation, or a mask for the loss of the primordial father. 

Kate Love’s paper speaks to a more recent spirituality; it refers back to William James, as she offers an example of nuanced, subjective excursion into art criticism. She attempts to make a case for her own experience operating upon liminal consciousness, on the cusp of language not yet given meaning.

In this seminar I will summarise key thoughts from these texts, also drawing upon Rorty’s critique of James for comparison. 

You will have your own lines of enquiry and experiences. Some of my questions are:

  • Does God get in the way of spirituality? 

  • What drives spirituality? 

  • If we embrace the nature of experience fully, do origins matter?

  • What happens to liminal experience in language?

Core Reading:

William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience, Penguin Classics, 1985. Lectures II (Circumscription of the Topic) and XVI and XVII (Mysticism).

Kate Love, The Experience of Art as a Living Through of Language, 2005, in After Criticism: New Responses to Art and Experience, ed. Gavin Butt, Blackwell Publishing. Scanned copy.

Optional further reading/ resources:

Freud, The Return of Totemism in Childhood, Chapter IV, Totem and Taboo, in The Origins of Religion, Volume 13 – Pep.

Richard Rorty, Some Inconsistencies in James’s Varieties, William James and a Science of Religions: Reexperiencing The Varieties of Religious Experience, ed. Wayne Proudfoot, Columbia University Press, 2004, p 86-97. 

Hilary Mantel, Beyond Black, 2006.

Matthew Taylor, God on My Mind, BBC Sounds podcast

Laurie Taylor, Immortality and Transhumanism, BBC Sounds podcast

 

Training weekend, March 26 and 27

Astrid Gessert: The drive, jouissance and the real in the later works of Lacan

It is just over 100 years ago that Freud published Beyond the Pleasure Principle, having observed phenomena that cannot be accounted for by a psychic operation that seeks to reduce tension to a tolerable level. Contrary to this, there seemed to be also forces at work that seek tension and engage in the repetition of unpleasurable experiences; there seemed to be a paradoxical pleasure in pain. 

The important aspect of this discovery was that something internal to the psyche disrupts the smooth functioning according to the pleasure principle, so that even if there were no demands from external reality, the psyche would not attain the balance for which the pleasure principle strives. Something is always missed.

Lacan took this idea very seriously and elaborated it. He conceptualised the thing that is missed as object a and he introduced for the never-ending, repeated circulation around this unobtainable, always missed object, this apparent ‘pleasure in pain’, the term jouissance.

Jouissance is probably one of the most ambiguous terms in Lacan, notoriously polysemic.

It relates to the enjoyment involved in the circular movement of the drive which finds satisfaction in failing again and again to attain the object, the movement whose true aim coincides with its very path towards the goal and not with the goal itself.  

We will explore this concept, how it was introduced and developed by Lacan, and the impact of it for changes in the Lacanian clinic in the context of other concepts to which jouissance is closely 'related', especially the concept of the drive and the real.

We will also discuss if jouissance is a helpful concept to think about how people enjoy themselves today, in a society that is different from the society that Freud and his patients had shared.

Suggested reading:

Lacan, J. (1994). The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis [Seminar XI; orig. published in French 1973]  - esp. chapters 13 - 14 -15.

Summer term

May 8 — Ed Thornton: Phenomenology, Structuralism and post structuralism 

This session is designed to provide an introduction to the philosophical movements of
phenomenology, structuralism, and post-structuralism and to open a discussion about the
correlative shifts that these movements produced in psychoanalysis. The purpose of this session is to provide trainees with a sufficient theoretical and historical understanding to make sense of some of the non-clinical factors that have affected the direction of psychoanalysis in the 20th century.
As you will see from the descriptions below, in order to cover so much ground in a single day, our characterisations of phenomenology, structuralism, and post-structuralism will be painted in broad strokes. The idea here is to sketch a kind of historical map of these movements in order to help trainees place the psychoanalytic theories they study in their other sessions in relation to this history.

Session 1: Phenomenology  10:00-13:00In this session I will begin by offering an overview of the long philosophical arc of
phenomenology. Our story will begin with Kant and with run through Husserl, Heidegger, and Sartre. The purpose of this session will be to explain why some philosophers have turned their attention to the internal structure of experience as a privileged site for the acquisition of
knowledge. This session will also include some comments on Sartre’s existentialist psychoanalysis and
Binswanger’s phenomenological psychology. Here we will see how the phenomenological
claim of consciousness’s self-awareness challenged the Freudian conception of the
unconscious.

Session 2: Structuralism and Post-Structuralism 14:00-17:00In the afternoon we will turn our attention to the birth of structuralism and will consider the
role of Saussure’s structural linguistics and Lévi-Strauss structuralist anthropology in setting
the tone for French philosophy in the 20th century. Here we will also consider Lacan’s
connections with structuralism and consider his theory of the Symbolic as a model for structural psychoanalysis. This session will also include a discussion of the early post-structural work of Foucault and Derrida. We will see that what structuralism and post-structuralism share is a critique of the centrality of the individual agent and an appreciation of the linguistic, social, and historical factors that determine human action. This session will also give us an opportunity to consider the threat this account poses to the psychoanalytic orthodoxy of the mind as somehow being internal to the subject.

