Prof. Dr. phil. Elfriede Löchel

I teach part-time students in the area of Reflexive Psychology and Theoretical Psychoanalysis.

The foci of my research are: Epistemology of psychoanalysis and corresponding methods of research; discourses on subjectivity; conceptual research; (re-)readings of Freud; psychoanalytic and interdisciplinary theory of symbolisation; gender theory and research; psychoanalytic research on media.

My current research projects: Hermeneutics of Freudian slips; psychoanalytic and interdisciplinary research on virtuality.

The study area of reflexive psychology and theoretical psychoanalysis consists of two modules:

1. History and epistemology of psychoanalysis in the context of establishing psychology as a science.
2. Epistemology and philosophy of science in relation to theories on subjectivity.

This study area is concerned with presenting the specific object of psychoanalysis – the unconscious – and its particular methods and epistemological interests in the field of science, as well as in the historical process of its emergence and further development. This also includes fathoming out the conflicting and tense relationships with neighbouring sciences, from which it arises that the science of the unconscious does not easily integrate with the others: “Freud was certainly a scientist: But to remember this is to expand one’s conception of science.” (A. MacIntyre)

The content in this study area also includes the various theories and schools of clinical psychoanalysis, metapsychology and cultural theory, as well as the various non-clinical fields of application.

I hope that students working with me get in touch with the unique pleasure of thinking and discussing thoughts. I hope I can inspire them with my passion for theories and texts. They may experience the creative tension between clinical work and research work, and they may, in a practical way, learn to use qualitative empirical research methods which can be derived from psychoanalytical methods.

What I like about psychoanalysis is that it not only contains a therapeutic method, but also a method of thinking which pays attention to the unthought, the unspoken and the unheard. Consequently, it presents great challenges to the thinking subjects, encouraging them to undertake balancing acts which are unavoidably confronted by crashing and failing. What I like about psychoanalysis in contrast to experimental psychology is that the self-reflection of the knowing subject, the analysis of their own entanglements, is methodically included in the process of gaining knowledge.

“Psychoanalysis never takes you ahead. It usually takes you to something completely different to what you thought.” (Fritz Morgenthaler)
“When thinking follows a cause, by which it is affected, it may happen that it changes on the way.” (Martin Heidegger)