Free Association: Free Speech? Pulsion 2025 symposium

Pulsion presents its annual symposium 2025

2-DAY HYBRID EVENT

• Saturday March 29 from 12pm - 2pm ET ONLINE ONLY
• Sunday March 30 from 9am - 6pm ET HYBRID

7.5 CE CREDITS OFFERED For NYS-licensed psychologists, psychologists, social workers, and licensed psychoanalysts

Featuring: Nadia Abu El-Haj, PhD • Marilia Aisenstein, PhD • Christine Anzieu-Premmereur, MD, PhD • Nicholas Bartlett, PhD • Sergio Benvenuto, PhD • Marisa Berwald, LCSW • Samuel Catlin, PhD • Marcus Coelen, PhD • Luca Flabbi, PhD • Patricia Gherovici, PhD • Peter Goodrich, PhD • Derek Hook, PhD • Howard Levine, PhD • David Lichtenstein, PhD • Rosalind Morris, PhD • Donald Moss, PhD • Vaia Tsolas, PhD • Jamieson Webster, PhD • Melissa Wright, PhD

Overview

“And of course I am afraid, because the transformation of silence into language and action is an act of self-revelation, and that always seems fraught with danger.” - Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider (1984)

Free speech, a central tenet of modern democracies, is threatened by forms of active and passive censorship whether they be on a university campus, in a psychoanalytic institute, or in the speech acts of cultural and political leaders. Free association, based on the premise of saying whatever comes to mind, has always held a paradoxical position in psychoanalysis because it presupposes the over-determination of the unconscious. At the intersection between academic, aesthetic, and psychoanalytic experience and thought, this symposium brings contributors across fields to discuss current manifestations, constraints, and censorships of free association and free speech. We invite academics, artists, and psychoanalysts to consider the presence, function, utility, resistance, defenses, and suppressions of free association and free speech, in the collective sphere and in clinical work, through of the effects of free speech and free association on the individual human body and on the body politic.

Picture: Shilpa Gupta, “For, In Your Tongue, I Cannot Fit,”photo by Atul Loke for The New York Times, 2023

Host or Publisher Pulsion - IIPPP