XVIth National Conference
Love and Psychoanalysis
8tht and 9th August, 2008
Graduate House, 1888 Building,
Grattan Street, Carlton, VIC 3053
Victoria, Australia.
`In the beginning was love', said Lacan of the history of psychoanalysis. There was love in its prehistoric beginning, when Anna O. and Josef Breuer made the first attempts at a talking cure.
But it was reserved to Freud to deal with love so as to learn from it, rather than simply enjoying it or suffering from it. Since then every psychoanalysis has been a love story, and a different one each time. Transference-love always emerges in the analytic experience, with the whole range of manifestations possible, from the tempered to the passionate. It is the ethical position of the analyst, anchored in the desire that Lacan called of the analyst that makes of this love a fertile instrument in the work of analysis.
The analytic experience and the reflections of analysts have also thrown some light on the other forms of human love. Before psychoanalysis there were the testimonies of lovers and poets; with and after Freud, we can think of erotic love, sublimated love, courtly love, the love of our neighbour and the other loves, bearing in mind their ties with the unconscious, desire, jouissance – in brief, with the categories that the analytic discourse has introduced into human affairs.
This is a good time to revisit love: in the analytic experience, as pathos (both passion and pathology) and as creativity. We still have much to learn from it.
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Keynote speakers include:
- Prof Constant Mews, medievalist, Monash University.
- Michael Leunig, artist and writer, The Age.
- Dr Leonardo Rodriguez, psychoanalyst.
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