Madness as Prism: On Psychoanalytic Variations


Symposium on 21 February at the IPU Berlin organized by IPU-KKC-Fellow Candela Potente, PhD.

In the beginnings of psychoanalysis, madness appeared as something foreign. For Sigmund Freud, psychotic patients were incapable of transference and therefore could not be treated. Later on, however, other psychoanalysts and psychiatrists reimagined transference, making psychosis psychoanalytically treatable. Lacanian psychoanalysis, for example, offered a new theory of psychosis and proposed certain “maneuvers of transference” for its treatment. Institutional psychotherapy, a crucial influence on Frantz Fanon, brought psychoanalysis into the psychiatric hospital: the Catalan psychiatrist Francesc Tosquelles understood transference as a multireferential phenomenon that the hospital's spaces and personnel are able to bring together.

Madness, in this sense, reveals psychoanalysis’ capacity to transform, to be heard in different variations, and this is the very capacity we find reflected in the multiple forms psychoanalysis has taken around the world throughout its history. This symposium proposes to discuss madness as a prism for understanding psychoanalysis’ transformations, focusing on Tosquelles’s notion of dispersed transference, Fanon’s concept of sociogeny, and a historical episode in Calcutta that invites reflection on the place of madness in the transnational history of psychoanalysis.

The Speakers


Joana Masó is Senior Lecturer in French Literature at the Universitat de Barcelona, a researcher at ADHUC—Research Center for Theory, Gender, Sexuality, and the UNESCO Chair "Women, Development, and Cultures." She has translated critical and philosophical texts within the contemporary French tradition by Hélène Cixous, Jacques Derrida, Catherine Malabou, Jean-Luc Marion, and Jean-Luc Nancy, and has published articles and editions on some of these authors. She coordinated the research project “The Forgotten Legacy of Francesc Tosquelles,” which resulted in the publication of the volume Tosquelles. Curar les institucions (Arcàdia) and the exhibition “Francesc Tosquelles. Like a Sewing Machine in a Wheat Field.”

Robert J. C. Young is Julius Silver Professor of English and Comparative Literature at New York University. He writes in the fields of cultural and political history, literature and literary theory, philosophy, photography, psychoanalysis, race and translation studies, with a particular focus on colonial history and postcolonial theory. His recent work has focused on archival and historical research on Frantz Fanon, which resulted in the co-edited volume of Fanon’s unpublished, uncollected, and untranslated writings Alienation and Freedom. He is currently completing a book on Fanon in the context of his own cultural and historical moment, with particular emphasis on his relationship to the work of François Tosquelles and his circle.

Akshi Singh is an Associate Editor at Parapraxis and Deputy Editor at Critical Quarterly. In Defence of Leisure, a memoir about reading the work of the writer, artist and psychoanalyst Marion Milner will be out in May 2025, with Jonathan Cape. She is a Lacanian analyst in formation. Her doctoral research explored histories of psychoanalysis in India.

Candela Potente is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the International Psychoanalytic University in Berlin and the KKC at Ruhr University Bochum, and the organizer of this event. She works at the intersection of psychoanalysis, philosophy, and literary theory, and her interests include the role of translation and transference in the epistemology of psychoanalysis, the international circulation of ideas, and philosophical debates on universality.

If you have any questions, please contact:
candela.potente(at)ipu-berlin.de

Information and Registration


Friday, 21 February 2025, 2 pm
International Psychoanalytic University, Alt-Moabit 91b, 2nd floor, Room 91b-01, 10559 Berlin.


Schedule

2 pm

Candela Potente – Opening
Joana Masó – “Gérard de Nerval at Saint-Alban: Tosquelles and the Dispersed Transfer [le transfert éparpillé]”

3.30 pm
Coffee break

4 pm
Robert J. C. Young – “Fanon, Psychoanalysis and Sociogeny”
Akshi Singh – “Madness on Trial: The Case of Gopinath Saha”

6 pm
Short break

6.15 pm
Final roundtable

Registrationform