Free Association: Free Speech? Pulsion Institute, 2025 symposium, March 29 and 30
Pulsion Institute presents its 2025 symposium “Free Association: Free Speech?”, 2-day event online and in New York City.
For Registration, click here
2-DAY EVENT
Saturday March 29 from 11am – 1:15pm ET
HYBRID at Pulsion Institute (321 W44 Street, suite 510)
Sunday March 30 from 9am – 5:30pm ET
IN-PERSON with Live Streaming at Foundation for Community Psychoanalysis (81 Court Street, 4th Floor, Brooklyn, NY)
7.5 CE CREDITS OFFERED For NYS-licensed psychologists, psychologists, social workers, and licensed psychoanalysts
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.
Shilpa Gupta, “For, In Your Tongue, I Cannot Fit,” photo by Atul Loke for The New York Times, 2023
PROGRAM
SATURDAY MARCH 29, 2025
Hybrid Event
11am-1:15 pm
Associativity from the First Meeting and Beyond
Marilia Aistenstein: presenter
Howard Levine: discussant
Round Table on the Drive to Submit:
Free Servitude?
Andjela Samardzic: presenter
On the Distraction of Thought and Voluntary Submission
Vaia Tsolas: presenter
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SUNDAY MARCH 30, 2025
In-person event with live-streaming
9-9:30am
Introductions and gathering
9:30-10:45am
Deadened Time: On Racial Anxiety in South Africa
Derek Hook: presenter
Rosalind Morris: discussant
10:45-11:00am Coffee Break
11:00-12:30pm ROUND TABLE:
Unfree Associations: Academia, Groups, and the Law
Nadia Abu El-Haj, Nicholas Bartlett, Samuel Catlin, Peter Goodrich, Jerome Premmereur: presentersMelissa Wright: moderator
12:30-2:00pm Lunch
2:00-3:15pm
Free Interpretation?
Sergio Benvenuto: presenter
Patricia Gherovici: discussant
3:15-4:00pm
Muted Speech: Censorship in Psychoanalysis Today
Donald Moss, David Lichtenstein, and Luca Flabbi: presenters
Marisa Berwald: moderator
3:45-4:00pm Coffee Break
4:15-5:30pm
ROUND TABLE: Free Association, Free-Floating Attention
Christine Anzieu-Premmereur, Jamieson Webster, Howard Levine, Marcus Coelen: presenters
Vaia Tsolas: moderator
5:30 Cocktail hour
