APPI ANNUAL CONGRESS 2024 - In-Person and Hybrid

(This is an In-Person and a Hybrid event - Zoom link will be send to to tikcets holders the day before the Congress )

“But the important point is that this form [ideal-I] situates the agency known as the ego, prior to its social determination, in a fictional direction that will forever remain irreducible for any single individual or, rather, that will only asymptotically approach the subject’s becoming, no matter how successful the dialectical synthesis by which we must resolve, as I, his discordance with his own reality.”

Lacan, the Mirror Stage as Formative of the “I” Function, Ecrits, p 76

In Totem and Taboo (1913) and later in Civilizations and Its Discontents (1930), Freud considers the family as the oldest social group. The larger society (or civilization) is seen as a later development. Even as, historically, the individual becomes increasingly implicated in society, social organization and civilization retained their “otherness”. Freud believed that since civilization is largely responsible for man’s misery, every individual is its enemy “civilization and psychopathology are one”, culture for Freud has an “other-ness” rather than an “I-ness” or a “me-ness.”

Nowadays you cannot escape the interconnectedness that modern society imposes on the subject. All is in the algorithm, your purchases, your job application, your gender declaration, your likes and dislikes, your food, your images…and many other ways it captures subjectivity and enjoyment. You are constantly being fed on what you feed it. The constant illusion that the subject can find happiness and completeness confronts the very basis of Freud’s argument of the antagonism between the demands of instinct and the restrictions of civilization. Where all is permitted, where to find no-thing? If you ask Google to describe how algorithms work it will tell you that “all social algorithms use signals to indicate how much a user enjoys specific content. For example, if you comment, share, or like a piece of content, the algorithm will understand it and try to provide similar content.” This circularity and surplus enjoyment brings us to Lacan’s formulation of intersubjective communication, “the sender, as I tell you, receives from the receiver his own message in an inverted form.”

7 CPD points will be awarded

CONGRESS PROGRAMME - TIMETABLE

09.00 – 09.45 Register in person and live stream

09.45 – 10.00 Welcome address by Micheli Romao, APPI Chair and Opening Comments by Carol Owens, Congress Host

10.00 – 10.45 Keynote Speaker 1 – Nina Krajnik

10.45 – 11.00 Break

11.00 – 12.30 - Presenters:

a) Kevin Murphy

b) Ivana Milivojevic

c) Berjanet Jazani

12.30 – 13.30 Lunch

13.30 – 14.15 Keynote Speaker 2 – Jacob Johannsen

14.15 – 15.45 Presenters:

a) Angie Voela

b) Michael Miller

c) Mike Holohan

15.45 – 16.00 Break

16.00 – 16.45 Plenary Panel Discussion

16.45 – 17.00 Closing comments – Ger McLoughlin, Chair, APPI Congress Events Committee and Carol Owens

Congress Host - Carol Owens

ABSTRACT - Nina Krajnik

Metamorphoses Of Subjectivity And New Symptoms In Times of Political Crisis

Abstract: Lacan asserted that the unconscious is politics, thereby emphasizing the intricate relation between the subject and the discourse of the Other. Psychoanalysis never wields general social impact because it does not consider people as mass or interest group, but regards them in their singularity and incomparability – not only with other subjects but with any worldview. However, this does not render psychoanalysis indifferent to politics. On the contrary, its attention applies to symptoms that are related to the Other of the political field – its transformations, expectiations, dissapointments, fears and dreams.

In this context, my presentation will focus on the consequences of the decline of the Name of the Father as the name of the Law, and the subsequent metamorphoses of social bonds,leading to the transition from neurotic to psychotic or perverse political discourses. It will address the new symptoms arising from these social changes: the anxiety and disorientation experienced in the shift from the traditional Other to its postmodern multiplicities, the hopelessness and fanaticism as the quest for the Other, the role of the mirror stage in bodily obediance and biopolitics, and new forms of jouissance as negotiations of the boundaries of the Other. Additionally, the search for a sense of security will be examined as a manifestation of contemporary melancholy.

Given the current escalation of conflicts, the presentation will also consider symptoms linked to political violence, such as cruelty, victimization, and Schadenfreude. The clinical segment will draw on my recent psychoanalytic fieldwork in the war zones of Kharkiv, Ukraine, located 30 kilometers from the Russian border. Here, I will explore the interplay between bodily boundaries and state borders, the question of what remains of the Father figure in the 21st century, and ily boundaries and state borders, the question of what remains of the Father figure in thehow psychoanalysis can practically influence the social and political sphere, especially during times of crisis.

