Berkeley City Club

Wagner's grand and lyric Die Meistersinger von Nurnberg transports us into a waking and sleeping dream of its characters. Wagner's opera embodies his vision that creativity occurs in the depths of the unconscious and is accessible to us in our dreamlife and through interpretation. Steven Goldberg, MD, and Jeanne Harasemovitch, LCSW, will each present their […]

Language changes in psychosis. Words become the floating signifiers of a mad Other who takes up a place in speech. Speech elements connect to nothing, have no meaning whatsoever and disrupt the meaning that was unfolding. These elements, whether heard or spoken, are foreign to the speaker, and create a profound sense of disorder with […]

The presidential election and inauguration, and their aftermath, have exposed cracks in the foundations of our democracy. Assaults on the rule of law, free speech, equality, freedom and truth have revealed deep rifts and tensions in American society. Domestic pressures, globalization, and mestastasizing conflicts produce closer and closer encounters with the Other and lead to […]

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 […]

Drs. Markman and Katz will each elaborate on the fundamental ideas of the death drive: Dr.  Markman in the work of Freud and Klein,  and Dr. Katz clarifying the differences between Laplanche and Green - or possibly presenting on the varieties of jouissance. Both presenters will include clinical experience as well as artistic, literary, and […]

Dr. Hobson will speak with us on the nature and status of psychoanalytic knowledge. Does it (as some would express) belong to a non-scientific domain of meanings, not 'facts'?  Or is that knowledge of facts at the core of the psychoanalytic enterprise founded upon a knower's particular relation with psychoanalytic objects of knowledge? Dr. Hobson […]

Dr. Martinez will present a critical reading of Freud’s 1925 text Note upon the Mystic Writing-Pad leading to a comparison of this model of the psychic apparatus with what Derrida describes as processes of inscriptionality, arriving at the important concept of alterability of the memory trace.

A Film by Wilhelm Rosing & Marita Barthel-Rosing. Ernst Federn survived seven years at Buchenwald; he was the son of Paul Federn, Freud's colleague. This film is the second in a series of BPS meetings on Frued's concept of the death drive and depicts the enormous reach of human destructiveness politicized.