Time and time again, Eugenio Montale's poems speak to a loved and absent auditor; they address, intimately, a You, a second person or familiar other. You could call this work museic, which would be to say both that it is often musical (deploying a pleasing geometry of sound and sense bordering on the unsayable) and addressed to a muse, a cherished femme figure serving at once as a source, catalyst and inspiration for song.
Among the polymath, Julia Kristeva's gifts to practicing analysts are a series of concepts and coinages speaking directly to the question of this You, the "matrixial borderspace" or forgotten song central to language and to psychic life which is transmitted via polyphonic or polysemic modes of signifying rooted in the sounds and sensations of the body.
These registers skirt a delicate and doubled line between metaphor and the meat of matter; they work, on the one hand, as a living memory of real experiences -- those of infancy, anterior to the acquisition of language, or those of motherhood, surpassing words -- and, on the other, constitute a timeless presence within speech and thought, a weather or welter of past, present, and future immanent to sign and syntax.
Reading Kristeva with Montale brings into bold relief the urgent necessity of the talking cure in an age in which the age-old symbolic orders governing speaking beings -- the panoply of human compacts and regimes generated by song, sign and syntax -- have come to founder.
Berkeley City Club
2315 Durant Avenue
Saturday, November 23, 2019
10:00 AM - 12:00 PM
Benjamin Davidson is a faculty member and research psychoanalyst of the San Francisco Bay Area Lacanian School, and maintains a private practice in Palo Alto and San Francisco. Since 2010 he has taught seminars on Lacanian and Freudian analysis at Stanford University, where he works a a Dean. Revolt!, his extended essay in two acts, was published in summer of 2019 by the European Journal of Psychoanalysis
Coming soon
"Psychoanalysis and Opera: Rejoining the Verbal and Non-Verbal"
Steve Goldberg, Dr.,
Lee Rather, Ph.D.,
""What Should I Call You? Pronouns and the Scene of Address""
Judith Butler, Ph.D.
"Link Theory and Practice: The Irreducible Effects of Presence"
Israel Katz, M.D.
"The Structure and Function of Part Objects"
Richard Rusbridger
"Psychoanalysis: the Contemporary Scene from an Editor's View"
Murray Schwartz
"Working Backwards: "Backwards Causation"and the Temporality of the Unconscious in Pre-Freudian Dream Theory"
Jake Fraser, Ph.D.
"The Significance of the Anus in Psychoanalytic Theory"
Benjamin Y. Fong, Ph.D.
"Love, Hate and Knowledge: the Analyst’s Aesthetic Conflict"
Meg Harris Williams
"The Analyst's Desire: The Ethical Foundation of Clinical Practice"
Mitchell Wilson, M.D.
"Freud’s Nietzsche: Eternal Return, Symptomatic Acts and the Gay Apophrades"
Dany Nobus
"What's uncanny in the Unheimliche?"
Sergio Benvenuto, Ph.D.
"Roads to the Unconscious: Some Parallels and Divergences between Psychoanalysis and the Writing of Poetry"
John Hart,
Helen Schoenhals Hart,
"Trans Realism: Psychoanalysis and the Trans Experience"
Patricia Gherovici, Ph.D.,
Grace Lavery, Ph.D.,
"*POSTPONED* What's uncanny in the Unheimliche?"
Sergio Benvenuto, Ph.D.
"*POSTPONED* Trans Realism, Psychoanalytic Practice, and the Rhetoric of Technique"
Grace Lavery, Ph.D.
"Creativity and the Erotic Dimensions of the Analytic Field"
Dianne Elise, Ph.D.
"Mama, Mnemo - Reading Kristeva with Montale"
Benjamin Davidson, Ph.D.
"The Maternal: Psychoanalysis, Literature and Film"
Claire Kahane, Ph.D.,
Marilyn Fabe, Ph.D.,
"Light Rooms: Medium, Mourning and Mania"
Elizabeth Abel, Ph.D.
"From Freud's Mourning to Mourning Freud"
Madelon Sprengnether, Ph.D.
"Group Discussion: The Place of the Nonrepresentational and the Nonverbal in Psychoanalysis"
Margot Beattie, Ph.D.,
Israel Katz, MD,
"Freud's Seduction: Psychoanalysis and California"
Fernando Castrillon, Psy.D.
"Trans Psychoanalysis and Livable Embodiments"
Patricia Gherovici, Ph.D.
"The Political Unconscious in Perilous Times"
Judith Butler, Ph.D.,
Lance Dodes, M.D.,
Jill Gentile, Ph.D.
"Die Meistersinger von Nurnberg: The Dream World of Wagner"
Steven H. Golderg, MD,
Jeanne C. Harasemovitch, LCSW,
"Incandescent Alphabets: Language and Art in Psychosis"
Annie G. Rogers, Ph.D.
"Homeland (In)Security: How Feminine Law Might Rescue Democracy, Truth and Free Speech"
Jill Gentile, Ph.D.
"Enigmatic Mechanisms: Some Reflections on Love, Affect, and Identification in Freud"
Marcus Coelen, Ph.D
"Refashioning Jouissance/Enjoyment for the Age of the Imaginary"
Juliet Flower MacCannell, Ph.D.
"Freud and the Frankfurt School"
Martin E. Jay, Ph.D.
"Thinking About The Future"
Christopher Bollas, Ph.D.
"Death Drive Dialogue #2"
Henry Markman, MD,
Israel Katz, MD,
"Psychoanalytic Knowledge"
Peter Hobson, Ph.D.
"The Alterability of the Memory Trace"
Rosaura Martinez, Ph.D.
"Conversion Disorder: Freud, religious transformation, Foucault and Agamben"
Jamieson Webster, Ph.D.
"Surviving Terror: An Interview with Ernst Federn"
Helen Schoenhals Hart, Dr.med.
"Rosa Luxemburg and Marilyn Monroe: Women in Depressed Times"
Jacqueline Rose
"Keeping the Other Alive: Counter-trends to the Death Drive"
Judith Butler, Ph.D.
"Cultivating the Foreigner Within: Julia Kristeva and Hannah Arendt on Uncanny Art and Human Relations in the Contemporary World"
Elaine Miller, Ph.D.
"Enduring Inequality: Racism in America"
Jeffrey Prager, Ph.D.
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