Past Event
"Freud’s Nietzsche:
Eternal Return, Symptomatic Acts and the Gay Apophrades"
Dany Nobus
The purpose of this lecture is not to show, once again, how Freud was crucially indebted to Nietzsche, how Nietzsche had anticipated Freud, or how Freud and Nietzsche arrived at the same conclusions. Instead, I will reflect upon something much more intimate than any conjunction of Freud and Nietzsche might suggest. Rather than pursuing, yet again, the question of the eternal return through a specific coordinating conjunction linking Nietzsche to Freud, I want to address its significance and its resonances by focusing on another word, which is not a conjunction but a preposition, and which signals belonging, ownership and possession. More specifically, I want to explore the relationship between Freud and Nietzsche in terms of the preposition ‘of’, as the Nietzsche of Freud, the Nietzsche who belonged to Freud, the Nietzsche Freud acquired, accepted, owned and carried with him—both literally and metaphorically. In this lecture, I shall argue that, in a literal sense, this Nietzsche who belonged to Freud was simultaneously a mysterious absence and one of the most dominant presences in his work environment. And this haunting, spectral quality of Freud’s Nietzsche subsequently returned in the metaphorical dimension of belonging, because for Freud it was almost invariably associated with a strong judgement of negation (Verneinung), a defence mechanism which he himself aptly designated in his eponymous 1925 paper as a process whereby the repressed is intellectually accepted (and rendered a right of existence at the level of speech), whilst the essence of repression itself, including its affective quantum, remains unacknowledged. Freud did not just possess Nietzsche, as an object that stands out from all the others in his collection owing to its simultaneous absence and presence, but he was also possessed by him, as an intrusive revenant whose exorcism would never be completed, and who would sometimes make his presence felt precisely in the absence of his identity. However, I shall also argue that with reference to his Nietzsche, Freud’s defence mechanism operated at the most advanced level of Harold Bloom’s famous taxonomy of ‘revisionary ratios’ in The Anxiety of Influence—that of an intellectual apophrades—with the caveat that this spectral, haunting return of the dead was neither particularly painful nor utterly uncanny, but distinctly light-hearted and gay, as Nietzsche himself would no doubt have wanted it.
Zoom
(link forthcoming)
Saturday, February 27, 2021
10:00 AM - 12:00 PM
Dany NobusDany Nobus is Professor of Psychoanalytic Psychology and the History of Ideas at Brunel University London, Founding Scholar of the British Psychoanalytic Council, and former Chair and Fellow of the Freud Museum London. Over the years, he has also been Visiting Professor of Sociology at the University of Massachusetts, Boston and Professor of Psychiatry at Creighton University in Omaha NE. He has published numerous books and papers on the history, theory and practice of psychoanalysis, most recently The Law of Desire: On Lacan’s ‘Kant with Sade’ (Palgrave 2017) and Thresholds and Pathways Between Jung and Lacan: On the Blazing Sublime (edited with Ann Casement and Phil Goss) (Routledge 2020). A new monograph entitled Freud in the Margins: Rethinking the History of Psychoanalysis is scheduled for publication in the Fall of 2021. In 2017, Dany Nobus was the recipient of the Sarton Medal of the University of Ghent (Belgium) for his outstanding contributions to the history of psychoanalysis.
Future Events
Penelope Garvey
Zoom
(link forthcoming), Berkeley, CA
Saturday, February 3, 2024
10:00 AM - 12:00 PM
Past Events
"Anorexia: Between Desire for Recognition and the Death Drive"
Domenico Cosenza, Ph.D.
"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.
Copyright © 2015-23 Berkeley Psychoanalytic Society | Site by Tim