Absence

Program

(for abstracts und biographies click the titles)

 

VIDEOS from the conference can be viewed on our YouTube channel after the event!

 

Unfortunately, two speakers on the first panel (Isabel Millar and Alexandra Schauer) had to cancel their participation in the conference at short notice. We kindly ask for your understanding for the change in the program.

 

Friday, 11. October

15:30 – 18:00: Opening Panel "Positions on Absence"
Library of Psychoanalysis at the Sigmund Freud Museum
AND via Zoom live stream: Please click here for joining the stream

 

Alexi Kukuljevic, moderation

Alessandra Lemma (London, UK - via Zoom), Mourning, Melancholia and Machines: An Applied Psychoanalytic Investigation of Mourning in the Age of Griefbots

Monika Pessler (Vienna, AT), Absence or What Remains

 

18.00: Minna Antova (Vienna, AT), Guided Tour DENK-MAL Synagogue Marpe Lanefesch (Universitycampus Vienna) On site only

Meeting point: Library of Psychoanalysis at the Sigmund Freud Museum

 

Saturday, 12 October

10:00 – 13:00: Panel "Psychoanalysis"
Library of Psychoanalysis at the Sigmund Freud Museum

 

Jeanne Wolff Bernstein, moderation

Rachael Peltz (Berkeley, US), The Dialectic of Presence and Absence –Today!

Cecilia Taiana (Ottawa, CA), Mourning the Dead, Mourning the Disappeared

Joachim Küchenhoff (Basel, CH), Ambivalences of Absence. Coping, Avoiding, Accepting, Using, Mourning

 

14:30 – 17:45: Panel "Literature and Philosophy"

Daniela Finzi, moderation

Leonard Schwartz (New York, US), H.D., Freud, and the Mental Image

Victor Mazin (St. Petersburg, RU), The Holes and the Real: Lacan and Langoliers

Lorenzo Chiesa (Newcastle, UK), Anxiety: Absence as a Presence, Elsewhere

 

Absence

The interdisciplinary symposium at the Sigmund Freud Museum explores the multiple facets of absence. Although the term rarely appears in Freud's writings, absence is a key component of psychoanalytic thinking. In psychoanalysis, as much attention is paid to the gap as to the words and memories concealing it; the analytical process is characterized by an interweaving of presence and absence, of attachment and separation. Up to now, this concept has remained central to the various psychoanalytic schools.

Literature and art have always dealt with absence as well, and at the same time the concept builds bridges to disciplines such as sociology, cultural and media studies. In the course of the symposium, questions of social change will be discussed on the basis of the concept of absence: What does the absence of the body in digital communication do to the subject and to society? What fantasies of absence or constant availability are at work in AI? And in view of the climate crisis and the threat of ecological collapse, how can we imagine the future other than in its absence?

The venue of the conference also becomes a subject of investigation: when the "birthplace of psychoanalysis" was renovated, the emptiness that characterizes this place due to the forced emigration of the Freud family proved to be constitutive for the redesign.

 

Have a look at our event program.

Watch a selection of our event videos on our YouTube channel.