Works In Progress Seminar: Formations of the Body in Psychoanalysis

Works In Progress Seminar:

Formations of the Body in Psychoanalysis

Wednesday, December 4, 2019

8:00 pm

Presenter: Jennifer Yusin

Can we say there is a unique psychoanalytic concept of the body? What role do the ideas of the maternal and paternal body play in the development of psychoanalytic theory and practice? How does the psychoanalytic clinic account for the body—its diverse forms, expressions, identities, etc.—in its approaches to and treatments of neurosis and psychosis? In this presentation, I will attempt to deepen our understanding of the body by exploring the ways it is linked to formations of symptoms and symptomatic acts. I will consider together Jacques Lacan’s proposition of the ‘sinthome’, a non-pathological symptom that has a function analogous to art, and Freud’s lifelong work on the symptom as a metaphor for an unconscious conflict. This presentation will also therefore address the possibilities of a psychoanalytic concept of the body in the study and teaching of psychoanalysis today.

No CME or CE credits offered. 

Jennifer Yusin is an associate professor in the Department of English and Philosophy at Drexel University and member of the School of the Freudian Letter (London). Her academic work explores the relations among psychoanalysis, philosophy, and global anglophone cultures and literatures. Her works include The Future Life of Trauma: Partitions, Borders, Repetitions (Fordham University Press, 2017) and “Postcolonial Trauma,” in Trauma and Literature (Cambridge University Press, 2018). She is also the editor and co-translator of the English translations of books by Jean-Gérard Bursztein, a psychoanalyst who practices and teaches in Paris. Those books include My Lexicon of Psychoanalysis, A Psychoanalytic Commentary of the Hebrew Bible, and Subject Topology: A Lexicon (Hermann Press, 2019). She is currently training in clinical psychoanalytic work.