BIOGRAPHY

Nina is a psychoanalyst and lecturer with a PhD in Philosophy. A pioneer of Lacanian psychoanalysis in Slovenia and the Western Balkans, she serves as the president of the Slovenian Association of Lacanian Psychoanalysis, the director of the International School of Psychoanalysis, and is the founder of the movement Lakan Balkan. She is the editor-in-chief of the publishing house Juno and the author of numerous works on psychoanalysis, science, and literature, notably on Joyce's Finnegans Wake. Her clinical specialization includes addressing political and war trauma in conflict-ridden areas and regions experiencing social turmoil.

ABSTRACT - Kevin Murphy

"Aggressiveness and Child Sexual Abuse"

Working with male child sexual abusers in a forensic setting offers a recurring thematic: they very often present with an absence of aggression. Yet, they are in prison for the crime of ‘enjoying’ proscribed and taboo sexual acts which, even without overt violence, are quintessentially aggressive in their psychological impacts on, and bodily violations of, vulnerable non consenting others – often their children. An index of this veiled aggressioncan be seen in the lifelong effects these acts have on victims. Rather than being surprisedthat apparently non-aggressive subjects achieve jouissance through aggressiveness, psychoanalysis from the beginning has emphasised the centrality of the latter in the formation of the ego of every human subject. Drawing on Jaques Lacan’s “Aggressiveness inPsychoanalysis”, presented a year before “The Mirror Stage as Formative of the I Function”, but intrinsically related to it, I will consider his insights around the ‘deadly tendencies’ of thedeath instinct which are implicated here. In terms of subject formation I will propose howthe child sex abuser can be viewed as deriving from a prototypical Mirror Stage identification combining aggressiveness with narcissistic structure. I will also consider howthis subject becomes fixated on the ‘specific satisfaction’ of the integration of an original organic chaos. I will further consider how child sexual abuse, as a particular form of Oedipally structured perversion, is a fantasmatic and repetitively symptomatic attempt tosustain this integration by avoiding re-fragmentation of the formative ego identificationthrough a jouissance attained at the expense of the Other.

BIOGRAPHY

Kevin is a psychoanalytic psychotherapist, training analyst and registered supervising analyst based in Dublin. In his private practice he works mainly in the area of sexuality. His doctoral research on asexuality was conducted under the supervision of Russell Grigg at Deakin University, Melbourne and was published by Routledge in 2023 as “Asexuality and Freudian Lacanian Theory, Towards a Theory of an Enigma”. He has presented papers at conferences and seminars in Ireland and abroad. He has worked with child sex offenders for many years. His current area of research is focussed on Freudian and Lacanian theories of perversion in relation to child sexual abuse.

ABSTRACT - Ivana Milivojevic

Stating the Obvious (and a wee step further)

In a letter to Fleiss from 1897, while arguing about ‘the irremediable antagonism between the demands of instinct and the restrictions of civilisation’, Freud uses words ‘unhappiness’,‘malaise’, and ‘discomfort’. His text “Civilisation and its Discontents” develops based on this observation, and in search of the answers of how the civilization as an entity of its own, and the subjects who represented/resisted it, ended up living in neurosis.

Saying that we live in a very different world today would only be stating the obvious. The ways we communicate are more instantly visual than patiently verbal. The doubt sprouting from our existential lack is replaced with consistently enforced attempts of finding objective truths. The pleasure of desiring is overshadowed by (predominantly infantile) forms of jouissance.

In the psychoanalytic clinic, while ‘unhappiness’, ‘malaise’, and ‘discomfort’ persist in one’s search for happiness, it seems that our civilizational ‘over-content’ – in oh so many areas of life – has become a bigger problem that ‘discontent’. And my wee step further than stating the obvious would be in the wondering of what is the new subject in the psychoanalytic clinic, that reflects this new civilization of the image, certainty and regression to our ‘natural’ state of jouissance without lack.

There is a place in the “Civilisation and its Discontents” where Freud says: ‘each one of us behaves in some respect like a paranoic, corrects some aspect of the world which is unbearable to him by the construction of a wish and introduces this delusion into reality’.

My question for this Congress relates to this, but from the other side of the mirroring between the individual and the world: how does the Other of now, sometimes paranoid and sometimes schizophrenic, shape its subjects and their desires, enjoyments and discomforts?

BIOGRAPHY

Ivana was born in Belgrade, Serbia, in 1967, Ivana moved to Dublin in 2001, brought (t)here by her want to explore the world of James Joyce’s and his storytelling at the place where the author and his views of the world came from and kept returning to. Since then, she has trained as psychoanalytic psychotherapist and she works in a private practice in Dublin. Ivana is an author of two monographs and some book chapters and articles published in Serbia, Switzerland and Italy.

