Lunch and Lecture: Taylor Schey
“In a Sentimental Mood, or, Are You a Sociopath?”
Tuesday, September 16 2014, 11:45 AM to 1:00 PM Callaway Center N116

Through a reading of Wordsworth’s early and only drama The Borderers, this paper situates the contemporary rhetorics of sociopathy and empathy in relation to latent tensions in eighteenth-century Scottish Enlightenment philosophy. Tracing how Wordsworth understands the sentimentalist articulation of sympathy as giving rise to the figure of the sociopath, it reopens the supposedly obsolete problem of analogy against which Romanticism has been traditionally defined, while contesting attempts to reduce this problem through notions of radical alterity and repetition compulsion. 

Taylor Schey is a PhD candidate in Comparative Literature and a Fellow at the Bill and Carol Fox Center for Humanistic Inquiry, where he is currently completing his dissertation, tentatively titled After Skepticism: Hume and the Political Aesthetics of Romanticism.

Professor Alexandre Leupin
Lecture: "Edouard Glissant: Poésie et coupures épistémologiques" (in French)
Thursday, September 25 2014, 4:30 PM Callaway 202 (Lyotard Seminar room)

Seminar: "Edouard Glissant and the Signifier" (in  English)
Friday, September 26 2014, 1:30 PM, Callaway 202 (Lyotard Seminar room)

Alexandre Leupin is Phyllis M. Taylor  Professor in French Studies at Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge. He has written extensively on Medieval and Modern Literatures, Art History and Psychoanalysis. He has published Les  entretiens de Baton Rouge, an interview with Édouard Glissant, and recently  completed a book-length study on this world renowned writer. He is founder and  director of the online journal http://mondesfrancophones.com.

Both events are sponsored  by The Department of French & Italian and the Emory Psychoanalytic Studies Program.

Robyn Fivush
"Talking Trauma: Is it always good for you?"
Thursday, October 2 2014, 4:30 PM White Hall 111

Dr. Robyn Fivush, who received her PhD from the Graduate Center at CUNY, is a Samuel Candler Dobbs Professor of Psychology and Associate Vice-Provost for Academic Innovation at Emory, where she is also associated faculty with the Department of Women's Studies, a Senior Fellow in the Center for the Study of Law and Religion, and Director of the Family Narratives Lab. Her research focuses on early memory with an emphasis on the social construction of autobiographical memory and the relations among memory, narrative, identity, trauma, and coping. She has written, co-authored, and edited over 150 books, book chapters, and articles. Two of her recent publications are the edited volumes: The Handbook of Children’s Memory Development in 2013,and Stress and emotion in the development of memory in 2009.

Jeanine M. Vivona
"The Interpersonal Words of the Infant: Implications of Infant Research in Embodied Communication for Psychoanalytic Theory and Technique"
Friday, October 10 2014, 7:30 PM Emory School of Medicine Commons Area 100

This paper has two aims: to highlight the importance of others' words in the interpersonal world of the infant and to explore the interpersonal nature of language. To those ends, we will examine empirical research on embodied communication, that is, the infant's ability to make meaning from the confluence of the other's speech, bodily cues such as facial expressions and gestures, and the larger experiential context. Most psychoanalytic discussions of infant research (e.g., the work of Beatrice Beebe, Daniel Stern) focus on the consequences of behavioral interactions between parent and infant for development of self and relatedness. By bringing in both the linguistic modes of communication between parent and infant and the contributions of parent-infant interactions to cognitive and linguistic development, we gain a fuller understanding of infant development, the scope of parental influence on the infant's mind, and the interpersonal dynamics that are memorialized in and activated through speech. Some compelling theoretical and clinical implications of this expanded view are identified.

Jeanine M. Vivona, Ph.D is Professor of Psychology in New Jersey and adjunct clinical faculty at Pennsylvania Hospital in Philadelphia. She maintains a private practice of psychoanalytic psychotherapy and supervision near Philadelphia. She is a member of the Editorial Boards of Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association (JAPA) and Psychoanalytic Inquiry. Two of her papers have been awarded The JAPA Prize, her 2006 article, "From Developmental Metaphor to Developmental Model: The Shrinking Role of Language in the Talking Cure" and her 2012 article, "Is There a Nonverbal Period of Development?" She is working on a book, which examines psychoanalytic conceptions of verbal and nonverbal strains of experience and modes of being.

This event is sponsored by the Atlanta Psychoanalytic Society, the Emory University Psychoanalytic Institute, the Emory University Psychoanalytic Studies Program, and the Atlanta Psychoanalytic Foundation.

Lunch and Lecture: Anthony Cooke
“The Forensic Fifty-Minute Hour: Crime, Mental Illness, and the Analyst-Analysand Relationship”
Tuesday, October 21 2014, Callaway Center N116

The first two “Hannibal Lecter Novels” by Thomas Harris—Red Dragon and The Silence of the Lambs as well as the first film adaptations, Manhunter and The Silence of Lambs—provide representations of the psychoanalytic process. All four cultural productions feature pivotal scenes in which the psychiatrist-turned-serial-murderer, Hannibal Lecter, engages in an ad-hoc psychoanalytic session with an FBI agent—Will Graham and Clarice Starling, respectively. Lecter provides a “talking cure” that allows these mentally ill agents to come to terms with his and her mental illness, which in turn “frees” them to apprehend other serial murderers at large.

The nuances of the analyst-analysand relationship in these texts and films emerge sharply against the New Right revival and contemporaneous federal decreases in funding for mental health during the eighties and early nineties. Drawing on the work of Melanie Klein regarding ego formations and defenses, as well as Françoise Davoine and Jean-Max Gaudillière’s work on madness and foreclosure, this paper offers a critique of the cultural work of controversial texts and films within the contested terrain of the deinstitutionalization movement and mental illness in late twentieth century America.

Anthony Carlton Cooke is a PhD candidate in English and an Emory Writing Center Fellow. His interests include American Literature, African American Literature, Kleinian and Object Relations Psychoanalysis, Cinema and Media Studies, Popular Culture, and Cultural Studies.

Lunch and Lecture: Samantha Allen
"Precarious Worlds: Queering Gamer Shame"
Wednesday, November 19 2014, 11:45 AM to 1:00 PM Candler Library 124

People who play video games often describe their affective relationship to gaming using the vocabulary of shame. Queer studies, too, recently took up shame as a potentially productive affect for queer politics. This talk asks: What do "gamer shame" and "queer shame" have in common?  Defining shame via Silvan Tomkins as a positive affect that persists beyond an obstacle, I focus on queer shame as positive affect attached to queer practices, relations, and identities that persists beyond the thwarting of a heteronormative world. And by theorizing games as transitional objects using Winnicott, I define gamer shame as a continued attachment to the space of play that persists into adulthood. With this comparison laid out, I ask: What is the relationship between gamer shame and queer shame? How might they mitigate or compound one another? And do video games have a place in coalitional queer politics?

Samantha Allen is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, writing a dissertation that applies Silvan Tomkins' theory of affect to the discourse of fetish newsletters and online fetish communities. Her work has been published in Feminist Theory and Loading with work forthcoming in QED: A Journal in GLBTQ Worldmaking. In 2013, Samantha Allen received the John Money Fellowship for Scholars of Sexology from The Kinsey Institute for Research in Sex, Gender, and Reproduction.