Video for the Third Annual Solange Skinner Conference

In this program, three distinguished critics responded to Freud’s classic paper, “Remembering, Repeating and Working-Through” (1914), the fifth of his six Papers on Technique written a century ago. Freud in this brief yet subtle essay addresses the question of how psychoanalysis works, and how it differs from other forms of treatment. “The main instrument for curbing the patient’s compulsion to repeat,” he writes, “and for turning it into a motive for remembering, lies in the handling of the transference” (154).

Beyond those profound clinical questions, Freud has given us an essay on the universal conflicts of stasis and change, recurrence and discovery, habit and transformation: elements in human life in general, as well as in the clinical realm. Freud uses the terms “illness” and “real life.” Between those two realms, he posits an “intermediate region,” a “Tummelplatz” or playing field: Freud’s metaphor for the transference arena where the compulsion to repeat, which is the patient’s way of remembering, may deploy itself. Freud calls this “Tummelplatz” an “intermediate region between illness and real life through which the transition from the one to the other is made.”

We invited an imaginative art historian, an innovative literary critic, and intellectual historian, and a uniquely lively writer on theatre, music and most recently on “reading” to look at that Tummeplatz and respond to it in their own terms. The conversation was guided by Adam Phillips who combines the clinical perspective with that of a brilliant writer. That is what, in addition to their erudition and scholarship, all four of these panel participants are – like Sigmund Freud – writers, in the best sense of the word.

To buy a DVD copy of this video, please contact our librarian Olga Umansky at library@bpsi.org