ABSTRACT - Berjanet Jazani

Women’s Bodies and Desire in Resistance

‘Woman, Life, Freedom’ a stunning slogan, traversing the dogmatism of theorising any formof the feminist movements and feminine position. Was it an echo of a burgeoning desire - being articulated in every street of the cities in Iran, or was it reclaiming the womanhood, meaning the freedom, after a long and non-stop subversive battle against a totalitarian systemof suppression, the feminine resistance? The above motto being chanted by both men and women, manifested as a metaphor, fabricating the very core of the new generation’s symptom to translate and index for them thefabric of impossible Real of suppressive doctrine against the most basic rights of human beings.

The tragedy of 1979 swept away all those relentless efforts for recognising and respecting thewomen’s right. This is the starting point where we would like to treat on this occasion as thebeginning of a haunting, suppressive trend against life and freedom starting with women. Atrend which was resisted, challenged and subverted right from the early days. Over the decades the subversive subject was able to partially change the dynamic, in September 2022, the outbreak of women’s uprise, joined and supported with their men, onceagain reminded us of the unpredictability at play within any human social network. No matterhow much the propagandists do to tailor the people’s expectations in accordance with a particular power structure, each subject is essentially subversive, and her/his acts are beyondthe control of a structural morality. I will expand the above argument under the light of Freudian and Lacanian thoughts onpsychical structures while being careful not to generalise too much as we seek an explanationof such social phenomena from a psychoanalytic perspective.

BIOGRAPHY

Berjanet trained is a medical doctor, practising psychoanalyst and author in London. She is the president of the College of Psychoanalysts UK (CP -UK), chief editor of Analytic Agora(the journal of The Academy of Psychoanalysis), analyst member of the Centre for FreudianAnalysis and Research (CFAR), and the author of ‘Lacanian Psychoanalysis from Clinic toCulture’ and ‘Lacan, Mortality, Life and Language: Clinical and Cultural Explorations’. Her most recent books include: ‘How Does Analysis Work? Examples of Lacanian Interpretation’& ‘The Perfume of Soul from Freud to Lacan: A Critical Reading of Smelling, Breathing and Subjectivity’.

ABSTRACT - Jacob Johanssen

I am Other Online: Digital Hysteria and Dynamics of Contemporary Intersubjectivity

In this talk, I wish to point to some scenarios and intersubjective forms of relating which are symptomatic of the current conjuncture. The internet, social media and digital technologies have been praised and demonised in equal measure. Individuals engage with different apps, platforms and gadgets more than ever before. This has particular implications for the consulting room and the wider social structures and bonds. On the surface, it seems as if the internet has given us the possibility of seeing ourselves through the Other's eyes, as well as to externalise psychic reality and engage with fellow users so that mutual understanding and recognition may flourish. Yet, it is all too evident that hatred, fake news, division and misunderstanding are widespread wherever we look online and beyond. Rather than interpreting such phenomena as mere instances of narcissism and tribalism, the situation is more complex. Drawing on my recent work on digital politics, online misogyny, and eating disorder content, I argue that they all exemplify the status hysteria has acquired as a symptom of the digital today.

BIOGRAPHY

Jacob is Associate Professor in Communications, St Mary’s University, London.He is the author of several books, including Psychoanalysis and Digital Culture: Audiences, Social Media, and Big Data (Routledge, 2019); Fantasy, Online Misogyny and the Manosphere (Routledge, 2022) and with Steffen Krüger Media and Psychoanalysis: A Critical Introduction (Karnac, 2022). Johanssen is editor of the Counterspace section of the journal Psychoanalysis, Culture & Society, sits on the executive committee of the Association for Psychosocial Studies and is a Founder Scholar of the British Psychoanalytic Council.

