This two day conference brings together historians, social theorists and psychoanalysts to explore the impact of the Second World War and totalitarianism on psychoanalysis; and of psychoanalysis on the understanding of the war and totalitarian systems.
Topics include: the role of psychoanalysis in the war effort, military intelligence and in postwar reconstruction; the crisis of psychoanalysis in Central Europe; the work of Hannah Arendt and other theorists of totalitarianism; cultural anthropology, fascism and the Cold War; visions of the child and the creation of the War Nurseries; the psychoanalytic sociology of the Frankfurt School; war and the origins of group therapy; neo-Freudianism; the psychoanalytic theorization of antisemitism; mourning, memory and trans-generational trauma; Winnicott and the social democratic vision.
Presentations will be 20-minutes arranged in panels, followed by discussion, all in a plenary format. Confirmed speakers include: Sally Alexander (Goldsmith’s, University of London), David Armstrong (Tavistock Consultancy Service), David Bell (British Psychoanalytical Society); Ronald Britton (British Psychoanalytical Society), José Brunner (Tel Aviv University), Matt Ffytche (University of Essex), John Forrester (University of Cambridge), Stephen Frosh (Birkbeck, University of London), Peter Mandler (University of Cambridge), Knuth Müller (Free University, Berlin), Daniel Pick (Birkbeck, University of London/British Psychoanalytical Society), Michael Roper (University of Essex), Michael Rustin (Tavistock Consultancy Service/University of East London), Michal Shapira (New York University), Lyndsey Stonebridge (University of East Anglia) and Eli Zaretsky (New School for Social Research, New York).