Suggested Reading:
• Gutting, Gary (2001) ‘Part II: The Reign of Existential Phenomenology’ & ‘Part III:
Structuralism and Beyond’, in French Philosophy in the Twentieth Century.Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. pp. 119-379.
• Kurzweil, Edith (1996) ‘Claude Lévi-Strauss’, ‘Jacques Lacan’, and ‘Michel Foucault’,
in The Age of Structuralism: From Lévi-Strauss to Foucault. London: Transaction
Publishers. pp 13-34, 135-164, & 193-226.
• Lewis, Michael, & Tanja Staehler (2010) Phenomenology: An Introduction. London:
Continuum.
• West, David (2010) ‘Husserl and Phenomenology’ & ‘Heidegger’s Phenomenology of
Being’, in Continental Philosophy: An Introduction. Cambridge: Polity. pp 95-112.
• West, David (2010) ‘Beyond the Subject: Structuralism and Post-Structuralism’, in
Continental Philosophy: An Introduction. Cambridge: Polity. pp 173-208.

May 22 — Jem Thomas & Elisabeth O’Loughlin: Ethics and psychoanalysis 

TO BE CIRCULATED

June 5 — Stephen Gee: The Returns of Desire

The History of Sexuality Part 1, Michel Foucault 1976

Homosexual Desire,   Guy Hocquenghem 1972

Both books were written in the wake of the rebellions of May 1968 and Stonewall; the earliest achievements of queer theory that were galvanised by the profound social change that both authors were passionately  involved in.. Hocquenghem’s book took off from Deleuze and Guattari’s explosive Anti-Oedipus and Foucault’s work also challenged the basis of psychoanalysis with his critique to the ‘repressive hypothesis’.

We will look at how they shake some of the identitarian assumptions of our own time and how they might help us look again at psychoanalytic practice and it’s unstable relationship to institutions and social norms.

June 19 — Paul Gurney: Phenomenology in Philosophy and Psychotherapy

The term phenomenology is used both to point to a movement in western philosophy in the late Nineteenth Century, and an approach to psychotherapy, emergent during the Twentieth Century, which is critical of the dominant psychoanalytic and psychiatric orthodoxies. What ideas are central to the phenomenological project, and what are the implications for clinical practice? In order to inform our discussion, I will circulate excerpts of the following texts prior to the seminar, although you may wish to obtain them for yourselves and read more.

The Sickness Unto Death by Soren Kierkegaard, trans Hannay, Penguin, London 1989 (1849), ISBN 978-0-141-03665-6, pp15-29.

Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, 2001 (1921), London & New York, Routledge, ISBN 0-415-25408-6 pp.5-14, 22-26, 68-70 & 86-89

Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations. 2009 (1953), Oxford, Wiley-Blackwell, ISBN 978-1-4051-5929-6 pp.30-38

The Child’s Relations With Others (Maurice Merleau-Ponty, trans Cobb, in The Primacy of Perception, ed. Edie, 1964, North-Western University Press ISBN 0-8101-0164-5 pp96-155)

Ethics and the Face, from Totality and Infinity by Emmanuel Levinas, trans Lingis, Duquesne, Pittsburgh, 1969, ISBN 978-0-8207-0245-2 pp194-219.

‘Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism’ by Chogyam Trungpa, pp13-22, 1973, Shambhala, Boston, ISBN 0-87773-050-4

‘Technique, Technicians and Philosophy’, pp.18-25, from ‘The Illusion of Technique’ by William Barrett, 1978, Anchor/Doubleday, New York ISBN 0-385-11201-7

‘The Language of African Theatre’, in ‘Decolonising the Mind’ by Ngugi wa Thiongo (1986), Woodbridge, James Currey, pp34-62, ISBN 978-0-85255-501-9;

July 3 — Brid Greally: The Jouissance of French Feminism

As we are interested in psychoanalysis as a practice and have limited time we will focus on the work of Julia Kristeva and Luce Irigaray. We will contextualise their main contributions to the debates pertaining to the body, language and sexual difference.

Introductory texts

 The Jouissance of French Feminism by Kelly Ives. Crescent Moon.

From Klein to Kristeva by J Doane & D Hodges (1992) University of Michigan Press.

Critical texts

Sexual Subversions; Three French Feminists by Elizabeth Grosz (1991) Allen and Unwin.

Reading Kristeva; unravelling the Double-bind by Kelly Oliver (1993). Indiana Press.

Luce Irigaray; Philosophy in the Feminine by Margaret Whitford (1991)

Routledge Press.

Anthologies

New French Feminisms ed by Elaine Marks and Isabelle de Courtivron. (1981) Harvester Press.

French Feminist Thought – a reader ed by Toril Moi (1987). Blackwell Press.