Events

11 February 2010  –  14 February 2010

3rd Annual Conference of the Centre for Lacanian Analysis: SEXUAL IDENTITY

Conference

As opposed to what Freud maintains, it is man – I mean he who happens to be male without knowing what to do with it – who approaches woman, or who can believe that he approaches her … But what he approaches is the cause of his desire that I have designated as object a. That is the act of love. To make love, as the very expression indicates, is poetry. There is a world between poetry and the act. The act of love is the male’s polymorphous perversion, in the case of speaking being. (Jacques Lacan)

How is human sexual identity determined? These days we often hear that it is either a process open to subjective positions where one enacts a gender identity or one has imposed on oneself a gender identity through a matrix of social constructions. Positions such as ‘transgendered’ or ‘inter-sexed’ are added to an expanding list of gender identities which already include the nomenclatures of gay, lesbian or bisexual. These are not descriptions of sexual preferences or practises; they are rather markers of both sexual identity and sexual difference.

Psychoanalysis, in contrast, is often perceived as being too deterministic and overly conservative in its findings. Freud’s Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality are today regarded with antipathy or simply ignored. But, indeed, Freud’s insight that human sexuality is a process beyond biological imperatives was the opening which made it possible to question the determination of human sexual identity. Lacan’s formulae of sexuation established the foundations of a possible definition of a sexual identity that would not be based on semblance but would rather be determined in terms of jouissance: the all-phallic determines the position of the man, the not-all phallic determines the position of the woman.

The main reference for the conference is Jacques Lacan, in particular, though not exclusively, his Seminar XX, On Feminine Sexuality: The Limits of Love and Knowledge, Encore. The conference aims to address a number of Lacan’s most provocative axioms, such as “There is no sexual relation” or “The Woman does not exist,” to explore other ways of thinking sexual identity.

CONFIRMED KEYNOTE SPEAKERS

Sonia Alberti: Professor of the Institute for Psychology at the University of the State of Rio de Janeiro (UERJ). Researcher of the National Council for Research, in Brazil. Doctor in Psychology (Université de Paris X-Nanterre, 1989) and Post-doctor (Federal University of Rio de Janeiro-UFRJ). Coordinates the Residence in Psychology at the University Hospital Pedro Ernesto (HUPE) and supervises residents in its Nucleo de Estudos da Saude do Adolescente (Section for Adolescent`s Health, of the HUPE). Psychoanalyst, AME of the Psychoanalytic School of the Lacanian Field and, at the present time, Representant of Brazil in the College of Representants of the International of the Forums (CRIF). Author of books and articles.

Dany Nobus, PhD, is Professor of Psychology and Psychoanalysis, and Head of the School of Social Sciences at Brunel University, London, where he is also the Convenor of the MA Programme in Psychoanalysis and Contemporary Society. He is Visiting Professor of Psychiatry at Creighton University Medical School in Omaha NE, and Adjunct Professor of Sociology at the University of Massachusetts-Boston. He is the author, most recently, of Knowing Nothing, Staying Stupid: Elements for a Psychoanalytic Epistemology (Routledge, 2005), and has contributed numerous papers on the history, theory and practice of psychoanalysis to academic and professional journals.