CFP

CALL FOR PAPERS

Affiliated Psychoanalytic Workgroups and Lacan Salon present the Fourteenth Annual Conference of APW

ON LOVE

Vancouver, BC, 30 July – 1 August 2015

Love calls everyone of us, either to celebrate its wonders or to lament its absence, to praise its beauty or to denounce its complex nature.

In Civilization and Its Discontents (1930), Freud figures love (Eros) in its opposition to civilization. He states that community life relies on “a two-fold foundation: the compulsion to work . . . and the power of love” (SE 21, 101). But although love is a foundation of civilization, a “rift between them seems unavoidable” (SE 21, 103).

For his part, Lacan first approaches love as one of three human passions, alongside hate and ignorance. Starting from his famous maxim, “love is giving what you don’t have” (Seminar 8, 121), Lacan provides a number of figures of love in the form of aphorisms: love is a gift; “one knows nothing of love without hate” (Seminar 20, 91); love as always reciprocal; love is wall, l’amur, between the sexes; and “Only love allows jouissance to condescend to desire” (Seminar 10, 179).

Given Freud’s and Lacan’s formulations on love, a number of important questions arise:

  • How do we understand Eros as a model of happiness for the modern couple?
  • How does love intervene in the analytic setting?
  • How do we conceptualize love as a social bond? What else can be said of love in our currenttimes?
  • What are the manifestations of kinds of love other than Eros—philia, caritas, storge, agape—in the analytic, social, and political settings?
  • What is the status of love as transference?
  • What are the relations between love and sexual enjoyment?
  • Do subjective positions (male/female) involve divergent positions from which to love?
  • What dialectics among love and fantasy or love and desire are manifested in the clinic?
  • What is the status of the object—the phallus, the other, object a—in current love constellations?
  • Is love sublimation? Or is sublimation a transformation of love into something else?

This conference invites submissions of papers of 3,000 words that reflect on these or other topics related to love. Papers should have a clinical or clinical-theoretical focus, but we will also accept a select number of papers on socio-cultural and political topics. Papers should be submitted to dcollins716@verizon.net and/or to presidentlacansalon@gmail.com. Submissions should consist of a 250 word abstract, with title, and contact information. Please submit your paper proposals by February 28, 2016. You will be informed if your paper is accepted by the end of March, and details of the conference schedule will be announced at the end of May.

For details and updates go to http://www.apwonline.org and http://www.lacansalon.com.