Monday, 28 January 2019, 7.30 pm, diffrakt | centre for theoretical periphery
Workshop with
Marcus Coelen
For clinicians working in psychiatric hospitals, psychotic countertransference poses a serious challenge insofar as it includes an identification with the fragmentation and aggression of the patient’s disorder. It has been suggested that these effects can be kept at bay by employing what Henricus Cornelius Rümke, in 1941, termed the “praecox feeling,” that is, the clinician’s subjective reaction Rümke identified as a crucial diagnostic tool in cases of schizophrenia. A psychoanalytic approach to the treatment of psychosis, on the other hand, will implement the process of transferential transmission at the risk of “catching the crazy,” as psychoanalyst Marcus Coelen will explain.
Attendance is limited. To register and receive the readings, please send a short message to mail@diffrakt.space.
Spellbound: Mass Hysteria, Collective Symptoms, Contagious States
Series organised by
Nadine Hartmann | Clio Nicastro | Hannah Proctor
This event series explores experiences of collective mental contagion. Probing the boundaries between the psychic and the physiological, the natural and the supernatural, the social and the spiritual, the events will focus on often mysterious mass psychic phenomena such as hypnosis, fainting fits, possession, the ‘mimetic’ dimension of hysteria and eating disorders, the regimentation of gesture and trances. How do certain kinds of collective behaviours or experiences take hold and spread among groups? Do conditions with no clear biological origin have their roots in society? What do mass symptoms express?
Spellbound will take the form of events in thematic pairs: a screening night followed by a reading and discussion night. Although the two nights in each pair will be conceptually linked they also function as stand alone events.