Psychoanalytic Studies Annual Lecture: Sharon Numa (British Psychoanalytical Society) Eyes Wide Shut: Maintaining the Status Quo
When:
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Venue:
Birkbeck Main Building, Malet Street
Location: Room B35 in main Birkbeck building in Malet Street, Bloomsbury, London WC1E 7HX
The complex psychic mechanisms of denial and disavowal frequently used to evade reality have long been the subject of psychoanalytic study. The “blindness of the seeing eye” (Freud, 1893) is clearly illustrated in society’s approach to the question of racism and to related historical injury. Confronting truth, aggression, hatred and its consequences poses a threat to social equilibrium as it often does to the psychic equilibrium of the individual. Hence the stability offered by certain types of pathological organisations becomes a desired refuge. Clinical analytic work allows us to explore some of these processes as they manifest in the inner world of the individual patient, and this will be discussed in relation to issues of power, superiority and inferiority where maintaining the status quo is given priority over development and growth.
Contact name:
Psychosocial Studies
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Dr Sharon Numa
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Dr Sharon Numa is a Fellow of the British Psychoanalytical Society. She is co-editor of the recently published On Being One's Self: Clinical Explorations in Identity from John Steiner's Workshop. She co-convenes the British Psychoanalytical Society's Race and Racialisation Study Group.