Veranstaltungsarchiv

Vortrag

David Bell

Knowledge as fact and knowledge as experience: Freud's Constructions in Analysis

Freitag, 13. Jänner 2012, 20.15 Uhr: 

Abstract:

Freud’s paper on constructions in analysis, raises problems that are much wider than its apparent focus. How one  thinks of  the analysts task,  necessarily brings to the fore  issues that are  fundamental to our subject, for one’s s  attitude to what it is that  the analyst does has a  clear, though not necessarily avowed, relation to what  one considers to be the aim of  analysis, how one understands the process of change .This in turn trenches upon important debates and tensions  within psychoanalysis- between those who consider change to be largely derived from insight and those who foreground the ‘corrective experience’ or the ‘real relationship’ , between  those who regard ‘truth’ as an essential  dimension of analysis  and those who regard the very notion of truth as a comforting and potentially dangerous illusion, between those who  think not only of meaning but also of causal structures determining the nature of the human subject and those for whom the very idea of cause  is anathema , who see psychoanalysis as a purely hermeneutic discipline.

Paper

David Bell is President of The British Psychoanalytic Society. Senior honorary lecturer UCL, Consultant Psychiatrist in the Adult Department at the Tavistock and Portman NHS Foundation Trust. He lectures and publishes widely on various subjects including the historical development of psychoanalytic concepts (Freud, Klein and Bion) and the psychoanalytic understanding of severe disorder. For his entire professional career he has deeply involved himself in interdisciplinary studies (the relation between psychoanalysis and literature, philosophy and socio-political theory).  He has written numerous papers and chapters in books/monographs,  edited two books, Reason and Passion and Psychoanalysis and Culture and written one small book Paranoia. He is also one of the UK's leading psychiatric experts in asylum and immigration. In 2012 he will take up the position of Professorial Fellow at Birkbeck College.