Psychoanalysis and the Public Sphere
Eleventh Annual Conference

Friday 30th to Saturday 31st January 1998

To be held at University of East London Conference Centre,
Stratford E15.

CALL FOR PAPERS

WHERE ARE THE PEOPLE?  EXPERTISE AND EXPERIENCE

Authority, tradition and modernisation in psychoanalysis and in society
need to be connected not sundered. We will welcome papers and presentations
which give substance back to concepts like 'responsibility', 'adulthood',
'authority', 'compassion', 'leadership' and 'governance'.  We will be
interested in papers which can present examinations of predicaments in
concrete situations or specific institutional contexts, and which may deal
with ambiguities of role and of task in psychoanalytic, political or policy
terms. This will help us to think about what it means to be, for example,
'a teacher' or a 'citizen' or 'social worker', or to describe forms of
creative social action which embody such meanings.

Daily experience is often in contradiction with public rhetoric but cannot
gain an adequate hearing. Public and political discourse is increasingly
emptied of desire, of a felt relationship to personal and social struggle.
Contact with the messiness, ambivalence and conflict of everyday
experienceseems to have become too dangerous, too threatening as a source
for politicalvision.

'Modernising' tendencies of all kinds have rejected what are perceived as
theconstraints of 'tradition' and have demanded a series of constant
ruptureswith the past. Furthermore, the entrepreneurial model of the person
which hasgoverned social life for the past 18 years of Tory administration
in Britain imagines people to be perpetually responsive to modifications in
their environment. Consequently, many practices which are based on the
ethos of public service have been subject to attacks on professional
expertise and institutionalised forms of authority. This manifests itself,
across the ideas and practices of both right and left, in false ideas of
social levelling, a denial of the fact of difference and a rejection of
healthy human dependency. In contemporary society there are many programmes
of management for persons but it is unclear how the aims of these
programmes and their subjects connect and are determined.

The title of the 11th Psychoanalysis and the Public Sphere Conference,
'Where are the People? Expertise and Experience', invites contributions
which reveal and articulate how psychoanalytic thinking and engagement can
rebuild the bridge between private troubles and public issues.  The
conference will address the question of how psychoanalysis can illuminate
processes of social leadership, policy formation, and social transformation.

Abstracts should be sent to Jessica Evans, Department of Sociology, Faculty
of Social Science, The Open University, Walton Hall, Milton Keynes MK7 6AA
by 1st September 1997.

__________________________________________
Robert Maxwell Young:  [log in to unmask] or
[log in to unmask], 26 Freegrove Rd., London N7 9RQ, Eng. tel.+44
171 607 8306  fax.+44 171 609 4837 Professor of Psychotherapy and
Psychoanalytic Studies, Centre for Psychotherapeutic Studies, University of
Sheffield. Home page and writings: http://www.shef.ac.uk/~psysc/
Process Press publications:
http://www.shef.ac.uk/~psysc/process_press/index.html
 'One must imagine Sisyphus happy.' - Camus