Works in Progress Seminar: The Language of the Mother and the Language of the Father

Event Phone: 212-879-6900

Works in Progress Seminar: The Language of the Mother and the Language of the Father: Sabina Spielrein’s Anticipation of the Concepts of Jacques Lacan, Hélène Cixous and Luce Irigaray

Wednesday, January 8, 2020

8:00 pm

Presenter: Klara Naszkowska, Ph.D.

Sabina Spielrein (1885–1942) was a Russian-Jewish forerunner of child analysis. I will focus on her model of the development of language and thought first formulated in the presentation delivered at the International Psychoanalytic Congress held in The Hague in 1920, and then expanded in a number of papers. I will show how Spielrein’s model anticipated by thirty years Jacques Lacan’s concept of the three orders, Real, Imaginary and Symbolic, and how her concept of the autistic primitive language associated with the mother anticipated the theories of Hélène Cixous and Luce Irigaray who postulate a non-symbolic feminine language associated with the mother, corporality and feminine jouissance.

No CME or CE credits offered. 

Klara Naszkowska, Ph.D., cultural historian, founding director of the International Association for Spielrein Studies (www.spielreinassociation.org), and 2019/2020 Fulbright Visiting Scholar at Union Theological Seminary (Columbia University). Recent and forthcoming publications: “Passions, Politics, and Drives: Sabina Spielrein in Soviet Russia” in: Sabina Spielrein and the Beginnings of Psychoanalysis: Thought, Word, and Image (Routledge, 2019) and “Sabina Spielrein: Searching for her own path” in: Psychoanalysis in the Shadow of War and Holocaust (in Polish, Universitas, 2020). Klara is the main organizer of the first International Conference “Sabina Spielrein and the Early Female Pioneers of Psychoanalysis” (2-4 April 2020, Warsaw).