International Conference

From 25 to 27 March 2010 the Sigmund Freud Museum is hosting an interdisciplinary conference bringing together psychoanalysis and cultural studies in focusing on the transformation of contemporary family constellations.

The opening lecture will be held by the anthropologist John Borneman of Princeton University.

At the center of the three-day conference are the upheavals occurring in systems of familial relationship at the beginning of the twenty-first century. The transformation of the genealogical order and its psychical bonding force, which was a key stabilizing factor in modern social organization, can be seen in the growing equality of the sexes, the separation of sexuality and reproduction, the recognition of non-reproductive sexual orientations, the implementation of post-sexual reproductive technologies, and in the diversity of new ways of life. According to Freud, that order’s foundation was the incest taboo as the law of the father, whose internalization was central to heterosexual identity and to the patrilineal succession of generations. The disintegration of prohibiting authorities and the changing psychodynamics of the relationship between parents and offspring, adults and children, has led to a new definition of the difference between the generations, whereby roles, identifications and the borders of intimacy have been subjected to new evaluations.

The conference will illuminate this transformation from anthropological, ethnological, medical, sociological, psychoanalytic, religious and cultural perspectives, tracing theoretical displacements that have as yet received little attention and discussing its emancipatory side. Familial and social upheavals are also the theme of a film screening and reading that will end the conference.

Conception: Irene Berkel, scholar of religious and cultural studies, Academy of Fine Arts, Vienna 

The keynote lecture on 25 March will be held by John Borneman, Professor of Anthropology at Princeton University.

Participants

John W. Borneman, Princeton University

Karola Brede, Goethe-University Frankfurt

Wilhelm Brüggen, Berlin Institute for Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis

Johannes Huber, University of Vienna

Michi Knecht, Humboldt-University Berlin

Martin Treml, Zentrum für Literaturforschung, Berlin

Conference Locations

Keynote Lecture on 25 March: Atrium of the Österreichische Beamtenversicherung ÖBV, Grillparzerstrasse 14, 1010 Vienna

Conference sessions on 26 and 27 March: Sigmund Freud Museum, Berggasse 19, 1090 Vienna