ABSTRACT - Angie Voela

The suffering philosopher: Berardi’s style at the limit

Franco (Biffo) Berardi is an intellectual witnessing the aberrations of contemporary culture (in Heroes (2015), Futurability (2019), The Third Unconscious (2021) and other writings), interms such as the enslavement of the future; reactionary nostalgia; the dark side of desire; the decline of the intellect, automation of knowledge; impotence and possibility, etc. Without meaning to reduce ‘complex events to mere lines of causation’, he sees ‘this form of psychopathology not as an isolated phenomenon, but as a symptom of a widespread suffering’ (Heroes, 46), characterised by an urgency inherent in the phrases ‘imminent psychosphere’, ‘threshold’, ‘becoming nothing’ (Third Unconscious). Speaking from the limit of a near total collapse of the Symbolic order as we know it, andadvocating the need to reactivate our ability to connect language and desire before it is too late, Berardi could be seen as a parrhesiastes (a speaking subject who supports their word withtheir being and nothing else), distancing himself from mastery and knowledge, rejectingparanoids and hysterics alike (Heroes, 224), calling for ways of remaining human (Heroes, 207) and warnings against the ‘total circle of total transparency’, before declaiming: ‘don’t beattached to life; don’t have hope […] don’t believe (me)’ (Heroes, 226). Rather than dwelling on Berardi the ironist, as he is often portrayed, I focus but the speaking-suffering subject, addressing us from an aporetic limit, presumably at a loss as how to proceed at the brink of an irreversible totalising transformation.

One way of approaching this address is by paying attention to its style, drawing parallels withLacan’s comments on Buffon’s address to the Academy of Sciences in 1753, in JudithMiller’s (1991) Style is the Man Himself. Lacan locates Buffon’s desire at the point of animpossible encounter between style and psychoanalysis whilst demonstrating that Buffonaddresses the academy as the notable and immortal collective other of which he is about to become a member. By contrast, Berardi the suffering subject demonstrates how not to becaptured by the dominant apparatus by inhabiting (in) the real of his aporia and suffering, whilst addressing us --- as what? The other that cannot/should not heed his word? Shouldwe experience this address as a necrotic othering, an impossible invitation, or an appeal totake sides? How would we respond as subjects, psychoanalytic thinkers and therapists –were we to be addressed like that addressed in the clinic?

It is possible to respond to these questions by focusing on potentiality at the limit. FollowingKolozova (2018), who draws on Badiou and Laruelle, we could consider the limit as boththreshold promising a leap of thought when there appears to be no way of exceeding of thehorizon (102); and as a no to endless signification; a cut (event) that intervenes into discursiveness (93), an interpretation affirming difference (85). And while the theoretical ramifications of the cut take us in the realm of the philosophical negotiation of the event andits relation to the one, the minus one, the den (not) and clinamen (tyche), it might be equallyimportant to consider if psychoanalysis can (continue to) be a practice of openness to that which one approaches based on an intersubjective discursivity that is not a subject-object relation where one is passive listener, but a form of sharing of the world prior to one’s constitution as subject.

BIOGRAPHY

Angie is a Reader in Social Sciences, University of East London (UK). She is the coeditor of Psychoanalysis, Culture and Society since 2018. She has published articles and book chapters on gender and feminism; psychoanalysis and philosophy; psychoanalytic approaches to politics, pedagogy and space; and psychoanalysis and contemporary culture. She is the author of After Oedipus: Psychoanalysis, Philosophy, and Myth in Contemporary Culture (2017) Her recently publications include the co-edited volumes After Lockdown, Opening Up: Psychosocial transformations after COVID-19 (2021) and Movement, Velocity and Rhythm from a Psychoanalytic Perspective (2022). She is training as a psychoanalytic psychotherapist at the SITE of Contemporary Psychoanalysis.

ABSTRACT - Michael Miller

The Jubilant Assumption of the Ethical: Between Humble Courage and Solemn Cowardice

Lacan's urgent concern with the reascendance of the ego—and the loss of the Other—remains vital today, not just in psychoanalysis, but in a wide swath of contemporary scholarly and popular discourse about identity and its recognition. Psychiatric "recognition theory," by way of example, frames identity recognition as an ethical imperative. With Hegel, Kierkegaard, and Lacan, I will argue that this imperative does not reveal the “truth” of the self or subject, but enforces the mirroring of narcissism—and therefore belies its own claim to the "ethical" with an ironic embrace of the Master/Slave relationship. This has significant consequences for those clinicians, including psychoanalysts, who continue to attempt to engage what is excessive to the ego. I will propose that the ascendance of recognition faces such clinicians with another ethical dilemma: that between Kierkegaardian “humble courage” and Sartrean "solemn cowardice.

BIOGRAPHY

Michael is a clinical psychologist, Associate Professor of Psychiatry, and Director of Doctoral Psychology Training at Upstate Medical University in Syracuse, NY, USA. His publications include Lacanian Psychotherapy (Routledge, 2011) and several shorter works on Lacan.

