Imagining A Revolutionary Unconscious (21 March 2025)
Imagining A Revolutionary Unconscious
A Radical Role for Psychoanalysis Troubling Times
Date: Friday 21 March 2025
Time: 5pm – 7pm
Medium: Hybrid – In-Person & Online
Venue: 18 Fitzwilliam Street Upper Basement Floor Dublin 2D02 XA30
Cost: From €27.79
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Refund Policy: No Refunds
About This Event
My writings take two forms: I frequently write autobiographically to interrogate my own origins, my experience with marginality, my hybrid identity etc.: I also write about the larger sweep of precarity embodied in forced migrations, displacements, and the travails of individuals struggling to find meaning and purpose in institutions and systems constructed through neoliberal and neocolonial logics of exclusion, negation of solidarity, and oppression. Using occlusion as an organizing concept, I join postcolonial theory, critical psychoanalysis, and psychoanalytic understandings of subject formation to conceptualize precisely how the subject comes to be; how familial, societal and sociohistorical lineages shape the child; and how psychoanalytic therapy might life the veil of occlusion and counter the constriction of racial melancholia to facilitate creativity and liberation. In current reactionary times, when neoliberal racial-capitalism is being abetted by calls for valorization of whiteness motivated by white supremacist anxiety and a fear of the dark Other, when alterity is negated, and when and the specter of fascism seeks to obliterate pluralism in thought, psychoanalysis offers a vital lifeline. Using the works of Jacqueline Rose, Shoshana Felman, Judith Butler, Karima Lazali, Suely Rolnik, Achille Mbembe, Fred Moten, Stefano Harney, and intergenerational theorists such as Abraham & Torok, and Davoine & Gaudillière, I am seeking to articulate a version of what Laubender calls the political clinic – a place in which a political, creative, and transgressive address to the unconscious might be welcomed. Lacan’s strength was his ability to turn psychoanalysis on its head, to constantly interrogate resistance, indeed to provoke transgression. As Roudinesco notes, Lacan believed that transgression was as necessary to civilization as the symbolic order. Can we grow comfortable enough with the idea of transgression that we might seek it out in our analytic institutes and universities? Can we acknowledge the conservative totalizing forces in our institutes and universities that inevitably call forth a disobedient response and what Rolnik (2023) calls an insurrection if we are to realize the revolutionary potential of an address to the unconscious?
Biography
Michael O’Loughlin is Professor in the College of Education and Health Sciences and in the Derner School of Psychology at Adelphi University, New York. He has authored, edited or co-edited many books, including (with C. Owens & l. Rothschild), Precarities of 21st century childhoods: Critical explorations of time(s), place(s), and identities (2023). His latest book (with L. Rothschild & S. Akhtar), Between Amnesia and Recollection: Environmental, Creative and Clinical Pathways to Memory, will be published by Karnac. Since 2018 he has been co-editor of the journal Psychoanalysis, Culture and Society. He is also editor of the book series, Psychoanalytic Interventions: Clinical Social, and Cultural Contexts, and co-editor of the book series Critical Childhood & Youth Studies. He directs the Adelphi Asylum Project and he has a private practice for psychotherapy and psychoanalysis on Long Island, NY. He was a Visiting Scholar at Psychoanalytic Institute of Northern California (PINC) for 2023-2024, and he will teach there again in May 2025.
Website: Michael O’Loughlin, PhD
