Berkeley Psychoanalytic Society
Exploring the Unconscious: Arts, Science and the Humanities
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Thinking About The Future
Saturday, October 29, 2016 @ 10:00 am - 1:30 pm
Most people have an internal object that gathers their unconscious assumptions about the future. As an object, the future serves multiple functions during the course of a lifetime and is therefore subjected to shifting cultural axioms about the future. Currently, the expansionist promise of globalization seems counter pointed by the death drive that annihilates the very complexity predicted by global advocates. The startling move towards religious fundamentalisms and the hate driven solutions of a paranoid right marching in facist steps compels all citizens to think about deeply mixed feelings about the future. Dr. Bollas’s talk will incorporate the passionate and brilliant account of the politics of our time found in Sheldon Wolin’s Democracy Inc. Managed Democracy And The Specter of Inverted Totalitarianism (Princeton, 2008) as well as his own work Forces of Destiny: Psychoanalysis and Human Idiom (Aronson, 1991, pps 7-49).
SPEAKER
Christopher Bollas is one of the most widely read authors in the field of psychoanalysis. He studied intellectual history with Carl Schorske at UC Berkeley, receiving his bachelor degree in history. He earned his doctorate in English Literature and studied with Norman Holland, Leslie Fiedler, Murray Schwartz, Michel Foucault and Rene Girard. He was Director of Education at Austen Riggs Center and qualified in psychoanalysis at the Institute of Psychoanalysis in London. He worked with and has been influenced by Arnold Modell, Andre Green, Herbert Rosenfeld, Joseph Sandler and others. Dr. Bollas is unique in being deeply informed historically, culturally and clinically.