The Place of Agency and Norms in Psyschoanalysis

Roundtable discussion with Jorge L. Ahumada, Akeel Bilgrami, Arnold M. Cooper, Garrett Deckel, Peter D. Kramer, and Bernard Reginster.

Category:

Education

Tags:

• philoctetes
• roundtable
• psychoanalysis
• sigmund
• freud
• akeel
• bilgrami

[pawsoned]

The unsolvable problem that haunts this discussion, apart from the dull moderator, is the concept of Cartesian cogito aka 'the ghost in the machine'. It is the elephant in the room that is swept under the rug and the panel only split hairs trying to put their finger on the fuzzy unconsciousness. Hence, in my view, the heavy-going talk peppered with unavoidable dead ends - aporias. Why do you invite Akeel? He's terrible and only makes the discussion impossible.

[iPlantChannel]

these talks are so great :)

[loregazer]

I don't really see the point of this conference, since it became pretty obvious that the unconscious does not have agency in Akeel's sense of "decision to gain governance over oneself." Indeed it would see that this defintion of agency would rule out unconscious agency by definition.