Cfp: "Psychoanalysis and Politics: National and the Body Politic," Norwegian Psychoanalytical Society, Oslo, March 25-27, 2011.

We cannot, argued Gullestad in Plausible Prejudice (2006), understand the appeal of right-wing politics if we do not take into account how this rhetoric is underpinned by and embedded in rearticulated neo-ethnic ideas. She argued that politicians from non-right-wing populist parties have resisted specific ways of talking that are considered too extremist, rather than their underlying frame of interpretation.  Recent news stories appear to lend support to her view: Civil rights campaigners have accused governments, not just in France but across Europe, of adopting anti-immigrant and anti-Roma policies to win popular support. The issue of the so-called 'Ground Zero mosque' has caused agitation in the US. In Denmark, the nationalist party is now in government, while the Sweden Democrats have been battling up in the recent elections, appealing to hostility towards immigrants and Muslims in particular, employing the slogan Tradition and Security. In relation to the Wolf-man's phantasies, where the passive role he played towards his sister was envisioned as reversed, Freud (1914) wrote that they corresponded exactly to the legends by means of which a nation that has become great -and proud tries to conceal the insignificance and failure of its beginnings. Given that we are witnessing a revival of nationalist ideas, it is worth asking what fantasies these give voice to. One might think in terms of 'cultures of fear' (Moïsi 2009) in reference to recent developments in USA and Europe and of fantasies of fusion or 'imagined sameness' (Gullestad). Alongside the image of the nation as a mother and/or father, Reich (1933) called attention to the fantasy of the nation as a body. This metaphor is echoed in Money-Kyrle's (1939) haracterization of 'group hypochondria' in connection with the burning of witches and heretics. The Church, with the State united to it, could tolerate no foreign body within itself, and turned ferociously upon any that it found. The analogy may call to mind fantasies of scooping out, sucking dry, of poisoning, or of the other's supreme enjoyment. Where 'the foreign body' in Freud/Breuer's (1893-95)formulation designates the memory of the trauma, the analogy breaks down in that resistance is what infiltrates the ego. The treatment consists in enabling the circulation to make its way into a region that has hitherto been cut off. Conversely, one might think, along the lines of Butler's (2004) reflections on the obituary as an act of nation-building, the instrument by which grievability is publicly distributed, which calls attention not as much to the iconic images celebrated as to what violence and what losses are derealized. When the national public sphere is constituted on the basis of a prohibition on certain forms of public grieving, what has been cut off?

This is an interdisciplinary conference – we invite theoretical contributions and historical, literary or clinical case studies on these and related themes from philosophers, sociologists, psychoanalysts, psychotherapists, literary theorists, historians and others. Perspectives from different psychoanalytic schools will be most welcome. Please send an abstract of 200 to 300 words to psychoanalysis.politics@gmail.com by December 1st 2010.