Description
‘The recovery of voices has been a central purpose of history from below from the very beginning’, writes Marcus Rediker in ‘The Poetics of History from Below’ (2010). Writing such histories usually necessitates working with sources that were not produced by the oppressed people whose voices the historian hopes to recover. Feminist scholars have long sought to counteract the clinical interpretations in Freud’s pseudonymised case histories with readings that foreground the circumstances of the real women who were his patients, supplementing his cases with social history. These re-readings not only recovered voices but also contested Freud’s analyses of his woman patients’ very capacity to speak, as Elaine Showalter noted in The Female Malady (1985): ‘Freud failed Dora because he was too quick to impose his own language on her mute communications.’ It is axiomatic to characterise psychoanalysis as the preserve of the bourgeoisie due to the money and time generally required to access treatment. Though certainly true for most times and places, the affordability of psychoanalysis has varied geographically and historically, depending both on provision available under different healthcare systems and on the existence of organisations offering low fees or free clinics. Indeed, psychoanalytic consulting rooms can be sites of class antagonism and discussions of class occasionally ruffle the pages of psychoanalytic case histories. Focusing on examples by British psychoanalysts, including Marion Milner and Christopher Bollas, this paper will attempt to construct an alternative to existing analyses of the encounter between Marxism and psychoanalysis that focus on abstract theories by grounding itself instead in socially and economically contextualised accounts of clinical practice.| Period | 1 Mar 2022 |
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| Held at | ICI Berlin |
| Degree of Recognition | International |