Search results

AbstractThis essay discusses the brief but extensive correspondence Soviet neuro-psychologist Alexander Luria exchanged with his younger American colleague Oliver Sacks between 1973 and 1977, the year Luria died. Sacks, whose case histories went on to become mainstream bestsellers, always expressed his indebtedness to Luria, whose warm and detailed approach to writing about his patients' peculiar and sometimes distressing neurological conditions inspired Sacks. This essay explores this influence but also probes distinctions between the two scientists' understandings of human consciousness tied to the very different social and political contexts in which they conducted their clinical research.

This essay discusses the brief but extensive correspondence Soviet neuro-psychologist Alexander Luria exchanged with his younger American colleague Oliver Sacks between 1973 and 1977, the year Luria died. Sacks, whose case histories went on to become mainstream bestsellers, always expressed his indebtedness to Luria, whose warm and detailed approach to writing about his patients' peculiar and sometimes distressing neurological conditions inspired Sacks. This essay explores this influence but also probes distinctions between the two scientists' understandings of human consciousness tied to the very different social and political contexts in which they conducted their clinical research.

In an essay on Peter Weiss, W. G. Sebald remarked that 'the grotesque deformities of our inner lives have their background and origin in collective social history'. Weiss's works explore the relationships between writing and action, aesthetics and politics. This short essay discusses some fragments of texts by Weiss, asking how subjects formed and (grotesquely) deformed by history can continue to resist or intervene to alter its course.

In an essay on Peter Weiss, W. G. Sebald remarked observes that 'the grotesque deformities of our inner lives have their background and origin in collective social history'. Weiss's works explore the relationships between writing and action, aesthetics and politics. This short essay discusses some fragments of texts by Weiss, asking how subjects formed and (grotesquely) deformed by history can continue to resist or intervene to alter its course. ; Hannah Proctor, 'Resistance I', in Re-: An Errant Glossary , ed. by Christoph F. E. Holzhey and Arnd Wedemeyer, Cultural Inquiry, 15 (Berlin: ICI Berlin Press, 2019), pp. 113–20

Abstract
Critics of 'identity politics' tend to assume that any exploration of subjective experience is tantamount to an affirmation of liberal individualism. This essay attempts to counteract that assumption through an analysis of case histories and research publications by twentieth-century psychoanalysts and psychologists. Such texts demonstrate the ways in which even the most ephemeral psychological experiences – dreams, fantasies, desires – are bound up with structural forms of oppression. Furthermore, these texts – through processes of abstraction, generalisation and classification – indicate ways in which interiorities clash up against externally-defined identity categories; oppression is lived but lived experience also exceeds and complicates identity.

In Memoirs of a Revolutionary Victor Serge describes the first decade of Soviet rule as displaying 'the obscure early stages of a psychosis', the symptoms of which became increasingly pronounced as time wore on and the defeats and corpses piled ever higher. The experience of living through the twenty-year period from the October Revolution of 1917 to the Stalinist purges (which reached their apex in 1937) he declares 'must be a psychological phenomenon unique in history'. At various moments in the memoir the reader catches a glimpse of Serge's wife Liuba Russakova, formerly Lenin's stenographer, who experienced a severe mental breakdown as a result of the paranoid and persecutory atmosphere in Soviet Moscow.

Following the October revolution of 1917 the fledgling Soviet government legalized divorce and abortion, secularized marriage, and decriminalized homosexuality. Utopians dreamed of the withering away of the family and the transformation of women's roles in the home and the workplace. But at least for the time being, only some bodies were capable of bearing children. Women's bodies became contested territory, a site of paradox. On the one hand the image of woman was re-imagined as a de-libidinalized fellow comrade, but this was combined with a continued emphasis on women's biological role as the privileged carriers of the future generation. Rather than circumventing this seeming contradiction, Soviet artworks of the 1920s confronted it, depicting motherhood as an emancipatory and revolutionary act. And this crucially does not only relate to bodies but to emotions. Revolutionary maternal love has a positive, affective dimension that provides an alternative to sexual love. The figure of the revolutionary mother prefigures the still hazily defined qualitative richness of the communist future. This article examines the figure of the revolutionary mother through a discussion of key artworks from the NEP era (1921-1928) concluding by considering how the representation of motherhood shifted in the Stalin era. The article asks what these historical ideas might still teach us today.

Understandings of mental health and illness were transformed in the 1960s as a generation of psychiatrists began to question the orthodoxy of their profession, reframing the aetiology of psychic distress as a consequence of an alienating, consumer society. Though the movement's roots in existentialism and Marxist thought are often emphasised, this workshop will centre attention on how radical psychiatry developed through a critical engagement with psychoanalysis: both challenging the assumptions of the Freudian canon, and reinscribing concepts of the unconscious for the postwar age. It will also explore how the actors and theories of the radical psychiatry movement informed – and were shaped by – the political movements that emerged around 1968. We ask how ideas about social, institutional or technological coercion, either hidden or in plain sight, were mobilised by radical psychiatrists, echoing contemporaneous political critiques of 'modern civilization'. Beginning with a short presentation of Camille Robcis's recent work on Félix Guattari's involvement in the development of Institutional Psychotherapy in France, the workshop will then discuss a text by Guattari himself, alongside a contextual delineation of his work by Dagmar Herzog. The second half of the workshop will cast light on comparable practices and debates which unfolded in the USA, UK, Algeria, Italy, Germany, and Eastern Europe. By placing radical psychiatry in its broader international context, we will trace the dialogues and transformations that occurred as concepts crossed political and geographical borders.Schedule 14:00-16:00 Part I Introduction and discussion of pre-circulated texts 16:00-16:30 Coffee break 16:30-18:00 Part II Situating French Institutional Psychotherapy in an international perspective 18:00-19:30 Break 19:30-21.00 Keynote by Camille Robcis Disalienation: Philosophy, Politics and Radical Psychiatry in France ; Radical Psychiatry, Psychoanalysis, and 1968 , workshop, ICI Berlin, 23 April 2018 ...

The post-1989 social order is crumbling. New forms of political discontent and expression are emerging, but also new military engagements, economic protectionism, a resurgence of nationalism, and a general mistrust of political representation and news media reflected in rampant talk of 'post-truth' and 'alternative facts'. It is all the more urgent to question the narratives about 1989 and its aftermath that are being used to determine contemporary history and shared political timelines. The end of the Cold War – interpreted by some as an 'end of history' – reshaped social and political life across the world and was routinely understood to coincide with democratization, globalization, the rise of neoliberal capitalism and global human rights regimes, but also the defeat of socialism and the dismantling of the welfare state. These processes and ideas have preoccupied the social sciences and humanities and dominated the conceptual apparatus theorists rely on to make sense of contemporary politics and societies. More than 25 years after this alleged historical rupture, after the triumph of liberal democracy, and the opening of the social sciences and humanities to transnational and transdisciplinary frames, a number of alternative (dis)continuities emerge: many of the changes associated with 1989 actually can be shown to have started much earlier, while the current crisis of finance capitalism on the one hand and the challenge of authoritarianism and protectionism on the other – not to mention impending ecological catastrophes – run counter to the triumphalist narrative that still serves as the basis of the determination of the current era. Programme 16:00 – 17:45 Panel I: What Happened to Social Theory in 1989? Epistemic Shifts and Continuities Introduction by Marian Burchardt Boris Vormann (John F. Kennedy Institute, FU Berlin) 'No Alternative: How the Third Way Became a Dead End' Respondent Marian Burchardt Boris Buden (Bauhaus University Weimar) 'How Has History Lost Its Language? On the Political Prospects of ...