Encounters between cultures in Tehran

Encounters between cultures in Tehran

The idea of organizing an international conference on the Geographies of Psychoanalysis in Tehran arose during various meetings with Gohar Homayounpour, the Iranian analyst and founder of the Freudian Group in Tehran, moreover, this group of psychoanalysts has been working on clinical and theoretical psychoanalysis for many years in the city. In the Geographies project, which is aimed at favouring the coming together of psychoanalysis and cultures from various countries around the world, there is a special space that is occupied by the relationship of psychoanalysis and the Muslim culture and, in more general terms, with the Eastern world as a whole.

The meeting in Tehran will not be directly centred on Islamic culture but will use the city and contradictory experience that will arise from the practice of psychoanalysis in Iran as a sort of container of a profoundly problematic character, and which, thus, reverberates with the complexity of the psychoanalytic experience.

We thought about offering both our Iranian colleagues and public topics for discussion that will touch upon problematic areas that face Western analysts as well, or at least topics that lend themselves to equipping the analyst who is able to question himself and who is willing to absorb other language and other models of life.

In moments like the current times, within the heart of violent and brutal conflict, where amongst various geo-political reasons we can see uncontrolled inflammation and illogical aggression, the trip to Iran can’t not include the spirit of research that is aimed at preserving the capacity of thinking even through the tools of psychoanalysis.

(Lorena Preta)

List of papers presented at the conference :

–    Lorena Preta, Psychoanalysis: An Updated Map Of The Psyche

–    Gohar Homayounpour, Geography of Proximity (Borrowing from Derrida)

–    Sudhir Kakar, Culture In Psychoanalysis

–    Anna Ferruta, Constructing Or Deconstructing Histories And Cultures

–    Alfredo Lombardozzi, Which Geographies? Psychoanalytic Anthropology Of Human Diversity

–    Felix De Mendelssohn, I. Freud And The Djinns. Doing Psychoanalysis in Algeria

–    Felix De Mendelssohn, II. Globalization And Development Of Psychoanalysis

–    Tiziana Bastianini, The Subject Of The Affect: How The “Actual” Can Be Expressed In Different Cultures

–    Mariano Horenstein, Psychoanalysis In Minor Language

–    Sophie de Mijolla-Mellor, The Invariants Of The Couple

–    Silvia Ronchey, Chalk Lines