The Whitney Humanities Center, with assistance from the Woodward Lectures Fund, will host a symposium titled "Whose Freud? The Place of Psychoanalysis in
Contemporary Culture" Friday-Saturday, April 3-4.
The conference participants will consider the status of psychoanalysis as a discipline and a discourse in contemporary culture, according to Peter Brooks, the Tripp Professor of Humanities and director of the Whitney Humanities Center, who organized the event.
Once solidly established within medical-therapeutic practices, psychoanalysis has increasingly been challenged by other forms of therapy, notes Brooks, pointing out that philosophers, neuroscientists, psychologists, literary critics and feminist scholars have questioned the validity of psychoanalysis -- some rallying to its defense, others rejecting it. Furthermore, debates have raged over some of the most basic assumptions of psychoanalysis, including recovered memories, repression and the role of psychoanalysis within the legal system, he notes.
"The moment seems well chosen for a searching reassessment of where and how psychoanalysis survives in our culture," says Brooks, adding that the conference will address such key questions as: "Should we conclude that psychoanalysis has moved from its base in medical science to become one of the hermeneutic arts?" "Have social conditions made its therapeutic applications outmoded?" And "How does psychoanalysis contribute to cultural analysis?"
The Freud conference will include six panels featuring scholars from the Universities of California at Berkeley and at Los Angeles, and Stanford, Duke, Chicago, Rice and Cornell universities, as well as from institutions in France, England and Eastern Europe.
The schedule of panels follows:
Friday, April 3 -- "Psychoanalysis and Its Discontents," 10 a.m.-noon; "Psychoanalysis, Between Therapy and Hermeneutics?" 2-4 p.m.; and "Psychoanalysis and Sexual Identity," 4:30-6:30 p.m.
Saturday, April 4 -- "Psychoanalysis and the Historiography of Modern Culture,"
10 a.m.-noon; "Psychoanalysis and Theories of Mind," 1:30-3:30 p.m.; and "Psychoanalysis: What Kind of Truth?" 4-6 p.m.
All conference panels will be held at Sheffield-Sterling-Strathcona Hall, corner of Grove and Prospect streets. The sessions are open to the public free of charge.
|