'Sentience and Sensitivity: Innate and human environment factors generating mindlessness and anxiety' (DT); 'Annihilation Anxiety and Bion’s Theory of Thinking: what we (don’t) need the Death Drive for'.(LB)
These are two linked talks.
DT: My main focus will be justified doubts about the premature resort to the explanation of an individual subject’s mind attacking itself. While according to psychoanalysis this can occur, there are many other routes leading to the same mental outcome. I will give a perspective on what I have observed as a psychoanalytic clinician.
LB: In post-Kleinian thought a ‘deathly state of mind’, one depicting a state or enactment of mindlessness, is commonly interpreted in terms of the activity of the Death drive where a (primary) destructive force is directed at the thinking capacities of the mind. I critically consider the theoretical basis for this interpretation in Bion’s theory of thinking, and suggest another explanation.
Date: 21 January 2019, 20:15 (Monday, 2nd week, Hilary 2019)
Venue: Lecture Room, St John's College Research Centre, 45 St Giles'
Speakers: David Taylor (British Psychoanalytical Society and UCL), Louise Braddock (University of Oxford)
Part of: Interdisciplinary Seminars in Psychoanalysis
Booking required?: Not required
Cost: free
Audience: The seminar is open free of charge to members of the University and to mental health professionals but space is limited. To attend it is helpful (but not essential) to e-mail paul.tod@sjc.ox.ac.uk
Editor: Paul Tod