Elissa Marder
"Freud's Idée Fixe: Femininity, Fixation, and Photography"
Tuesday, February 4 2014 

Dr. Elissa Marder is Professor of French and Comparative Literature at Emory University where she is also affiliated with the Departments of Philosophy and Women’s Studies.  She is a founding member of the Emory Psychoanalytic Studies Program and served as its Director from 2001-2006.  Her publications include: Dead Time: Temporal Disorders in the Wake of Modernity (Baudelaire and Flaubert) (Stanford University Press, 2001); The Mother in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction: Psychoanalysis, Photography, and Deconstruction (Fordham University Press, 2012); Time for Baudelaire (Poetry, Theory, History). Eds. E.S. Burt, Elissa Marder, Kevin Newmark.  Yale French Studies vol. 125/126 (forthcoming: Spring, 2014).  

Co-sponsored by Department of French and Italian.

Lunch and Lecture: Mark Stoholski
“Let not thy left hand know what the right doeth:” On Georges de La Tour's The Fortune-Teller"
Tuesday, February 25 2014    

Pascal Quignard notes that the works of the 17th century painter Georges de La Tour serve as snares for the eye. The paintings present themselves as visual surfaces that arrest the gaze and enfold it within an enigma that lies on another plane entirely. La Tour's The Fortune-Teller fashions this enigma through the question of fate – not an individual fate, but one that lies always behind us. Passed from hand to hand, generation to generation, from image to image, this fate is not foreign to psychoanalysis, as it is born from an encounter with the visual surface of the dream. La Tour's image catches us in an indefinite movement, from the visual surface, to that of language, to another, one which will have remained behind the back, unseen, and unheard. The Fortune-Teller works a disarticulation of bodies, faces and hands in which the symbol of fate is made to appear.

Mark Stoholski is a fourth-year graduate student in the Department of Comparative Literature. He is currently preparing a dissertation entitled Affecting the Logos, which treats the literary and affective work of seduction in the writings of Gorgias of Leontini, Blaise Pascal, Ernest Hello, and Pascal Quignard. He was a co-organizer of the Traversals of Affect/Traversées d'affect international conference, held at Emory University in 2013. His wider interests include the sophistic, theology, and the psychoanalysis of the "Budapest School."

Martha-Grace Duncan
"What Not to Do When your Roommate is Murdered in Italy: An Essay for Amanda Know"
Thursday, March 20 2014

Professor Martha-Grace Duncan is a Professor of Law at Emory University. She has earned a Ph.D. in Political Science from Columbia University and a law degree from Yale.  In addition, she has studied psychoanalysis as a research candidate at NYU Psychoanalytic Institute. Professor Duncan specializes in Criminal Law, a field that has led to many fascinating friendships with inmates. At Emory, she teaches Criminal Law as well as courses in Law and Literature and Law and the Unconscious Mind. Her publications include a book: Romantic Outlaws, Beloved Prisons: The Unconscious Meanings of Crime and Punishment, numerous law review articles, and memoirs in literary journals.  Her presentation is part of a book in progress to be entitled:  Morbid Laughter, Proper Tears:  The Demand for “Appropriate” Emotions in Criminal Law.

Elizabeth Rottenberg
"Foreign Bodies: Psychoanalysis and Neuroscience"
Tuesday, April 1 2014

Dr. Elizabeth Rottenberg is an Associate Professor of Philosophy at DePaul University and an advanced candidate at the Chicago Institute for Psychoanalysis.  She is the author of Inheriting the Future: Legacies of Kant, Freud, and Flaubert and has translated books by Lyotard, Derrida, and Blanchot.  She is a founding member of the Derrida Seminars Translation Project and the translator (most recently) of Jacques Derrida's The Death Penalty II. She is currently finishing a book entitled For the Love of Psychoanalysis.

Monique David-Ménard
"The Objects of Desire between Real and Reality"
Monday, April 21 2014

It will be a matter of reconsidering objects in the transference not only as inassimilable residues for the subject, but also, at certain moments, as the materials for subjective transformations, thanks in particular to the function of dreams when they become acts. This invention of objects in the space of the transference leads us to stress the importance of the “day's residues,” apparently insignificant but nonetheless decisive components. Thereby, the transposition of sexual life in the cure is a metonymy rather than a metaphor. How are we, then, to analyze discourse so as not to erase the act of this transposition and the play that it opens up?

Monique David-Ménard is Professor of Philosophy and Director of doctoral research in Psychoanalysis at the University of Paris Diderot. She is also a practicing Psychoanalyst in Paris. She is an associate member of the Society of Freudian Psychoanalysis, a co-founder of the International Society of Psychoanalysis and Philosophy, and a member of the International Network of Women Philosophers of UNESCO. The main fields of her research are: Psychoanalysis, Psychoanalysis and Philosophy, Sexualities and Gender, and the Sciences of the Living. She is the author of: L’Hystérique entre Freud et Lacan. Corps et langage en psychanalyse (1983); La Folie dans la raison pure. Kant lecteur de Swedenborg (1990);Les Constructions de l’universel. Psychanalyse, philosophie (1997); Tout le plaisir est pour moi (2000); Deleuze et la psychanalyse. L’Altercation (2005); Les Constructions de l’universel (2009);Eloge des hasards dans la vie sexuelle (2011); Corps et langage en psychanalyse. L'hystérique entre Freud et Lacan. Nouvelle edition augmentée (2014). Her translated works include: Hysteria from Freud to Lacan. Body and Language in psychoanalysis (1989).

Lunch and Lecture: Rachel Weitzenkorn
"What of Evidence: How Psychoanalysts are Expanding Empirical Validity"
Tuesday, April 22 2014 

It is no secret that psychoanalysis has had to work under the pressure of the guiding principal dominating research and the cultural imaginary that can be encapsulated with the term "evidence-based medicine". Psychoanalysts have taken two approaches to this financial and legitimacy pressure, either working outside the system, ignoring the empirical approaches of other psychiatric treatments, or attempting to develop standard treatments that have utility for empirical scientific verifiability. Barbara Milrod has been a leading psychoanalytic researcher attempting to bridge the widening gap between the American Psychiatric Association's research standards and the goals and knowledge of psychoanalysis. This paper will read Milrod's standardization of psychoanalytic anxiety treatment alongside Freud's 1926 work Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety. What can these two approaches reveal about the nature of evidence?  Does anxiety and panic lend itself more readily to an evidence approach? How does the pressure of evidence-based medicine expand and influence psychoanalytic thought?

Rachel Weitzenkorn is a third year PhD student in the Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies Department. She works within the fields of psychoanalysis and feminist science studies. She is developing a dissertation project that interrogates the evidence of behavioral biology, and pharmacology through analysis of visual representations of the body.