11th Meeting of the International Society of Psychoanalysis and Philosophy – SIPP/ISPP
Stockholm, May 2-4 2019
Call for Papers : The Truths of Psychoanalysis
Send abstracts of 500 words maximum before November 1st to : Sippstockholm2019@gmail.com
Dear friends,
For the meeting in Stockholm, we wish to engage with truth in psychoanalysis as a multifaceted concept. How does psychoanalysis engage with truth and fiction at a subjective level, with the symptom, the truth of art, truth and falsity of discourse? How does it respond to cultures of manipulation and propaganda, with the undoing of the reality principle on a collective level? We welcome individual papers that deal with truth from theoretical and political as well as clinical points of view, wishing to encourage a broad discussion of a topical issue.
What does psychoanalysis have to do with truth? In the analytical situation, we are not obliged to speak the truth or to disclose any truths about ourselves. In the discourse of psychoanalytic theory, there is no quest for a concept of truth that would correspond to facts, reality or actual events. Nevertheless, psychoanalysis has, throughout its history, engaged deeply and honestly with truth, both in terms of the way in which it unravels and and the way in which it becomes distorted.
Freud abandoned his search for real events in his theory of seduction, looking instead at unconscious formations as sites of truth. In Moses and Monotheism, “Constructions in psychoanalysis”, as well as The Future of an Illusion, Sigmund Freud distinguishes between material truth and historical truth; historical truth representing something that simply must be believed, a fragment of memory which appears to be real without necessarily being accurate. Truth, to Freud, belongs to the subject and its history, but pertains not to facts but to the persuasion of the moment.
Jacques Lacan, in turn, approaches the question of truth through its distinction to knowledge; evoking truth as an aspect of the unconscious that makes itself known through the symptom, the “thing”, the acting out, the dimension of the real, the traumatic arrival of language. Opening his discourse in television 1974 with the announcement “I always speak the truth”, Lacan performs the subjective aspect of truth, indicating that truth, to psychoanalysis, changes according to context, and that one cannot utter the whole truth.
As has been shown not least by the Hungarian school of psychoanalysis, the tradition of critical theory, the Slovenian school of psychoanalysis and others, psychoanalysis may also teach us something about lies and and distortions of truth on a collective level; about cultural illusions and historical lies. Adorno analyzed racist propaganda in terms of the drive, Kristeva has worked with “maladies” of the collective, Zizek deployed theories of the fantasm in a dialectic which affirms that truth, as Lacan writes, already “has the structure of a fiction.” Today, more than ever, we need the complexity of psychoanalysis to understand the complexity of the concept of truth.
The meeting will take place at Södertörn University in Stockholm and at the Swedish Psychoanalytic Association. We will send out further info about the city, hotels etc, after the preliminary programme has been set.
For information, please contact