Tag Archives: Sandor Ferenczi

July 18th Workshop, Psychoanalytic Filiations: Mapping The Psychoanalytic Movement

UCL’s Centre for the History of the Psychological Disciplines is hosting a one-day workshop on how to write the history of the psychoanalytic movement. The workshop, which marks the publication of Ernst Falzeder’s book, ‘Psychoanalytic Filiations: Mapping the Psychoanalytic Movement’, will be held from 2-6pm on July 18th, 2015 at UCL. Full details follow below.

Written over a span of nearly a quarter century, the “red thread” running through the book is its focus on the network of psychoanalytic “filiations” (who analysed whom), and how crucial concepts of depth psychology were developed before the background of those intense relationships: for example, Freud’s technical recommendations, the therapeutic use of countertransference and the view of the psychoanalytic situation as a social, interactive process, the introduction of the anal phase, the birth of the object-relations-model as opposed to the drive-model in psychoanalysis, or the psychotherapeutic treatment of psychoses. Several chapters deal with key figures in that history, such as Sándor Ferenczi, Karl Abraham, Eugen Bleuler, Otto Rank, and C. G. Jung, their respective relationships to each other and to Freud, and the consequences that their collaboration, as well as conflicts, with him had for the further development of psychoanalysis up to the present day. Other chapters give an overview on the publications of Freud’s texts and on unpublished documents (the “unknown Freud”), the editorial policy of the publications of Freud’s letters.

Discussants:

Dr. Ernst Falzeder (UCL)
Dr. Shaul Bar-Heim (Birkbeck College)
Arthur Eaton (UCL)
Prof. Brett Kahr (Roehampton University)
Dr. Matt ffytche (University of Essex)
Dr. Sarah Marks (University of Cambridge)
Dee McQuillan (UCL)
Dr. Richard Skues (London Metropolitan University)
Chair: Prof. Sonu Shamdasani (UCL).

Cost: £20, UCL staff and students: free.

Register online here.

New! Special Issue History of the Human Sciences

The April 2012 issue of History of the Human Sciences is now online. This month’s issue is a special issue, guest edited by Elizabeth Valentine, on the topic of parapsychology, occultism, and spiritualism. The eight all new articles in the issue explore the history of psychology’s relationship to spiritualism and other occult matters across the globe; most specifically in the Netherlands, the United States of America, Germany, Britain, France, Spain, Hungary, and Japan. (Pictured above is medium Eusapia Palladino, the subject of one of the issues articles, in a seance in 1898.) Full titles, authors, and abstracts follow below.

“Psychical research and parapsychology interpreted: Suggestions from the international historiography of psychical research and parapsychology for investigating its history in the Netherlands,” by Ingrid Kloosterman. The abstract reads,

One of the reasons the history of parapsychology and its ancestor psychical research is intriguing is because it addresses a central issue: the boundaries of science. This article provides an overview of the historiography of parapsychology and presents an approach to investigate the Dutch history of parapsychology contributing to the understanding of this central theme. In the first section the historical accounts provided by psychical researchers and parapsychologists themselves are discussed; next those studies of sociologists and historians understanding parapsychology as deviant and even potentially revolutionary are dealt with; third, more contemporary studies are examined whereby enterprises such as parapsychology are understood as central to the culture in which they arose. On the basis of this analysis a new direction in the historiography of the subject is suggested in the fourth section, centred upon the relation between parapsychology and psychology in the Netherlands throughout the 20th century. In the Netherlands not only were pioneering psychologists such as Gerard Heymans (1857–1930) actively involved in experiments into telepathy, the first professor in parapsychology in the world – Wilhelm Tenhaeff (1894–1981) – was appointed in 1953 at Utrecht University and in the 1970s and 1980s parapsychology had its own research laboratory at Utrecht University in the division of psychology. This unique situation in the Netherlands deserves scholarly attention and makes an interesting case to investigate the much-neglected connections between the fields of psychology and parapsychology in the 20th century. The connections between psychology and parapsychology might help us to understand why parapsychology came to be regarded as a pseudoscience.

“Psychical research and the origins of American psychology: Hugo Münsterberg, William James and Eusapia Palladino,” by Andreas Sommer. The abstract reads, Continue reading New! Special Issue History of the Human Sciences