27 Rue de Fleurus, a Salon Meeting of the Contemporary Freudian Society
“Jacques Lacan and Ella Freeman Sharpe: Analysts of a Single Dream”
A Discussion with Jamieson Webster, PhD
Wednesday, May 21, 2014
8:30 to 10:00pm
Location: Upper West Side TBA
“Ella Freeman Sharpe finds a confirmation of the omnipotence of the subject in the immense character of this dream… In fact, it is the patient who tells us that he has had a tremendous dream, that there was a huge story beforehand, that there was a whole tour around the world… it would take an enormous time to tell… but when all is said and done the mountain gives birth to a little story, to a mouse. If there is here something which is indicated as a horizon of omnipotence, it is a narrative, but a narrative which is not told. The omnipotence is always on the side of the Other, on the side of the world of the word as such. It is this that the patient does not or cannot conquer. The analysis of the dream will tell us why this is so” – Jacques Lacan, Desire and Its Interpretation
This salon meeting aims at introducing participants to Lacan’s clinical thought and writing through reading (to be distributed ahead of this meeting) in detail the analysis of a single dream included in a chapter of Ella Freeman Sharpe’s 1936 book, Dream Analysis, to which Lacan devoted two months of sessions in his seminar from 1959 Desire and its interpretation. Lacan elaborates on the dream as a powerful example of the importance of close attention to language and metaphor in the context of transferential messages, in this patient as they illuminate the return of a transitory fetishistic symptom expressive of certain difficulties the loss of a parent in early childhood poses for the resolution of the Oedipus complex. We will touch on central Lacanian concepts from the Phallus, to the importance of lack/absence, the signifier and unconscious phantasy.
Jamieson Webster, PhD is a psychoanalyst in private practice in New York. She is on the faculty at Eugene Lang College; she supervises doctoral students at The City University of New York; she is a founding member of Das Unbehagen; and contributing editor for Division/Review. She is the author of The Life and Death of Psychoanalysis: On Unconscious Desire and its Interpretation (Karnac, 2011) and Stay, Illusion! The Hamlet Doctrine (Pantheon, 2013) written with Simon Critchley.
Suggested Program Contribution: $15.00
Nancy Cromer Grayson and Debra Gill, Co-Chairs, Susan N. Finkelstein, Moderator
For additional information, please contact Debra Gill (212-534-0669 or debra.gill@gmail.com) or Nancy Cromer-Grayson (212-427-9023 or cromergrayson@gmail.com).
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The Contemporary Freudian Society
Salon Meeting – 5/21/14
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