Marilia Aisenstein, MD,
Training-Supervising Psychoanalyst, Paris Psychoanalytic Society, past president of the Paris Society, past chair of the Board at the Paris Psychosomatic Institute (I.P.S.O.) and Editor of the “Revue française de psychosomatique.” She has written many papers, international reviews, and books in French (98+ publications). In 1992 she received the “Prix Maurice Bouvet “(award for written work in psychoanalysis). She is an honorary member of Pulsion Institute.

Christine Anzieu- Premmereur, PhD, MD
is Board Secretary, faculty and supervisor at Pulsion Institute, and an adult and child psychoanalyst in New York City. She is on the faculty of the Columbia Psychoanalytic Center and is Assistant Clinical Professor in Psychiatry at Columbia University and the chair of the IPA Committee for Child and Adolescent Psychoanalysis. She has published and written widely on child psychoanalysis and most recently co-edited A Psychoanalytic Exploration of the Contemporary Search for Pleasure: The Turning of the Screw (2023).

Marcus Coelen, PhD
is a psychoanalyst and psychoanalytic supervisor in Berlin and New York; a professor of comparative literature and romance philology; translator and editor, mostly in French and German.

Patricia Gherovici, PhD
is a Board member, faculty and supervisor at Pulsion Institute. She is the recipient of the 2020 Sigourney Award for her clinical and scholarly work with Latinx and gender variant communities. She is co-founder and director of the Philadelphia Lacan Group and Associate Faculty, Psychoanalytic Studies Minor, University of Pennsylvania (PSYS), Honorary Member at IPTAR the Institute for Psychoanalytic Training and Research in New York City and Founding Member of Das Unbehagen. ​

Maria Eugênya Pacioni Gomes
holds a specialist degree in Material and Consumer Culture: Psychoanalytic Semiotics (ECA/USP 2022). Her research is on the subjective effects of consumer culture and digital accelerationism on society and communication, relying on concepts derived from psychoanalysis, philosophy and social studies.

Rodrigo Gonsalves
is a Doctor in Philosophy from the European Graduate School, works as a psychoanalyst, teacher and writer with several book chapters and articles on new lines of Marxist and Lacanian psychoanalysis. He is a member of numerous organizations (Latesfip, PSOPOL/IPUSP, the editorial committee Continental Thought and Theory and Editora Lavra Palavra) and Associate Editor of Jacobin Brasil.

Rob Horning
is a writer in New York, author of Internal Exile, a newsletter about art and technology, and former editor at New Inquiry and Real Life.

Howard B. Levine, MD
is a member of APSA, PINE, the Contemporary Freudian Society and Pulsion, on the faculty of NYU Post-Doc’s Contemporary Freudian Track, on the Editorial Board of the IJP and Psychoanalytic Inquiry, editor-in-chief of the Routledge Wilfred Bion Studies Book Series and in private practice in Brookline, Massachusetts. He is the author of Transformations de l’Irreprésentable (Ithaque 2019) and Affect, Representation and Language: Between the Silence and the Cry (Routledge 2022) and editor of The Post-Bionian Field Theory of Antonino Ferro (Routledge 2022) and The Freudian Matrix of Andre Green. Towards A Psychoanalysis For The 21st Century by André Green (Routledge/IPA 2023). His co-edited books include Unrepresented States and the Construction of Meaning (Karnac 2013); On Freud’s Screen Memories (Karnac 2014); The Wilfred Bion Tradition (Karnac 2016); Bion in Brazil. (Karnac 2017); Andre Green Revisited: Representation and the Work of the Negative (Karnac 2018); Covidian Life (2021 Phoenix); Psychoanalysis of the Psychoanalytic Frame Revisited: A New Look at Bleger’s Classical Work (Routledge/IPA, 2022); and Autistic Phenomena and Unrepresented States: Explorations in the Emergence of Self (Phoenix 2023)

David Lichtenstein, PhD
is Board Treasurer, a faculty member and supervisor at Pulsion Institute. He is a co-founder, faculty member, training, and supervising analyst at Apres-Coup Psychoanalytic Association. He is the past editor of DIVISION/Review: A Quarterly Psychoanalytic Forum. He is on the faculty of the NYU Postdoctoral Program in Psychoanalysis and the CUNY Graduate Center and an Adjunct Professor at the CUNY Doctoral Program in Clinical Psychology and at Adelphi University Derner Institute.

