CFP: Psychoanalysis, Community, and Language (6/30/05; APCS, 11/4/05-11/6/05)

Proposal for Panel
PSYCHOANALYSIS, COMMUNITY, AND LANGUAGE

For The Association for the Psychoanalysis of Culture and Society (APCS)
Annual Conference on PSYCHOANALYSIS AND COMMUNITY

November 4-6, 2005 at Rutgers University

Plenary Speakers: Willy Apollon and Eric Santner

Dana Bilsky, Northwestern University, Panel Chair

Popular notions of language locate successful communication in eloquent speech or elegant writing.
Our criticism of public figures suggests that an inarticulate speaker, prone to malapropism, may be
unfit to represent the interests of a given community. Yet psychoanalysis contends that apparent
linguistic failure conveys unconscious intent and latent meaning. In what ways are communities
constituted by these unconscious exclusions that linguistic misfires embody or point up? How might
a more perceptive apprehension of infelicitous speech performances yield new insight into the
conflicts with which communities are riven?

This panel seeks explorations of linguistic failure—for example, slips of the tongue and the pen,
mispronouncing, misspelling, mishearing, combining words, substituting names—as introducing to the
public sphere that which cannot be admitted in ordinary social discourse. Papers might ask, for
example, how an unintentional speech act mimics or departs from the logic of an hysterical symptom,
parapraxis, joke, or dream in bringing an unconscious goal into social reality. How might apparent
mistakes communicate the repressions, anxieties, inexpressible aggressivity, and wishes on which
communities are founded? Or, by what perversions of language are unspeakable things misspoken?

Discussions of literary texts, cultural artifacts, historical archives, ethnographic and clinical
material are equally welcome. Paper proposals should attempt to bring a psychoanalytic methodology
to bear on a linguistic phenomenon’s place within the norms of a community broadly defined
(linguistic, political, etc.). Psychoanalytic approaches could include but are in no way limited to
Freud’s discussions of condensation and displacement, Ferenczi’s discussions of supposed mistakes,
Lacan’s discussions of aphasias, Abraham and Torok’s discussions of encrypted words, and Bollas’s
discussions of normotic illness, to name a few.

Paper proposals should be up to 300 words and sent as an e-mail attachment in Word
to d-bilsky_at_northwestern.edu by June 30, 2005.

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Received on Fri Jun 10 2005 - 00:55:11 EDT