Berkeley City Club

This talk aims first to illustrate the significance of the anus in psychoanalytic theory, engaging with the writing of Freud, Lou Andreas-Salome, Karl Abraham, and others. It then shifts to a discussion of sociological applications of the theory of anality in the works of Norman O. Brown and Otto Fenichel, articulating finally a theory of […]

In an essay in Poetry magazine in 1951, the critic Lawrence Hart wrote: “We came to consider poetry as the adventure of the writer into the hidden springs of his own action and emotion—his work in poetry being parallel in some ways to that done through psychoanalysis and sometimes aided by it.” We’ll explore some of those […]

In “Trans Realism, Psychoanalytic Practice, and the Rhetoric of Technique” Grace Lavery argues that, in Eliot’s early, definitive statement of realism in the seventeenth chapter of Adam Bede, realism will only have been accomplished when readers have learned not merely to respect, but to desire, the dysphorically sexed bodies of others. In this sense, Lavery […]

Dr. Elise will present an overview and discussion of her book, Creativity and the Erotic Dimensions of the Analytic Field, where she puts forth the premise that psychoanalysis is an erotic project. She proposes that a creative aesthetic can provide a clinical container for the engagement and exploration of erotic life within the anlytic field of each […]

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 […]

Theorizing our relation to the concept of "the Maternal" has been an ongoing psychoanalytic project: Dr. Claire Kahane will speak about the underplayed aspect of "maternal rage", an ambiguous term, referring both to the child's rage against the maternal object, and the mother's rage against not only the child, but the very concept of the […]

What happens when psychoanalysis joins in conversation with photography? Arguing that light is a "carnal medium" that provides an umbilical connection between the photographed object and the viewer, Roland Barthes recovers a neglected thread of early psychoanalytic discourse about mourning, in which "mania" had been a prominent term. Focusing on a few scenes from Virginia […]

The modernist Freud of the early twentieth century has ceded to the postmodern Freud of the twenty-first. My book Mourning Freud examines this phenomenon from the perspective of Freud's self-analysis in relation to his generation of theory, the challenges and transformations wrought by feminism, cultural studies, and postmodernism, and the speculations of contemporary neuroscience regarding the unreliability […]

Madelon Sprengnether has had to postpone her talk with BPS, originally scheduled for December 1, 2018, to Saturday, January 26, 2019. Therefore on December 1, we will hold a Group Discussion on the place of the Nonrepresentational and the Nonverbal in Psychoanalysis. Drs. Beattie and Katz will introduce the subject.

Dr. Castrillon will present a selection of his research on Psychoanalysis in California derived from the theoretical and clinical formulations developed in his forthcoming book California Psychoanalyst: Subjectivity and Clinical Praxis in the Far West. Inclusive of both the historical development and the Californication of psychoanalysis and grounded in his attention to the subject of the unconscious, […]

"I had no choice. I would be dead if I hadn't transitioned - I would have killed myself." Drawing on her clinical experience as a psychoanalyst working with gender-variant analysands, Gherovici argues that those compelled to change gender often do it because they are facing the most crucial issues of life and death. What is […]

The Berkeley Psychoanalytic Society is pleased to promote psychoanalytic understanding in the public sphere. As we mark the one year anniversary of the current administration, we invite you to participate with a panel of prominent academics and psychoanalysts to explore and elucidate psychical processes and cultural forces at play in the risks we now face […]