CFP:EMOTIONS. Annual Conference on Psychoanalysis and Social Change

From: "Philadelphia Lacan" <[email protected]>


Call for Papers
APCS- Call for papers/Philadelphia Conference 2002
THE ASSOCIATION FOR THE PSYCHOANALYSIS OF CULTURE AND SOCIETY

Eighth Annual Conference on Psychoanalysis and Social Change


University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia PA
October 25-27, 2002

Б▄═EMOTIONS

The Association for the Psychoanalysis of Culture and Society (APCS) is
pleased to announce its 8th annual convention, which will focus on the topic
of Emotions.

The conference will take place at the University of Pennsylvania in
Philadelphia on October 25-27, 2002.

We invite submissions that focus on the topic of emotion. Proposals for
panels are especially welcome. Papers should be 20 minutes in length. All
submissions should include :

(1) a title and abstract of 200-300 words for each paper, and

(2) the name, address, e-mail, and any institutional affiliation of each
presenter.

The conference is interdisciplinary in character, and will include
participants from a broad number of academic fields, as well as from
clinical practitioners with diverse backgrounds and orientations.
Proposals are welcomed from a wide variety of perspectives. Papers
addressing the social dimension of emotion and its possible
transformation are especially solicited.

The deadline for proposals is AUGUST 1.

CALL FOR PAPERS

The question of emotion is highly ambiguous, and more hotly contested
than ever today, from neuropsychology and esthetic theory to the
philosophy of the passions and evolutionary psychology. Surveying a
range of contemporary opinion in 1917, Freud recognized a fundamental
impasse: 'I do not think that with this enumeration we have arrived at the
essence of an affect.'
As a subjective state of mind (mood, stimmung) that is simultaneously a
physiological phenomenon with a quantum of energy, emotion stands at the
crossroads between the body and the mind. As a private, individual event,
emotion is simultaneously regulated by cultural forms of life. As an
experience
with a symbolic dimension, emotions are as much a part of social
existence as rites or customs or artistic forms of expression, yet they are
simultaneously regarded as biochemical events, regulated by
psychopharmacology and explained by evolutionary theory. Moreover,
there are classes of emotions, according to some proposals, such that
some emotions have a group character (shame and guilt are the classic, if
problematic examples), while others are said to contain an ethical dimension
(pity and empathy, love and hate), still others being regarded as more
primitive and visceral. And recently, arguments in favor of the ethical
value of the arts (narrative, painting, music and other forms, which are
themselves coded around the senses in very different ways) have been
countered by arguments in favor of evolutionary explanations, based on the
presence of emotion in animals?an argument which goes back to Darwin
himself. What can various clinical and academic perspectives, grounded in
psychoanalysis, bring to this tangled web of argument?


Possible topics include:

- emotion in art (how affective responses to esthetic phenomena
complicate esthetic theory)

- anthropological perspectives (the so-called social emotions- shame,
guilt, etc.)

- group emotions

- psychopharmocology (biochemical perspectives on depression and anxiety)

- biology (the question of emotion in animals)

- emotion between psychoanalysis and philosophy (Freud with Plato,
Nietzsche, and others)

- emotion, rhetoric and politics (from Aristotle to Martha Nussbaum)

- esthetic emotion, from pity and fear to the feeling of the sublime, to the
art of disgust

- particular emotions (anger, fear, boredom, love, melancholy, etc.)

- emotion, affect, and jouissance

- institutions of emotion (confession, catharsis, truth commissions, the
court-room)

- anxiety (Freud and Heidegger, Stimmung, Befindlichkeit)

- emotion and time

- emotion and memory

- transformations of emotion (the logic of interventions in
psychoanalysis and elsewhere)


Proposals and inquiries should be sent to the following two addresses:

Professor Charles Shepherdson
Department of English
State University of New York at Albany
Albany NY 12222
[email protected]

- or -

Carmen Lamas
University of Pennsylvania
[email protected]