SAVE THE DATE: ALFAPSY and APRÈS-COUP PSYCHOANALYTIC ASSOCIATION
René Magritte, Not to be Reproduced (La reproduction interdite), 1937.
Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam
COLLOQUIUM:
On the Subject of Psychiatry and the Subject of Psychoanalysis
September 19 & 20, 2014
Mount Sinai Hospital, Davis Conference Center
Hess Center, 2nd fl., 1470 Madison Av. (between 101st and 102nd Sts.)
New York, New York
Since the 1980s, there has been a notable shift of focus in psychiatry toward neuroscience and biology. The result has been an upsurge in psychiatric conceptualizations of psychopathology based solely on material transformation, be it chemical, genetic, or neurological. By taking this approach, “biological” psychiatry has become increasingly estranged from the social sciences. From a psychoanalytic or humanistic perspective, this means that psychiatry has turned away from precisely what gives specificity to the human being as the subject of language. Scarcely, if at all, does it consider how suffering and symptoms are also effects of the ways in which language impacts the body; rarely does it acknowledge how the social environment affects subjectivity. These omissions parallel the steady revisions of psychiatric diagnostic protocols, which, by expanding pathologies, medically standardize predictable yet invariably singular events and difficulties life presents.
Our colloquium seeks to raise questions related to this shift in psychiatry, which is not embraced by the entire psychiatric profession. We welcome psychiatrists, psychoanalysts, scholars, clinicians from all disciplines, and other interested participants, to discuss such pertinent questions as: How can psychiatry establish an alternative to the neoliberal logic that ignores the social and ethical questions underlying psychic pathologies, and turns them into an illness like any other? Is the dominance of neurobiology a return to, or an extension of, nineteenth-century mechanistic ideology? How crucial to this return is “Big Pharma,” which profits by promising a “quick fix”? How does an idealistic faith in quantification and measurements belie the particularity of mental illness?
We look forward to hearing opinions on these controversial issues from within contemporary psychiatry, as well as from others, and will pay close attention to the differing approaches that Continental and American psychiatry bring to bear upon the notion of the subject.
Participants include:
Jack Barchas (New York), Jalil Bennani (Rabat), Michel Botbol (Brest), Marco Antonio Coutinho Jorge (Rio de Janeiro), Hervé Granier (Montpellier), Patrick Landman (Paris), Christopher Lane (Chicago), Jean-Pierre Lebrun (Brussels), Juan Mezzich (New York), Paola Mieli (New York), Ona Nierenberg (New York), Mário Eduardo Costa Pereira (São Paulo), Michel Peterson (Montreal), Frank Summers (Chicago), Hachem Tyal (Casablanca)
Scientific Committee: Hervé Granier, Paul Lacaze, Christopher Lane, Kareen Malone, Paola Mieli, Annie Muir, Ona Nierenberg, Andy Stein, Martin Winn
ALFAPSY is a not-for-profit international organization of Francophone psychiatrists that provides opportunities for alternative concepts, theories, and practices in psychiatry to have a voice and an impact within the contemporary psychiatric community. ALFAPSY was established in 2003 in order to bring together the National Private Practice Associations of Algeria, Belgium, France, Morocco, Senegal, Switzerland and Tunisia. Since its inception, it has established itself as distinctive in aim and interests from other official federations, associations, and organizations within the profession world-wide. It was founded by the Association of French Psychiatrists in Private Practice (AFPEP) and brings together practitioners who do not confine their work to the medical model as the sole means of conducting psychiatry. ALFAPSY is committed to a wide global scope in its work and development of alternative paradigms within psychiatry.
Established in 1987 in New York, Après-Coup Psychoanalytic Association is a not-for-profit organization dedicated to analytical formation and the discussion of contemporary issues in psychoanalysis and culture. An independent organization, Après-Coup has brought together researchers, scholars, and psychoanalysts from Europe, South America, Canada, Australia, and the United States, along with specialists from other fields, in a variety of colloquia and seminars. Après-Coup Psychoanalytic Association is provisionally chartered by the Board of Regents of the State of New York.
For more information, visit www.apres-coup.org