Paola Mieli, PhD
is a psychoanalyst practicing in New York City. She is the president of Après-Coup Psychoanalytic Association (New York), the Co-Chair of the section of Psychoanalysis in Psychiatry of the World Psychiatry Association (WPA), a member of Le Cercle Freudien (Paris) and of Espace Analytique (Paris). She is the author of numerous essays on psychoanalysis, art and culture. She is the Editor of the Sea Horse Imprint, Agincourt Press, New York.

Alysia Reiner
is an Award-Winning Actress, Producer, Activist, and Speaker. She is best known from her breakout performance as “FIG” for all 7 seasons of the Netflix Hit Series Orange Is The New Black – for which she took home a SAG Award; and from originating the role of Agent Sadie Deever in Ms. Marvel on Disney+.

Dominique Scarfone, MD
is a training and supervising analyst in the Canadian Psychoanalytic Society and Institute, a professor at the Department of Psychology and Psychiatry of the Université de Montréal and a faculty at Pulsion Institute. Among his recent books in English are Laplanche: An Introduction (2015) and The Unpast. The Actual Unconscious (2016). He authored several book chapters, numerous articles in international journals and is regularly invited to give lectures and seminars across Canada, the United States and Europe.

Mindy Seu
is a designer, educator, and technologist living in New York City. Seu is currently on the Faculty at Rutgers Mason Gross School of the Arts and Yale School of Art. Her latest publication, Cyberfeminism Index, was published in 2023.

Vaia Tsolas, PhD
is the co-founder and Board Chair of Pulsion, a training and supervising analyst at Columbia University, Psychoanalytic Center and on the faculty at Albert Einstein Medical School. She is the director and co-founder of RHPS. Dr Tsolas is the senior editor of A Psychoanalytic Exploration of the Contemporary Search for Pleasure: The Turning of the Screw (2023) and of The Psychoanalytic Exploration of the Body in Today’s World (2017).

Jamieson Webster, PhD
is a Board member, faculty and supervisor at Pulsion Institute and teaches at the New School for Social Research and supervises doctoral students in clinical psychology at CUNY, and is a member of the Institute for Psychoanalytic Training and Research. She is the author several books and writes regularly for Artforum, The New York Review of Books, The New York Times and Spike Art Quarterly.

This symposium continues Pulsion’s work on the drives, picking up the thread and continuing from last year’s focus on the erasure of the feminine and its consequences for the psychical and societal links. Questions that emerged in our clinic and were formulated in our clinical days back in June of 2023, around the disaffected contemporary subject, informed the theme of this year’s symposium on the drives and AI. One of these questions was about the disaffected, mechanical, artificial, robotic subjectivity we often encounter these days in our consulting rooms and how that aligns with the artificial intelligence that has recently invaded our everyday life with startlingly increasing magnitude. What can we psychoanalysts say, if anything at all, about AI when we know very well the danger of applying our analytic skills unwisely and omnipotently beyond the walls of our consulting rooms?

Pulsion’s mission is on the ethic of the borders; highlighting, mobilizing, and potentially pushing forward something new. Today we bring together a group of psychoanalysts, artists and social theorists under this enticing, but always fragile, premise.

Giacomo Contri, Lacan’s first Italian translator of Ecrit, said in one of his last meditations: “Thinking is feminine because it can be fertilized (by an external means): to this, an objection later arises. The objection is a threat of castration (a stupid but ferocious threat). This objection is the narcissism.
Thinking is not incomplete: there is just a question of precedence (of the means).”
Pulsion, as a new psychoanalytic Institute in NYC, aims to push forward Thinking as feminine “because it can be fertilized (by an external means).” What this articulates is the reckoning with one’s own limitations in wishing to receive from a partner in thinking. In our clinic of the disaffected subject, we ponder the consequences of hate directed towards thinking as feminine, highlighting the ways in which the consequences of such hate have never been profitable for either the psyche or culture. Contri adds that the hate of thinking as feminine attributes its cause to narcissism presenting itself when the subject denies the threat of castration.

I asked ChatGPT to tell me what Pulsion institute is:
I received the following:

“The Pulsion Institute is a renowned research and educational organization that focuses on the study of human behavior, cognition, and emotions. It is dedicated to advancing our understanding of various psychological and physiological aspects of individuals and their interactions within different contexts. The institute conducts cutting-edge research, offers workshops and seminars, and provides resources to professionals in the field of psychology. Its aim is to contribute to the development of practical applications and interventions that enhance well-being and personal growth.”

