5th Global Conference
Conference Programme, Abstracts and Papers
Session 1: Biography, Ambition and the Afterlife
Chair: Asa Kasher
The Trauma of Death and the Silence of the Private Diary
Nikos
Falagkas and Georgia
Kalogeropulou
Modern Greek Studies, King’s
College, London and Department of Philosophy at the Ecole des Hautes
Etudes en Sciences Sociales, Paris, France
Having
addressed the potentiality of a union of psychoanalysis with philosophy,
we concentrate on the theory of trauma, which attempts to account for
the individual’s confrontation with alterity. Alterity
can take the form either of the seductive message of the other, a message
too organized and purposeful to be assimilated at the time it occurs,
having therefore to be treated as a total absence of meaning, or of death
being the limit of meaning itself and the absolute alterity as such.
According to Laplanche’s version of the trauma theory, an intense and overwhelming
event (understood as an intrusion to the subject) triggers a psychic causality
characterised by the double temporality of trauma, which consists in an initial
absence of consciousness of the traumatic event, followed by a period of latency,
only after which, the trauma becomes manifest in the subject’s repetitive
actions or dreams and can be therefore recognized and handled as such.
The diary writing bears resemblances to the psychoanalytical procedure
as it is motivated by the conscious effort of the writer to express himself
in a spontaneous way without the constraints of a pre-existent structure
or a given subject. A closer look at entries from George Seferis’s private diary demonstrated
that the private diary constitutes a privileged topos where both the bipolar
temporality and the causality of afterwardness of trauma are clearly reflected:
there is an initial silence synchronically to the event of the death of the other
(the diarist’s mother and brother), which demonstrates the diarist’s
incapacity to assimilate it and then, following a period of latency, a gradual
acceptance of the loss.
Death and Ambition in Freud’s The Interpretation
of Dreams
Liran
Razinsky
The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Jerusalem, Israel
Psychoanalysis has
always seen death as psychically unimportant and death anxiety as secondary,
superficial, and reducible (Freud, 1915, p. 297; 1923, pp. 57-9; 1926,
pp. 129-30, 140). Sexuality always has the primacy as a motive force.
Anxiety is not about death or any existential concerns, it is about excitations
or excessive libido. Death is not seen as an important psychic factor.
One
of Freud’s major claims that regarding death is that of non-representability.
Death cannot be represented in the unconscious, Freud claims, for it
is negative abstract and involves time, all of which have no place in
the unconscious. neither it can be represented in conscious thought for
when one tries to do so one discovers one is inevitably always still
there, as a spectator. Death is not to be found in the child’s
world or the that pf primeval man, and neither in the adult’s
or modern man’s one. This idea has contributed a lot to his view
that death does not have real psychic influence.
What I will try to do
today is to claim the contrary: that death is very central in the psyche,
including in the unconscious, and that death concerns are not secondary
but primary. Even when not represented directly, death is psychically
active and influential. My talk today is part of a larger research that
criticizes the psychoanalytic neglect of death and claims, through analyzing
various canonic texts.
I wish to demonstrate these claims today through
using Freud’s own book, The
Interpretation of Dreams as a case study where my aim is to uncover
the hidden theme of death as a motive force in Freud’s own dreams,
associations and interpretations. I argue that one cannot dismiss death
as unimportant, and that one would leave too much out if one tries
to do so, for death is a pivotal theme in the book. My reading will
show that Freud’s formal approach regarding
death – to leave it aside and not treat it as important – does
not withstand not only an external criticism, but also the facts of his
own mental life.
Accounts of Afterlife from the Dead: How Useful Are They for the
Dying?
Stafford
Betty
Department of
Religious Studies,
California State University, Bakersfield, California, USA
There are hundreds of accounts allegedly written by spirits who once lived on our planet and desire to tell us about the world they now inhabit, and that we too will inhabit once we pass. These messages come to us through mediums. This paper summarizes the world described in one of the richest of these accounts, Helen Greaves’s Testimony of Light, then evaluates the evidence for its genuineness. Reasons pro and con are considered side by side. The author believes there are more reasons to trust the best accounts than to dismiss them as fraud or unconscious projections by mediums, though he warns that it is likely, if they are genuine, that they are somewhat contaminated by these projections. The author then wonders about the value of such accounts for readers, both those near death and those like us who are merely curious. He concludes that they hold out hope against extinction and that such hope is a great blessing for all, both healthy and dying, who fear death.
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