Stephen Frosh – Psychoanalysis outside the Clinic
Event Date: 6 July 2011
Hughes Parry Hall
University of London
36-45 Cartwright Gardens
London WC1H 9EF
OPUS – AN ORGANISATION FOR PROMOTING UNDERSTANDING OF SOCIETY
and BIRKBECK, UNIVERSITY OF LONDON present:
AN OPUS SCIENTIFIC MEETING
Professor Stephen Frosh - Psychoanalysis outside the Clinic
More than a hundred years after the founding of psychoanalysis, it remains influential and controversial far outside its core sphere of activity in the ‘clinic’. In a wide range of cultural and social disciplines, psychoanalytic ideas are drawn on to explain human subjectivity and its relations with the social world. The book on which this talk is based explores these interventions of psychoanalysis through detailed examination of how they work in literature, politics, social psychology, philosophy and psychosocial studies. It shows how psychoanalysis can at times greatly illuminate these fields of study, and how at other times it might mis-read them. In this talk, I lay out some questions about how psychoanalysis comes to be ‘applied’, attending especially to the issue of the generality or otherwise of interpretations and transference.
Stephen Frosh is Pro-Vice-Master, Head of the Department of Psychosocial Studies and Professor of Psychology at Birkbeck College, University of London. He is the author of many books and papers on psychosocial studies and on psychoanalysis, including Psychoanalysis Outside the Clinic (Palgrave, 2010), Hate and the Jewish Science: Anti-Semitism, Nazism and Psychoanalysis (Palgrave, 2005), For and Against Psychoanalysis (Routledge, 2006), After Words (Palgrave, 2002) and The Politics of Psychoanalysis (Palgrave, 1999).
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Introduction by Jan Baker (OPUS).
talk:
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questions:
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I have established an analogy between practice of meditation and psychoanalysis.
Julian B. Rotter (1970) writes in his book Clinical Psychology “Other professions which overlap clinical psychology are those of the psychiatrist, social worker, lawyer, speech pathologist, and religious worker. All these professions are concerned in one way or another with the individual’s adjustment to a special set of circumstances”.
Now the question arises what does a religious worker does to help an individual for his/her adjustment with himself/herself and with the society? The one apparent answer is guiding people to perform devotional exercises.
Perhaps answer lies in the following lines:
Psychoanalysis emphasizes free association, the phenomenon of transference, and the development of insight. Psychoanalysis helps a person understand himself/herself better. The goal of psychoanalysis is to acquire self-understanding and knowledge of the sources of anxiety.
According to Swami Vivekananda, “During meditation the mind is at first apt to wander. But let any desire whatever arise in the mind, we must sit calmly and watch what sort of ideas are coming. By continuing to watch in that way the mind becomes calm, and there are no more thoughts waves in it. Those things that we have previously thought deeply have stored into unconscious mind and therefore these come up at the surface of conscious mind during meditation.” We may call this ‘auto-catharsis’ sort of free-association, unconscious mind talking to conscious mind. Meditation provides us insight, understanding of self and increases our psychological strength. So we can draw some analogy between practice of meditation and psychoanalysis. .
According to Swami Vishnu Devananda:”Through meditation, the play of the mind is witnessed. In the early stages nothing more can be done than to gain understanding as the ego is observed constantly asserting itself. But in times its game become familiar, and one begins to prefer the peace of contentment. When the ego is subdued, energies can then be utilized constructively for personal growth and the service of others”.
According to Radhasoami Faith: “…strong desires, embedded in the mind, are awakened in Bhajan (a type of meditation) by the current of Shabd (sound).