The word psychoanalysis is missing here, but this might not be a huge surprise for us. After all, psychoanalysis has been repudiated from its very beginning, since it ‘disturbed the sleep of the world’ by bringing sexuality into our awareness and, even more correctly, psychosexuality in the etiology of neurosis and furthermore, sexual difference with its shattering effects to our ego. In Andre Green’s paper (IJP, 1995) “What sexuality has to do with psychoanalysis”, he writes; “the baby will not only have to bother about his own sexual impulses, but also to wonder and to fantasize about the secret relationships of the two partners, which do exclude him in order to enjoy mutually their intimate pleasurable relationship.” In this conformation with the discontinuous existence of the object, of its periodic disappearance, alongside all other subsequent frustrations what we discover is thinking, the birth of desire and the preconditions for sublimation. This is our only defense against the ultimate limit that of mortality. Naively, therefore, I might ask, how can a machine ever replicate the human psyche, that which builds solely on the impossibility of ever answering satisfactorily the Sphinx on the riddle of death and sexuality, and in particular, of sexual difference?

Some might say that always, when civilization encounters something completely foreign, some stroke of human genius, some new invention that transcends human limits, we greet it with suspicion or even cataclysmic phantasies. This terror exacerbates our fears of extinction. We project onto it the jouissance of the unlimited, the Siren song that compelled Odysseus to plug his ears and be tied to the mast in order to bypass the threat, to continue his journey toward the Ithaca of human striving. To quote Margaret Atwood: “… the song that forces men to leap overboard even though they see the beached skulls … the song nobody knows because anyone who has heard it, is dead, and the others can’t remember.”

Just in today’s paper we learned that the EU agreed to the AI Act, a fledgling attempt to regulate AI in a manner that preserves its benefits while limiting its risks. The risk targets, according to today’s paper, are things such as spreading misinformation, eliminating jobs through AI automation and endangering national security systems.

Although the potential threats and benefits are supremely important topics in their own right, this symposium was designed to explore the intersection at which human subjectivity meets and lives in a world of artificial intelligence, and how it can be altered by the premise of no limitations, of no castration, of the repudiation of the feminine.

What can the drives, as a fundamental concept in Freud’s works, inform us about the very essence of what it means to be human? As Andre Green puts it “One day we’re going to have to accept that the most subversive part of Freud’s thought is that it upsets the theory of subjectivity by placing at its origin the myth of the drive, by making the subject into the subject of the drive … at times leading the drive, at other times being led by it.” As Thomas Ogden (IJP, 1992) articulated, this is a decentering in which the human subject is no longer its own agent.

As AGI is inspiring to reproduce, and through its sheer speed and unlimited capacity to remember, surpass everything the human mind can achieve, we might raise the question: can drive as it stands for a limit concept between the soma and the psyche, a decentering concept linked to negativity, mark this very essence of human subjectivity and that which cannot be replicated in a machine. It is in this very important distinction between instinct and drive that Freud positioned the main difference between animals and humans: how do we then, in his homage, begin to think of drives at the meeting point between AI and human subjectivity, especially in a world where humans aspire to be free of death and castration, and AGI is designed on a superior footing to human minds?

As psychoanalysts we know very well that our interventions with patients are indeterminant in their value, but rather can only be evaluated after we see the effects that they have on our patients’ discourse. Can we perhaps say that, similarly, AI and AGI can only be evaluated in the afterwardness, via the effects on human subjectivity and civilization at large? In Blood Meridian Cormac McCarthy wrote “… when God made man the devil was at his shoulder. A creature that can do anything. Make a machine. And a machine to make a machine. And evil that can run itself a thousand years, no need to tend it.” Will AI and its plausible successor, AGI, run themselves for a thousand years in denial of sexual difference, dominated by the repudiation of femininity, the wholesale denial of any limitations, beyond any anxieties of castration with no need for a thinking human subject at the wheel with the drives pulsing through every thought and turn?

J. Robert Oppenheimer said that “the optimist thinks this is the best of all possible worlds. The pessimist fears it is true.”

These are questions that evolved from last year’s symposium on the Repudiation of the Feminine and led us to today’s Symposium on AI and the Drives, which will point again towards something new, towards another iteration of Pulsion’s mission to remain positioned at the border.

Click here for Introductory Remarks, Vaia Tsolas, Clinical Days 2023 pdf format