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Wild Analysis today

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The most pressing questions of the twentieth century – ‘Why War?’, atrocity, authoritarianism, trauma, gender, sexual difference, and sexuality – have been posed, if not answered, in the language of psychoanalysis. Yet what, if any, are the limits of this versatile, unruly, even ‘wild’, discourse as an approach to the crises of our own times – the pandemic, climate emergency, geopolitical conflict and new calls to arms?

Returning to Freud’s denunciation of the practice of psychoanalysis outside the strictest clinical rigours, Wild Analysis: From the Couch to Cultural and Political Life (Routledge, 2022) explores psychoanalytic thought and practice at its limits, covering topics as difficult and diverse as representations of illness, migration, racial identity and identification, modern invocations of the Enlightenment, the practice of critique, and acute cases of ‘wild’ psychoanalytic insight in the recent history of education, research, and in Freud’s own engagement with disciplines and taboo subjects at the limits of psychoanalysis itself. 

This event celebrates the publication of Wild Analysis and proposes a wider conversation around what ‘Wild Analysis’ might mean beyond the couch: as a means of accounting for, coming to terms, or simply living with the challenges of today. Speakers will include: Shaul Bar-Haim, Elizabeth Sarah Coles, Matt ffytche, Daniel Pick, Jacqueline Rose, and Helen Tyson.

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Speakers
  • Elizabeth Sarah Coles -

    Elizabeth Sarah Coles is a Marie Sklodowska-Curie Postdoctoral Fellow at the Universitat Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona, where she researches experimental currents in modern and contemporary literary criticism. Her monograph on the Canadian poet and Classicist, Anne Carson, is currently under review.

  • Helen Tyson -

    Helen Tyson is a Lecturer in Twentieth and Twenty-First-Century British Literature at the University of Sussex, where she is also a Co-Director of the Centre for Modernist Studies. Helen’s recent publications include articles on Marion Milner and Virginia Woolf in Critical Quarterly and in Feminist Modernist Studies, and the co-edited book, Wild Analysis: From the Couch to Cultural and Political Life (Routledge, 2021). She is working on a book titled Reading Modernism’s Readers: Modernism, Psychoanalysis and the Bestseller.

  • Matt ffytche -

    Matt ffytche is Professor at the Department of Psychosocial and Psychoanalytic Studies, University of Essex and an Academic Associate of the British Psycho-analytical Society. His recent publications include Psychoanalysis in the Age of Totalitarianism (co-edited with Daniel Pick, 2016), and Sigmund Freud (Reaktion Books, Critical Lives Series, 2022). He is Editor of the journal Psychoanalysis and History.

  • Prof Daniel Pick
  • Prof Jacqueline Rose
  • Shaul Bar-Haim -

    Shaul Bar-Haim is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Sociology at the University of Essex. He is the author of The Maternalists: Psychoanalysis, Motherhood and the British Welfare State (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2021) and co-editor of Wild Analysis: From the Couch to Cultural and Political Life (Routledge, 2021). His articles were published articles in journals such as History Workshop Journal, History of the Human Sciences, and Psychoanalysis and History. Shaul is currently working on a new project on the history of negative feelings and collective identity, tentatively entitled ‘The Shadow-Emotion of Narcissism: Jewish Self Hatred and the Critique of the Internalization’