ANN PELLEGRINI
Fulbright-Freud Visiting Lecturer of Psychoanalysis
Trauma in the Public Imagination: Thinking after Freud

Tuesday, June 12, 2007, 7 p.m.
Sigmund Freud Museum
Berggasse 19, 1090 Vienna

How might Freud's understanding of trauma and death help us think afresh about the politics of loss in the contemporary moment and the relationship between private and public traumas? Although psychoanalysis is often treated as if it is apolitical and individualistic, this talk argues for a psychoanalysis, and a Freud, very much attuned to the world. Returning to a cluster of essays Freud wrote between 1914 and 1920, this lecture attends to such psychoanalytic concepts as trauma, melancholia, and the death drive as vital resources for interpreting and, even, reimagining our social worlds. In many ways, this talk represents an act of conjuring, a summoning of ghosts to Berggasse 19. With Freud, we will ask how the past lives on in the present and consider what resources psychoanalysis might offer us in these haunted, bloodied times.

Ann Pellegrini is Associate Professor of Performance Studies and Religious Studies at New York University. She is the author of Performance Anxieties: Staging Psychoanalysis, Staging Race (1997), co-author of Love the Sin: Sexual Regulation and the Limits of Religious Tolerance (2003), co-editor of Queer Theory and the Jewish Question (2003), and co-editor of the forthcoming anthology Secularisms. She also co-edits a queer studies book series, Sexual Cultures, at New York University Press. In 2007, she is the Freud-Fulbright Visiting Scholar of Psychoanalysis at the Sigmund Freud Privatstiftung.

An event of the Sigmund Freud Foundation and the Fulbright Commission