ABSTRACT - Michael Holohan

Telling Response-able Stories About Significant Otherness in Human-Chatbot Relations

AI-enabled chatbots intended to act as virtual companions or even therapists are becomingincreasingly common in the marketplace, with millions of users currently registered. Thesechatbots make use of the “Eliza effect”, or the tendency of human users to attribute humanlike knowledge and understanding to a computer. A common interpretation considers this form of relating as delusion, error, or deception, where the user forgets or misunderstands they are talking to a computer. The flipside to this interpretation, proffered by companionchatbot companies like Replika or Kindroid, is the notion that, ideally, a subject can findhappiness and completeness in their relationship to a chatbot. As an alternative, I draw onthe work of both psychoanalysis and feminist Science & Technology Studies scholarship as providing a robust and capacious tradition of thinking and engaging with human – nonhuman relationships in non-reductive ways. I closely analyze different stories about encounters with chatbots, taking up the feminist STS challenge to attend to the agency of significant otherness in the encounter. I focus on the story of Julie, who experiences a mental health crisis, and her chatbot Navi, as told through her own descriptions of her experiences with Navi in the recent podcast, Radiotopia presents: Bot Love. I argue that common interpretations of the “Eliza effect” are incapable of attending to the possibilities of pleasure, play, incompleteness or even healing that might occur in human-chatbot relatings. Other forms of understanding this new technology and its potentialities are needed both in research and mental health practice.

BIOGRAPHY

Michael is a psychoanalyst in private practice in Munich, Germany, and has aninterdisciplinary background in psychoanalysis, psychotherapy, literary theory, and scienceand technology studies. From 2020-2024, Michael was a postdoctoral researcher at the Institute of History and Ethics in Medicine at the School of Medicine, Technical University of Munich, where he explored the relationship between different conceptions of the mind inpsychoanalysis and biomedicine and the relevance of psychoanalytic thought for contemporary biomedical practice, research, and ethics. He holds a PhD in the History of Consciousness from the University of California Santa Cruz, and an MSc in Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy from the School of Medicine, University College Dublin. He is a member of the Association for Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy in Ireland and the Irish Council for Psychotherapy.

BIOGRAPHY - Congress Host - Carol Owens

Carol is a psychoanalyst and clinical supervisor in private practice in Dublin. She has lectured and published extensively in the field of Lacanian psychoanalysis. Recent books include the Gradiva shortlisted volume Precarities of 21st Century Childhoods (co-edited with Michael O' Loughlin and Louis Rothschild, Lexington, 2023) and Studying Lacan's Seminar VII - the ethics of psychoanalysis (Routledge, 2024), the latest in the Studying Lacan’s Seminars series for which she is also the series editor. A co-chair of the Irish Psychoanalytic Film Forum, she also serves on the editorial boards of Psychoanalysis, Culture and Society where she is the PCSReview coordinating editor, and the CP-UK journal Analytic Agora. She is a board member of the APCS, a registered practitioner member of the APPI, and an affiliate member of the CP-UK.

BIOGRAPHY - Chair, APPI - Micheli Romão

Micheli is the current chairperson of APPI. She has over 13 years experience working psychoanalytically, as psychologist and psychotherapist in different mental health settings. She has published peer review articles in The Letter, and translated many articles to Lacunae. Micheli is particularly interested in the intersection between mental health and physical health. Her clinical work as a psychologist is informed by many years of working in hospital settings such as the Mater University Hospital, as part of the Liaison Psychiatry team, where she presented cases informed by a psychoanalytic framework and specifically the question of medically unexplained Illness, chronic diseases and cancer. Micheli is currently working as an Integrative Health Specialist with Vhi and maintains private practice in South Dublin.

BIOGRAPHY - Chair, Events Committee - Geraldine McLoughlin

Geraldine is a trained psychoanalytic psychotherapist with a Master’s in Psychological Science from St Vincent’s School of Psychotherapy. She has also completed a Diploma in Reflexive Supervision. Clinical work also included the provision of long term psychodynamic group therapy and experiential group workshops on symptomatology and long term effects of early childhood abuse. Geraldine’s clinical work includes the provision of expert testimony to the Courts and she provides Organisational Role Analysis to senior management. Geraldine is currently completing a Master’s in International Human Rights Law having already submitted her Thesis “In the Shadow of the Law: institutional abuse victims’ search for Truth and Justice”. She continues her training in Restorative Justice Mechanisms, Regulatory Investigations, Protected Disclosures and Digital Forensics. Geraldine’s recent clinical work includes the provision of therapy to clients who are “whistle-blowers”. Geraldine has recently been assigned the role of Project Officer in HSE CHO1 Mental Health Services in relation to implementation of Mental Health Commission National Quality Framework.