Social Structures and their Symptoms: Psychoanalysis in Clinical Practice and Social Theory

In his introduction to Freud’s 1905 case study, Fragment of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria, Philip Reiff critiques Freud’s attempt to treat the patient Dora by limiting the scope of analysis to the woman’s own pathologies, “when, in fact, from the evidence [Freud] himself presents, it is the milieu in which she is constrained to live that is ill.” Psychoanalysis, as a method in literary and social theory, operates in light of this provocation, turning the concepts of psychoanalytic theory onto social structures and their symptoms. Colonialism, racism, sexism and other intersecting social pathologies have been subject to diagnosis and critique with appeal to the same concepts used in the practice of clinical psychoanalysis. This practice, however, is centrally one in which two people engage in conversation over a series of sessions aims to empower an individual to live better with their symptoms, in their situation. In tension with this liberatory potential, psychoanalysis has also been understood as adaptational, centering the needs of individuals to cope with those features of their circumstances that are causing them pain rather than changing those circumstances. Beyond the academy and the consulting room, psychoanalytic theory has gained wide-ranging traction in popular media, political, social and economic commentary and strategy, and our casual discourse about ourselves and our relationships. It seems a safe starting point for inquiry that psychoanalytic method is in application in this wide variety of settings, and has intuitively plausible descriptive accuracy in seemingly every case.

In this conference, we will investigate the way that the tension between the adaptive and liberatory aspects of psychoanalytic theory and practice manifest in the variety of settings in which it is applied. The papers presented will investigate the following questions: How can psychoanalysis promote social change? What is the nature of the analogy between therapeutic action on the couch, and action on large-scale social and material structures and inequalities? What does it mean to adapt to a society that is seen as sick, but also, what does it mean to adapt to a society that understands itself to be sick, that is itself adapting and changing? Whose emotional responses are world-revealing, and whose are read as symptoms? Can psychoanalysis theorize itself?

This two-day conference at the intersections of the academy, psychoanalytic practice, and the public sphere. We hope to bring together writers whose work serves different purposes and addresses different audiences: analysts who offer practical techniques for working with patients, cultural critics who offer a psychoanalytic perspective on political and cultural issues, and scholars who incorporate psychoanalytic concepts to the methodologies and subject matter of their academic disciplines.