29 Jan 2016 15:00 : 7th Irish Psychoanalytic Film Festival

The 7th Annual festival of Psychoanalysis and Film takes the theme of Revolution in all its rich etymological resonances. In 2016, Ireland celebrates 100 years of independence, and commemorates the events of 1916 and the revolution that led to Ireland’s status as Nation state. We say something ‘is revolutionary’ meaning that it brings change, sometimes liberty from a previous position. We think ‘revolting’ when something has ‘turned’, ‘gone off’, become less ideal, changed for the worse. We revolt when we are accosted with something or someone which attempts to trap us. Psychoanalytically speaking, we may think about the speaking being who gives themselves up to the subversive effects of a psychoanalysis, who allows themselves to undergo a revolution at the level of the most personal, the most subjective. The psychoanalyst – in this time of treatment of human psychical discontent and suffering with the solutions of ‘big pharma’ and/or behaviour modification – also revolts against the regime, protests against the norm or status quo as a ‘final’ solution for the individual. And yet, psychoanalysis has also undergone revolutions – in the sense of times, turns and movements in praxis, in ideology. Lacan often referred to Freud’s discovery of the unconscious as a revolution, ‘Copernican’ in essence. Just as Copernicus displaced the earth as the centre of the universe in his ‘On the Revolutions of Celestial Bodies’, Freud too displaced the ego as the centre of the human psyche in favour of the unconscious. We can also think about ‘revolvings’: the movements and turns and rotations and cycles which in psychoanalytic thinking evoke the movement of the drive around the object, and the repetition compulsion. The 2016 7th film festival looks to these and other instances of revolution, revolt, and revolvings.

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