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UCL Psychoanalysis Unit Webinar, Presented by Shaul Bar-Haim
30 June 2022, 2:00 pm–3:30 pm
'The language of the ‘inward’: The 'maternal' as a site of hidden emotions in 1930s Britain'
This event is free.
Event Information
Open to
- All
Availability
- Yes
Cost
- Free
Organiser
-
Psychoanalysis Unit
About this Event
We are pleased to announce Shaul Bar-Haim will be presenting a paper on 'The Language of the 'inward': The 'maternal' as a site of hidden emotions in 1930s Britain.
The presentation will be chaired by Liz Allison, following which there will be time for thoughts and questions on the paper and its topics.
It is also possible to attend in-person at the UCL Psychoanalysis Unit (1-19 Torrington Place), however please note that only a limited number of spaces is available.
About this Webinar
Emotions scholars are often reluctant to assume the existence of people's interiority, psychic reality, or indeed unconscious' feelings. For example, historians working under the influence of new materialistic frameworks in the study of emotions very often tend to focus mainly on ‘images’ of expressive emotions, texts in which emotions are being discussed more explicitly, or other primary sources where emotions can be easily identified and fit into a descriptive historical narrative. In topographical terms, emotions scholars tend to deny the hermeneutic demands that entail discourses assuming ‘inwardness’ of the psyche.
The main aim of my paper is to show how psychoanalysis can still be useful today for locating what I call 'sites of hidden emotions'. I will demonstrate some of these theoretical suggestions by drawing on one case study: the discourse of the 'maternal' in 1930s Britain. During that time, the fascist crisis in Europe, and the popularity of new 'maternalist' strands in psychoanalysis, turned motherhood into a psychosocial domain of anxieties, phantasies and desires – or, as I will argue, a 'site of hidden emotions'.
The exploration of this case study will enable me to highlight the importance of preserving the interest in what poet Denise Riley called 'feeling of private inwardness' in an age that is dominated by neuroscience and other materialistic approaches to the mind.
Shaul Bar-Haim Biography
Shaul Bar-Haim is a Senior Lecturer at the Department of Sociology, University of Essex. His research focuses on the intellectual and cultural history of psychoanalysis, and related disciplines, in twentieth-century Britain. He is the author of The Maternalists: Psychoanalysis, Motherhood, and the British Welfare State (Penn University Press, 2021); and the co-editor of Wild Analysis: From the Couch to Cultural and Political Life (Routledge/New Library of Psychoanalysis, 2021).