Love anxiety and the ‘Anti-Oedipal Condition’:
About the Psychic Terror Caused by a Potential Catastrophic Change –
A Psychoanalytical Investigation of Heinrich von Kleist’s Penthesilea
and a Clinical Case
Angela Mauss-Hanke
Saturday, 29 May 2010; 17.30
The conference focuses on the enormous psychodynamic difficulties that have to be overcome when a person notices that a growing feeling of desire is in the air of his/her inner self, which would cause an inner ‘catastrophic change’ (Bion) in order to be lived out. This is the case when a traumatic experience has caused a damage of those feelings that are needed for the psyche to progress towards a love relationship. These difficulties are being investigated through an analysis of Kleist’s tragedy Penthesilea and a clinical case. The cardinal point of the tragedy as well of the patient Miss May turns out to be the psychic terror caused by the basic conflict between identity-guarding rejection and identity-changing attraction and growing of libido, both being expressed in an enormously strong anxiety to love an to know which makes it impossible (Penthesilea) or very difficult (Miss May) to leave their psychic retreat which the author describes as an anti-oedipal condition. The individual is extremely frightened to leave his/her pseudo-autonomous position and is therefore fighting against entering an inner ‘no-man’s-land’ between existing preoedipal relationships and a not (yet) realized love relationship on an oedipal level in the future. Kleist’s tragedy as well as the life history of the patient, who came to analysis after her sister’s suicide, describe a universal human fight which can be found in all individual and collective enemy making: a fear-driven power, which by all means wants to prevent the integration of a former incomprehensible experience tries to apply its logic to the whole organism (of him-/herself, a group, a nation) and by doing so tries to hinder its transformation, which at the same time is crucial for the organism in order to survive.
Angela Mauss-Hanke was born in 1960. Before and while studying psychology she was a manager for American, French and German contemporary jazz ensembles. She is a psychoanalyst, training group analyst and child analyst (German Psychoanalytic Association). She is also a lecturer, supervisor and training therapist of the psychoanalytic IPA-institutes in Munich and Cologne. She works in private practice near Munich. Mauss-Hanke is the editor of the German Annual of the International Journal of Psychoanalysis (IJP), and a member of the European editorial board of the IJP; member of the group of moderators for the European CCM-project; head of the group analytic department at the Akademie für Psychoanalyse in Munich. She is the author of psychoanalytical papers and lectures, mostly about topics relevant to society, i.e. “The Killing of the So-called Handicapped in Germany and the Nuremberg Medical Trial 1946/47” (2000); on Sept. 11th “The Low Voice of Sanity” (2004) and about revenge “Revenge Doesn’t Know its Bounds” (2009).
PARTICIPATION: The conference is open to psychoanalysts, candidates, psychologists, psychiatrists, psychological counselors, social workers, psychiatric assistants and psychology and psychological counseling undergraduate and graduate students.
LANGUAGE: English with consecutive translation to Turkish.
VENUE: Psike İstanbul Center, Valikonağı Cad. Süleyman Nazif Sk. Park Apt.
No: 13/12 Kat: 4 Nişantaşı 34371 İstanbul Türkiye
CONFERENCE FEES
• Psike İstanbul members and guest members: 40 TL • Non-members: 50 TL
• Students, assistants and Psike İstanbul member candidates: 30 TL
Fees will be collected upon entrance. Please make reservations via email to psikeistanbul@gmail.com or psikanaliz@psikeistanbul.org
