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Talking about Heidegger and Lacan at "Rendering Unconscious"

29/1/2020

 
Dr Vanessa Sinclair, the welcoming host of the podcast Rendering Unconscious, has invited me to talk about my book, Discourse Ontology.

Of course we don't stay at that. It's a good opportunity to discuss more generally about language, philosophy, mathematics, and psychoanalysis, as well as about Heidegger, Husserl, Freud, and Lacan.

For the specific episode click here.
It is also available on SoundCloud, as well as at all the usual podcast streaming platforms. Links here.

Vanessa's main website page is at Rendering Unconsious.

Discourse Ontology

20/5/2019

 
 My book, on Heidegger and Lacan, was just published by Palgrave.
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Psychosis and Psychoanalysis Conference

15/3/2016

 
It has been quite some time since my last blog entry, but I thought I'd add a quick note about this very interesting upcoming conference on Psychosis and Psychoanalysis at the Freud Museum, London.
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It is organised in collaboration with the Psychosis Therapy Project, a therapy service for people experiencing psychosis, and I am honoured to have been invited to participate in a Clinical Round-table on technique.



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The Problem Of the Body

5/10/2014

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What follows is an edited version of a talk delivered on July 12, 2014, at the annual CFAR Conference. The theme this year was: “Sexuality: Phantasy, Discourse and Practice”. I participated in a panel on the general subject of “Sexuality and Phantasy”. My presentation was not prepared beforehand. This here is an edited transcription of a recording. As such, it tries, but fails in many ways, to capture the spontaneity and informality of what was said. But then, that’s the best I could do.

There you go.

Good morning.

I was wondering how to start today. I was considering the title of the panel, “Sexuality and Phantasy”, and struggled to think. What, if anything, could I add to the subject?

I realised this. I realised that whenever I find myself thinking about Sexuality, I find myself thinking of Descartes --you know, René Descartes, the philosopher.

Of course Descartes did not, as far as I know, write about sexuality as such --or about phantasy for that matter. But he did write about the mind-body problem.

This will be my starting point today.


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What is real in a historical event?

9/4/2014

 
This is a slightly edited transcription of a talk I delivered on April 5, 2014, at the “Workshop in preparation of the WAP Congress” of the London Society of the NLS. The theme of the congress is "A Real for the 21st Century". The Workshop, organised by Janet Haney, was structured around four entries from the upcoming English version of Scilicet. Each was presented by a member or friend of the London Society who participated in the process of translation and editing. My talk was in connection to “Shoah”, a paper by French psychoanalyst Philippe Benichou.

Dear friends and colleagues,

Thank you for giving me the opportunity to speak today here about some of the questions I found myself struggling with, while reading and translating “Shoah” by Philippe Benichou.

Benichou’s paper talks about the Shoah. You cannot wonder, Benichou writes, what a "real for the twenty-first century" could be, without mentioning that event beyond meaning, real, all too real, the Shoah.

I was captivated but also puzzled by the power of this depiction of the Shoah as an “event beyond meaning, real, all too real”.

I asked myself, what could this mean?

Attempting to formulate an answer, I found myself faced with further questions:

What is an event? What is history? What is a historical event?

And then: What is real in a historical event?

This is how I will begin.


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Streetlight Effect

10/5/2013

 
It has been dubbed the “bible” of psychiatry, and indeed the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) is taken by many as exactly that. Every new version of this publication, prepared by the American Psychiatric Association, is considered to contain the latest and more advanced criteria for the classification and diagnosis of mental disorders.

Acceptance has not been unanimous, though. For many of its critics, the DSM has been too unreliable, far too prescriptive and yet quite vague, very much geared towards the compartmentalization of human behaviour, very much conforming to the wishes of the big Pharmaceutical companies –in short: very problematic.

The news, then, that after more than sixty years of near hegemony –at least in the U.S.– the DSM is pushed aside by the US National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH), cannot but be welcome. A research framework is being introduced for collecting data for a new understanding of mental disorders, a "new nosology", away from DSM.

Is there, at last, room for optimism? Are we finally about to enter an era of scientific psychiatry which will (hopefully) settle all disagreements and clear out all ambiguities for good?


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Autumn 2012 teaching

3/10/2012

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It has been some time since I last posted something to this blog, but I guess you know how it is. Time --or rather, lack thereof-- has taken the upper hand recently.

I hope I will be able to post something soon, but in the meantime, this is just a short note about two lectures I will be giving in October and November, as part of Autumn 2012 Public Lectures Programme of CFAR.



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Thinking with one’s feet

1/2/2012

 
_I was reading something on the BBC today, regarding the “decoding” by science of people’s “internal voices”. The article was about a new technique, whereby researchers are said to be able to reconstruct words, based on the brain waves of patients thinking of those words. I was reminded of an anecdote about Lacan, one of the most important post-Freudian psychoanalysts.

In 1975, during a lecture tour in the United States, Jacques Lacan spoke at MIT before an audience of mathematicians, linguists, and philosophers. Noam Chomsky, the already famous by then American linguist philosopher and activist, attending the lecture, asked Lacan a question on thought.

Lacan's reply was possibly not what Chomsky expected:

“We think we think with our brains”, Lacan said. “Personally, I think with my feet. That's the only way I really come into contact with anything, solid. I do occasionally think with my forehead, when I bang into something. But I've seen enough electroencephalograms to know there's not the slightest trace of a thought in the brain.”

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Reality checks

27/7/2011

 
Last week I wrote about a scientific paper that claimed that “most published research findings are false”. I identified the three slightly different conceptions of truth that the abstract of that paper was alluding to, and suggested, as a work hypothesis, that we differentiate between “real truth” and “scientific truth”.

I ended that post rather abruptly and at a somewhat provocative point. I claimed that science does not have anything to do with reality.

I acknowledged, however, that this would need to be clarified.

This is what I shall attempt to do today: to clarify.

So science “does not have anything to do with reality”.

How did we get to this conclusion? What does it mean?

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Home truths

21/7/2011

 
The other day I came across a very intriguing research paper, bearing a very provocative title: “Why Most Published Research Findings are False”. Published in 2005, this paper was written by John P.A. Ioannidis, a medical professor specializing in epidemiology. His claim is simple (I quote from the abstract of the paper):

The probability that a research claim is true may depend on study power and bias, the number of other studies on the same question, and, importantly, the ratio of true to no relationships among the relationships probed in each scientific field. In this framework, a research finding is less likely to be true when the studies conducted in a field are smaller; when effect sizes are smaller; when there is a greater number and lesser preselection of tested relationships; where there is greater flexibility in designs, definitions, outcomes, and analytical modes; when there is greater financial and other interest and prejudice; and when more teams are involved in a scientific field in chase of statistical significance.

Now, as you might imagine, a scientific paper with such a subject matter would be sure to attract a lot of attention, both positive and negative, and that was indeed the case. But I do not intend to participate in the debate, and this is not the reason I am bringing up this paper here.

I am more interested in the concept of truth, especially in the way it is employed in papers such as Ioannidis’, i.e. in current scientific research.

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    Christos Tombras
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