Sigmund Freud Archives - Public Seminar

Higher Ed

“God Is Dead”

And other memories of coming of age gay and Catholic in the sixties

October 12, 2022 • by John D’Emilio

I was flabbergasted. The idea that someone not only didn’t believe in God but also had grown up without God was something I couldn’t take in. All I could think was, “Wow. Without God, he’d never have to worry about whether he was going to hell, whether he’d make it ...

Philosophy

When I Was One-Dimensional

How Herbert Marcuse’s text changed my life

July 20, 2022 • by James Miller

"For their sincere reception," Cavell concludes, some life-altering texts require "the shock of conversion." Reading Marcuse, I had felt that shock, with pleasure. Few experiences are quite as rapturous as the conviction that one has embarked on a splendid new life with the firmest of good convictions: as Plato long ...

Social Research

The Global Rise of Xenophobia, the New Issue of Social Research

The New School journal unveils its latest issue

March 30, 2022 • by Social Research

The rise of Xenophobia, globally, has unfortunately become increasingly virulent. The latest issue of Social Research, through a set of case studies, draws connections between the personal and the political with contributions from Marci Shore, Erika Lee, Bálint Madlovics, Irena Grudzińska Gross, Sina Arnold, Jocelyne Cesari, Mehmet Kurt, Munawwar Abdulla ...

The Global Rise of Xenophobia, the New Issue of <em>Social Research</em>

Politics

What Freud Would Say About Left-Wing Infighting

Sanders supporters and others need to resist the temptation to retreat into ideological purity

February 15, 2022 • by Todd Gitlin

At the 2008 reunion of veterans of the 1968 Columbia occupation, I remember sitting near him at one session and watching the abuse he patiently took from aging movement heavies who voiced their anger at him for having raised doubts, in his books, about the wisdom of their most violent ...

What Freud Would Say About Left-Wing Infighting

History

Muscovite

An excerpt from “The Book of Unconformities: Speculations on Lost Time”

October 1, 2020 • by Hugh Raffles

During the years I was writing this book, my mother began to lose her memory, or, as she often said, she started “getting stupid.” I traveled frequently to London at this time, and on one of these trips visited the house in Belsize Park in which Sigmund Freud spent the ...

Feature

What is Psychoanalysis?

An excerpt from Robert Boyers, The Fate of Ideas: Seductions, Betrayals, Appraisals

December 6, 2018 • by Robert Boyers

In The Fate of Ideas: Seductions, Betrayals, Appraisals, Robert Boyers reflects on his allegiances and disputes with some of the twentieth century's most transformative writers, artists, and thinkers. Centering his chapters around specific ideas, Boyers explores the process by which they fall in and out of fashion. Through encounters with authority, ...

Feature

Engaging, and Accompanying, the Pain of Others

An excerpt from Robert Grossmark’s The Unobtrusive Relational Analyst

November 21, 2018 • by Robert Grossmark

Robert Grossmark's The Unobtrusive Relational Analyst introduces a new psychoanalytic register for working with such patients and states, involving a present and engaged analyst who is unobtrusive to the unfolding of the patient’s inner world and the flow of mutual enactments. For the unobtrusive relational analyst, the world and idiom of ...

Feature

An Interview with Mari Ruti

Penis Envy and Other Bad Feelings

September 27, 2018 • by Mari Ruti and Josh Maserow

In Penis Envy and Other Bad Feelings: The Emotional Cost of Everyday Life Mari Ruti interweaves theoretical insight, cultural critique, feminist politics, and personal experience to lift the lid on the prevalence of bad feelings in contemporary everyday life. Emanating from a playful engagement with Freud’s idea of penis envy, Ruti’s autotheoretical ...

Feature

Beyond #MeToo

Female agency as heroine in The Tale

August 22, 2018 • by Jill Gentile

This article was originally published in the Philosophical Salon of the Los Angeles Review of Books. The author served as a consultant to Jennifer Fox's film "The Tale." This piece joins other related pieces published on Public Seminar, including an interview with the filmmaker, a psychoanalytic approach to understanding childhood ...

Feature

Feminists Say

Gagging on rape

August 13, 2018 • by Vanessa Place and Cassandra Seltman

Last year the journal Studies in Gender and Sexuality published a panel called "The ontology of the rape joke," organized around a performance by Vanessa Place of her piece, "Rape joke." The panel included responses from Jamieson Webster, Jeff Dolven, Gayle Salamon, Kyoo Lee, Katie Gentile, and Virginia Goldner, and ended with ...

Feature

Psychoanalysis and Cyberspace

Shifting Frames and Floating Bodies

July 2, 2018 • by Luca Caldironi

Reconsidering the Moveable Frame in Psychoanalysis: Its Function and Structure in Contemporary Psychoanalytic theory, edited by Isaac Tylim and Adrienne Harris, explores, and troubles, the idea of "the frame" at a time when the concept is undergoing both a systematic recrudescence and widespread transformation within psychoanalytic theory. It has always ...

Feature

The Modernity of Sandor Ferenczi

A Life inscribed within the crucible of the history of the psychoanalytic movement

May 9, 2018 • by Thierry Bokanowski

This is an excerpt from chapter 2 of The Modernity of Sándor Ferenczi: his historical and contemporary importance in psychoanalysis, by Thierry Bokanowski. By providing a concise yet thorough overview of the life and work of Sandor Ferenczi, The Modernity of Sandor Ferenczi seeks to help make his thought and work better known. ...