Psyche(d), with Tempo
organized by Dr. Talha C. Işsevenler
What untimely works can inform our rethinking of subjectivity as we are finding ourselves in new technological, political and ecological grounds? In this open-ended reading/research-group, we will closely look at seminal and contemporary studies of psyche, thinking, affect and materiality in their entirety as unexhausted potential of these works might return to animate us with new ideas & rhythms.
Three broad questions orient this selection:
1) Technological & historical constitution of unconscious
2) opposition of feeling to thinking
3) politics of difference and universality.
1) Generally put: How do historically specific media and technology affect unconscious? Specifically: feminist film/media theorists conceptualized a historical turn from masculine obsession with mastery over elusive sign epitomized in filmic narrative structure towards pre-Oedipal separation anxiety foregrounded with televisual flow. How can we explore this oscillation between rigid frame and fluid intersubjectivity in the context of digital media?
2) Psychoanalytic training and clinical practice seem to be driven by an unresolved problematic whereby thinking is seen both as a defence as in intellectualization and as an achievement as in mentalization. How can we explore and perhaps resolve the opposition of feeling to thinking?
3) How do concrete particulars (class, race, gender...) affect abstract universals (individual, family) of psychoanalysis? Can psychoanalysis/psychology/psychotherapy take part in their own transformation through political events?
By practicing a slow-temporality of reading and gathering i.e., once a month, a series of occasions and a long-term momentum are hoped to be created in order to engage demanding theoretical, empirical and literary works that (may) play foundational roles in establishing new research areas and effectuating turns in critical thought.
Please email talha141@gmail.com to receive the readings and links. Continuous participation is not required to be part of the reading group.
1. March 31, 2023 — anxiety: part I.
“Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety” (1925) Sigmund Freud
2. April 28, 2023 — obsessive-compulsion & separation anxiety in media: part II.
“High Anxiety: Catastrophe, Scandal, Age, and Comedy” (1992) Patricia Mellencamp
3. May 26, 2023 — psyche amidst political intervention.
“Toward the African Revolution” (1964) Frantz Fanon
4. June 30, 2023 — thinking as hyper-cathexis.
“Organization and Pathology of Thought” (1951) David Rapaport.
“What is called thinking?” Martin Heidegger
5. July 28, 2023 — subjectivity as limit experience part I.
“Death and Sensuality: A Study of Eroticism and The Taboo” (1962) Georges Bataille
6. August 25, 2023 — subjectivity as limit experience part II.
“Sexuality Beyond Consent: Risk, Race, Traumatophilia” (2023) Avgi Saketopoulou
7. September 29, 2023 — material ground(s) of memory, narrativity and temporality
“Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression” (1995) Jacques Derrida
“Plato’s Pharmacy” Jacques Derrida
8. October 27, 2023 – multiplicity and capital.
“Outside in the Teaching Machine” (2008) Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak
9. November 24, 2023 — machinic unconscious as unknown/unknowable/untimely
“Red Grass” (1950) Boris Vian
10. December 29, 2023 – nonhuman environment: regression & becoming-child
“The Nonhuman Environment in Normal Development and in Schizophrenia,” (1960) Herald Searles
11. January 26, 2024 — existential psychoanalysis: aesthetics & ethics
“Saint Genet, Actor and Martyr,” Jean-Paul Sartre
12. February 23, 2024 — mentalization & intellectualization
“Mentalizing in Clinical Practice” (2008) Jon G. Allen, Peter Fonagy, Anthony Bateman.
13. March 29, 2024 — withdrawnness
“Friendship” (1971/1997) Maurice Blanchot
14. April 26, 2024 — metaphysics & transcendence
“The Unconscious God” (1985) Viktor E. Frankl
15. June 7, 2024 — cybernetics & auto-poesis
“Cybernetics for the 21st Century, Vol.1: Epistemological Reconstruction” (2024)
16. June 28, 2024 — transparency
“There is life between us (+transparency)” (2021) Deniz Gul
17. July 27, 2024 — you & I: encounter
“Basic Philosophical Writings” (1996) Emmanuel Levinas. (Eds.) A. Peperzak, S. Critchley and R. Bernasconi
18. August 28, 2024 — Lacan read by Copjec
“Read my desire” (1994) Jean Copjec
19. September 30, 2024 — Reading paranoia
“Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading” (1995/2003) Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick
20. October 31, 2024 — Mimetic violence
Mimesis and Violence, Rene Girard
21. November 28, 2024 — Worlding in post-colonial times
What is a world? On postcolonial literature as world literature (2016) Peng Cheah
22. December 26, 2024 — Homecoming
Elucidations of Hölderlin’s Poetry, Martin Heidegger
23. January 24, 2025 — Political time and musicality
Technical temporalities of the Transitional Protest Movements (2024) Talha Işsevenler
24. February, 28, 2025 — 1972
System and structure: Essays in communication and exchange (1972) Anthony Wilden
26. March 28, 2025 — Writing of War
War Memoirs 1917-1919 (1980) Alfred Bion
26. April 25, 2025 — Poetic Psychology: phenomenology of imagination
Earth and Reveries of Will: An Essay on the Imagination of Matter (1946) Gaston Bachelard
27. May 30, 2025 — Eigen
The Psychotic Core (1988) Michael Eigen
28. June 25, 2025 — Field
The Post-Bionian Field Theory of Antonino Ferro (2022) Ed. Howard B. Levine
29. July 30, 2025 — Collective Disavowal[Reverence]
Totem and Taboo (1913) Sigmund Freud
Wild Thought (1962) Claude Levi-Strauss
Psychoanalysis, Time and Translation (1990) Jean Laplanche
30. August 27, 2025 — Digital psychoanalysis, 6.30 PM EST
Unconscious Networks: Philosophy, Psychoanalysis, and Artificial Intelligence (2022) Luca M. Possati
31. September 29, 2025 — Post-Freudianism
Hope And Dread In Psychoanalysis (1993) Stephen A. Mitchell
32. October 26, 2025 — Borromean knot
Seminar XXII: R.S.I. (1974) Jacques Lacan
33. November 30, 2025 — God on Earth
“The Grand Inquisitor” in The Brothers Karamazov (1880) Fyodor Dostoevsky
34. December 28, 2025 — Lou Andreas-Salomé's psychoanalysis
Nietzsche (1894) Lou Andreas-Salomé
Letters, Sigmund Freud and Lou Andreas-Salomé
35. February 1, 2026 — Psychic Apparatus & Beginning
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Formulations on two principles of mental functioning, Freud, S. (1911/1958). The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud (Vol. 12, pp. 213–226). London, England: Hogarth Press.
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On beginning the treatment (Further recommendations on the technique of psycho-analysis I) (Freud, S. (1913/1958) The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud (Vol. 12, pp. 121–144). London, England: Hogarth Press.