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M. BRADY BROWER |
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On June 8, 1905, a group of researchers representing the elite of the French
scientific community gathered in the offices of the Institut général psychologique
(IGP) on the rue Condé in Paris with the celebrated Italian spiritualist
medium, Eusapia Palladino, and the goal of ascertaining the reality
of mediumistic phenomena. In the course of forty-three séances stretched
over three years, the members of the group witnessed Eusapia producing a
variety of unexplainable phenomena. With her hands and feet carefully controlled
by the attending scientists, Eusapia shattered drinking glasses without
touching them, caused curtains and strips of fabric to billow and bulge,
produced luminescent wisps of light, materialized "spirit" hands and arms,
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NANCY D. CAMPBELL |
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 Addiction is a prime exemplar of a once-moral disorder now understood
as a neurochemical “brain disorder” or “brain disease.” Since arising in the
late nineteenth-century United States, the concept of “addiction” has been
pressured by scientists and clinicians seeking to wrest addiction from its
miscategorization as a moral weakness in order to recategorize it as an illness
or disease.1 For the cadre of North American neuropsychopharmacologists
discussed in this article, the addict’s stigmatized moral status was an
obstacle to their science and a product of a psychoanalytic psychiatry, the
dominant cultural configuration to which they opposed themselves early in
their research and clinical careers. Through their shared project to biologize
psychiatry, they gradually recoded mental illness, alcoholism, and the addictions
as brain disorders. Their successful recoding entails significant
rethinking of the role of self, brain, and society, and the displacement of psychiatry
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ELIZABETH A. WILSON |
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The blossoming interest in how to bring neuroscience and psychoanalysis
together has produced a large number of texts since the 1990s, some
primarily clinical, some populist, some principally academic. This essay
is not a comprehensive review of the literature: the diversity of interests,
audiences, and political and philosophical affiliations makes any attempt
to summarize the field impossible. Instead the essay concerns itself with
methodological questions: what kinds of interdisciplinarity are being practiced
in the new neuroscience-psychoanalysis literatures? Which is to say:
what methodological difficulties lie in the path of an alliance between the
neurosciences and psychoanalysis? I will argue that one of the key difficulties
these new projects have is how to work with knowledges that emerge
out of contradictory needs and antagonistic histories. Too concerned with
producing a strong, polished alloy out of various elements of neuroscience
and psychoanalysis, these literatures tend to overlook the lines of fissure, the inconsistencies, flaws, and fractures that such alchemy must inevitably
generate.
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STEFANOS GEROULANOS |
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Born of the epistemological auto-da-fé of physiology and neurology in the
1890s, psychoanalysis began to reach old age when new neuroscientific and
physiological models for consciousness began to appear, in the long 1970s, to
outperform it. For some seventy years, it spread its wings under the shadow
of life sciences, belied by their determinist commitments, offering clinical
as well as theoretical innovation well beyond the borders of its practice.
And if at that fin de siècle Freud managed to bring disparate psychological
elements together in a therapeutics of the talking cure, a metapsychology,
and a theory of unconscious processes, then the richness of psychoanalysis,
based on its intentionally indeterminist treatment of the body and on
the exclusivity of its practice, came to appear unfruitful, speculative, and
self-destructive with the coalescence of new neuroscientific and biological
paradigms.
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ANGELA WOODS |
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 To begin: two fragments.
The first is an embroidered jacket. It belonged to a woman called Agnes
Richter who lived in an Austrian asylum in the late 1890s. In the words of
artist Renée Turner, the jacket is "embroidered so intensively that reading
is impossible in certain areas. . . . Words appear and disappear into seams
and under layers of thread. There is no beginning or end, just spirals of intersecting
fragmentary narratives. She is declarative: 'I,' 'mine,' 'my jacket,' 'my
white stockings. . . .', 'I am in the Hubert-us-burg / ground floor,' 'children,'
'sister' and 'cook.' In the inside she has written '1894 I am / I today woman.'"
Re-embroidering the laundry number printed on her jacket, "something institutional
and distant" is transformed "into something intimate, obsessive
and possessive." She transcribes herself. This is "hypertext"; this is "untamed
writing."
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STEFAN P. DUDINK |
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It is a pleasure and honor to be invited to say a few words at the opening
of this conference. I would like to begin by thanking the organizers of the
conference for staging such a terrific opportunity to develop languages to
understand and critique the sexual nationalisms that have emerged in Europe
over the last two decades. I am particularly grateful for this opportunity
since the Dutch variety of sexual nationalism, in which homosexuality has been accorded such a pivotal role, has left me speechless for some time. Now,
this may sound terribly naïve, coming as it does from someone who routinely
tells his students that categories such as homosexuality are, in Joan Wallach
Scott's words, "simultaneously empty and overflowing" with meaning—that
they have no determinate meanings and can be made to mean almost anything.
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ERIC FASSIN |
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We did not see it coming. Or at least, I didn't. Who would have guessed that
the brave new world of sexual nationalisms would require me/us to one day
make a choice between women or sexual minorities, on the one hand, and
racial or racialized ones, on the other? (In these remarks, the usage of the
first person will more often than not, whether explicitly or implicitly, hesitate
between the singular ["I"] and the plural ["we"]. Neither is premised
on identity. What is at stake in this hesitation is the political definition of a
conversation among critics of sexual nationalisms.)
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