7.5 CE Credits Offered for NYS-licensed psychologists, psychologists, social workers, and licensed psychoanalysts

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 overdetermination 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.

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Nadia Abu El-Haj, PhD • Marilia Aisenstein, PhD • Christine Anzieu-Premmereur, MD, PhD • Nicholas Bartlett, PhD • Sergio Benvenuto, PhD • Marisa Berwald, LCSW • Samuel Catlin, PhD • Marcus Coelen, PhD • Luca Flabbi, PhD • Patricia Gherovici, PhD • Peter Goodrich, PhD • Derek Hook, PhD • Howard Levine, PhD • David Lichtenstein, PhD • Rosalind Morris, PhD • Donald Moss, PhD • Vaia Tsolas, PhD • Jamieson Webster, PhD • Melissa Wright, PhD

SATURDAY MARCH 29, 2025

Hybrid Event
Location: Pulsion, 321W 44th street, Suite #510, NY, NY 10036

11am-1:15pm
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

SUNDAY MARCH 30, 2025

In-person Event
Location: Foundation for Community Psychoanalysis, 81 Court Street Floor 4, Brooklyn, NY 11201

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

11-12:30pm
ROUND TABLE
Unfree Associations: Academia, Groups, and the Law
Nadia Abu El-Haj, Nicholas Bartlett, Samuel Catlin, Peter Goodrich, Jerome Premmereur: presenters
Melissa Wright: moderator

12:30-2pm
Lunch

2:00-3:15pm
Free Interpretation?
Sergio Benvenuto: presenter
Patricia Gherovici: discussant

3:15-4pm
Muted Speech: Censorship in Psychoanalysis Today
Donald Moss, David Lichtenstein, and Luca Flabbi: presenters
Marisa Berwald: moderator

3:45-4pm
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

5:30pm
Cocktail hour