THE 21^st CENTURY AND ITS DISCONTENTS:
A PSYCHOANALYTIC PERSPECTIVE


Thursday 28 February — Sunday 2 March 2008

The University of Auckland

The psychoanalytic clinic is the real insofar as it is the impossible to bear. JACQUES LACAN.




Nearly eighty years have passed since the publication of Freud's paper, Civilisation and Its Discontents (1930), and although the 21st century appears to have little in common with Freud’s Vienna of 1930, Civilisation and Its Discontents continues to generate questions:


 ·       Are contemporary symptoms, those we encounter in our critical and clinical work, and those presented in society at large, the manifest expression of a profound malaise that affects our civilisation?


 ·       Are individuals being increasingly objectified and reduced to their behaviours that would be measured and controlled?


 ·       In such contexts, does psychoanalysis, addressing the individuality of the subject of the unconscious, become marginalised?  


This conference aims to address how psychoanalysis can contribute both critically and clinically to the examination of the “discontents” of our contemporaneity. We note the following as possible concerns: addiction, alienation, anorexia, anxiety, assistencialism, bulimia, dependence, depression among others. 


This conference aims to bring together those broadly engaged in approaches to psychoanalysis that are clinical and critical (and in this latter sense both philosophical & cultural); and those particularly engaged with the works of Lacan.