Joël Des Rosiers
“From Diaspora to Metaspora - Journey to the intimate homelands”
Thursday, September 17 2015, 4:30 PM White Hall 111 

"I call metaspora the digital perversion of nostalgia. However, nostalgia only has meaning if originating from sacrifice, thus rending obsolete the notions of country of origin, host country and the corollary diaspora, then word heavily loaded with ancestral anguish. Lighter, formed with slices of life instead of linear narratives, metaspora measures the distance between intimates and intimacy, as it is also a marker of the unexpected intimacy of distance, whether geographical, temporal or cultural.

Aside from being rooted in giving and in emotion, metaspora is an aesthetic category. It is emblematic of Beauty, freed from the slag of the bigotry of identities, that degrade so many poems. Through its effects on art, science and literature, metaspora allows itself the thought of a concept of space and time, taken from Jorge Luis Borges.

If the idealistic and romantic concept of diaspora is rooted in real or fantasized memories, by virtue of remembering a loss of origin, the concept of metaspora aims to make the future become present. It is therefore a series of actions allowing the legibility and the actualization of future events.  

The sporadic speeches, meaning seeds or fragments, collected in the present communication, are open narratives at the confluence of psychoanalysis, music and cinema. They want to accredit the idea that the writer enriches his intimacy with the places where he lives or has lived, as long as he keeps an exquisite consciousness of his dignity as a suffering foreigner. Places, faces, artifacts, all are “intimates homelands” he carries with him wherever he goes."

Joël Des Rosiers is a Montreal-based Haitian poet, essayist, psychiatrist, and psychoanalyst. He is the author of numerous collections of poems and monographs on literary criticism. He won prestigious literary prizes such as the Grand Prix du Festival International de la Poésie (1999) and the Modern Language Association Prize for Independent Scholars for Métaspora: Essai sur les patries intimes (2014).

Sponsored by the Department of French and Italian and co-sponsored by the Psychoanalytic Studies Program. 

Lunch and Lecture: Stephanie Koziej
“Looking for Tenderness in the Early Works of Freud”
Thursday, October 8 2015, 11:45 AM to 1:00 PM  Candler Library 122

This presentation is a first step in Stephanie Koziej’s research. In this talk, she will present the outcomes of her close reading of Freud's 1905 version of Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality to tease out his understanding of tenderness or Zärtlichkeit in the first edition of this important text.

Stephanie Koziej is a 2nd year WGSS graduate student who is also pursuing a certificate in the PSP. She has a BA, MA and MPhil in Philosophy from the Catholic University of Leuven, where she became interested in psychoanalysis and the work of Freud. Her current research interests revolve around the place of tenderness in Freud's theory of sexuality.  What is its relation to libido? Is it sexual? How does it differ from love and Eros? Are there different “types” of tenderness that he singles out? And what is its role in Freud's understanding of the constitution of hysteria?

Dominique Scarfone
“Enactive Cognition, the Freudian Unconscious and Time"
Monday, October 19 2015, 4:15 PM White Hall 111

Dr. Dominique Scarfone is Professor in the Department of Psychology of the Université de Montréal where he teaches psychoanalytic theory. He is a Training and Supervising Analyst at the Montréal Psychoanalytic Institute and a member of the Canadian Psychoanalytic Institute. He was until recently Associate Editor of the International Journal of Psychoanalysis and directed until 1999 the psychoanalytic review TRANS. Dr. Scarfones' research interests include Freudian metapsychology and its epistemological foundations, psychic temporality, presentation and representation in psychoanalysis.

He is the author of Jean Laplanche (Paris, PUF, “Psychanalystes d’aujourd’hui” 1997) recently translated in English as Laplanche: An Introduction (New York, Psychoanalysis in Translation, 2015), Oublier Freud? Mémoire pour la psychanalyse (Montréal, Boréal, 1999), Les Pulsions (Paris, PUF, 2004) and Quartiers aux rues sans nom (Paris, Éditions de l’Olivier, 2012), and co-edited with Howard Levine and Gail Reed Unrepresented States and the Construction of Meaning (London, Karnac Books, 2013). Another book entitled The Unpast. Actuality of the unconscious is forthcoming.

“Old Fights, New Insights: What Psychoanalysis and Religion Say to Each Other About Care”
Lunch Panel-Workshop
Friday, November 13 2015, 11:45 AM-1:00 PM RARB 501 Candler School of Theology

Speakers:
Emmanuel Y. Lartey
L. Bevel Jones III Professor of Pastoral Theology, Care, and Counseling, Candler School of Theology and Graduate Division of Religion
Robert A. Paul
Charles Howard Candler Professor of Anthropology and Interdisciplinary Studies, Director, Emory University Psychoanalytic Institute
Trace Haythorn
Executive Director, Association for Clinical Pastoral Education
Moderator:  Katie Givens Kime (Graduate Division of Religion)

Religion and Psychoanalysis have had an uneasy relation fraught with misunderstandings. While religious scholars and practitioners might disregard psychoanalysis as outdated sexual theories, scholars and practitioners of psychoanalysis might disregard the breadth and depth of world religions as mere pathologies. This workshop is designed to foster an exchange between these two fields on a question that is crucial for both: care.  What can Psychoanalysis and Religion learn from each other on the question of care? How might hospital chaplains and religious leaders benefit from the psychoanalytic understandings of projection, transference, and counter-transference?  Similarly, what might psychoanalysts and scholars of psychoanalytic theory gain from the understanding of “care” within more complex elaborations of theological notions such as, for instance, grace and sin? The presentations of the three speakers will be followed by a discussion.