Unconscious Phantasies of "Cure" and the Therapeutic Aims of Psychoanalysis

Birkbeck Institute for Social Research/Institute for the Humanities

Ignes Sodre Seminar - Unconscious Phantasies of "Cure" and the Therapeutic Aims of Psychoanalysis

Ignes Sodre, a training and supervising analyst at the British Psychoanalytical Society, and currently Visiting Professorial Fellow, jointly in the Birkbeck Institute for Social Research and the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities, will be offering a series of workshops open to students and staff, during 2009-10. These workshops will be freestanding, so participants are free to attend on one occasion or for the whole series. Each will be linked to the theme of ‘cure’ in psychoanalysis. She will draw on clinical material and psychoanalytical theory to suggest how various forms of mental disturbances may be result of unconscious methods of treatment for mental suffering. Clinical psychoanalysis can be seen, from this point of view, as a process of careful, gradual dismantling of methods of ‘cure’ which leave the personality restricted and impoverished. The psychoanalytical idea of ‘cure’ is based on Freud’s method of investigation in which self-knowledge opens a path for more appropriate (healthier) methods of dealing with what have been experienced as unbearable states of mind. This idea has its starting point in Freud’s perception that mental illness may itself be an attempt at cure: “In regard to the genesis of delusions, a fair number of analyses have taught us that the delusion is found applied like a patch over the place where originally a rent had appeared in the ego’s relation to the external world […]the manifestations of the pathogenic process are often overlaid by manifestations of an attempt at a cure or a reconstruction”. (Freud 1924, “Neurosis and Psychosis”).

Tuesday 8th December 1pm - 3pm Room 153 Birkbeck Main Building

Free - open to all - no registration

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Julia Eisner
Administrator
Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities
Birkbeck Institute for Social Research
Birkbeck, University of London
Malet Street
London WC1E 7HX

T: (0) 20 3073 8363
F: (0) 20 3073 8359
E: j.eisner@bbk.ac.uk