Chicago Psychoanalytic Society

Co-Sponsored by the Institute for Clinical Social Work

Tuesday, April 17, 2018 – 7:00 PM-8:50 PM

Location: Robert Morris University – 401 S. State Street, 8th floor auditorium

Admission is free

The Odyssey of Desire & the Eros of Free Speech

Presenter: Jill Gentile, PhD

Discussant: Jonathan Lear, PhD

This program is available to watch on our YouTube Channel.

In her talk, Jill Gentile explores unexamined resonances between the projects of Freud and the Founding Fathers of American democracy. She starts with an analogy between the Fundamental Rule and the First Amendment and illuminates the magic of speech and the paradoxes of freedom. By tracing gaps and exclusions that perpetuate conditions of patriarchy and leave unfulfilled the imaginative appeals of both psychoanalysis and democracy, she helps us discover the signal power of human carnality, of sexual signification, and of the feminine. What would a “feminine law” promise for the eros of free speech and for the freedom of desire, the freedom to desire? Might a paradoxical law of space, of “no rule,” help us to revive democratic symbolization and to guide ethical and emancipatory— even revolutionary—social change?

Presenter: Jill Gentile, PhD, one of the most dazzling and inventive of current psychoanalytic and social commentators, is a faculty member at the NYU Postdoctoral Program in Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis and the Institute for the Psychoanalytic Study of Subjectivity. Her book, Feminine Law: Freud, Free Speech, and the Voice of Desire, with Michael Macrone (Karnac, 2016), examines the mutual relevance between psychoanalysis and democracy through the lenses of free speech and the female body. She was awarded the 2017 Gradiva Award for her essay, “What is special about speech?” She has also served as a consultant to the film The Tale, which will premiere at Sundance in 2018.

Discussant: Jonathan Lear, PhD, a member of the Chicago Psychoanalytic Society and a Faculty Member at the Chicago Institute for Psychoanalysis, is the John U. Nef Distinguished Service Professor and Director of the Neubauer Collegium for Culture and Society at the University of Chicago. His books include: Wisdom Won from Illness: Essays in Philosophy and Psychoanalysis (2017), Freud (2005), Love and Its Place in Nature: A Philosophical Interpretation of Freudian Psychoanalysis (1990).Educational objectives:

After the presentation, the participant will be able to:

• Identify areas of resonance between psychoanalysis and democracy; and between the Fundamental Rule and the First Amendment
• Recognize the coherence among various spatial metaphors in psychoanalysis; and describe the significance of naming the feminine (genital) for a revived free speech regime.

Admission is free. No reservations are required. Continuing Education Credits are offered exclusively to Society members.