CV:
Refhan Balkan Öztürk is a psychiatrist and psychoanalyst . She is a member of PsikeIstanbul and IPA. She worked in various committees of Psike Istanbul including Psike Istanbul Executive Board, Scientific Committee and Admissions and Progression Committees. She continues her training and supervision studies as part of the association. She has presentations, articles, and has written book chapters on neurology, psychiatry and psychoanalysis. She works in private practice.
How to Root a Foreigner/Outsider ?
Abstract:
In order to settle down and then become rooted, one must first embark on a journey. It is sometimes a choice and sometimes an obligation to abandon where one is, and to move the body, the mind and the psyche to the new, to the unknown, to the memorylessness , perhaps to the point “0”; in other words, to migrate.
Psychoanalytic work aims to settle on the couch, on the frame, to take root in the soil of a new psychic functioning by migrating from the impasses in which the psyche is stuck while traveling through the deepest layers of the mind. With this rooting, one becomes more free, creative and capable of self-actualization. In order to take root, as Vilém Flusser says, we must first be able to uproot everything around us and freely create new rhetorics and thoughts.
Starting with Freud, many psychoanalysts have moved and continue to move. How did psychoanalysts, who sometimes stopped at one or more destinations along their journey, manage to be rooted? When we look at the changes in psychoanalytic theories and working practices after Freud, we see that almost all of the new rhetorics and theories were put forward by analysts who uprooted themselves from the land of their birth and moved to other lands. It would not be wrong to say that the desire for being rooted is the twin brother of creative thinking.
In this presentation, I will be discussing the psychic and mental journey that these migrated and rooted psychoanalysts go through, to create their theories and how the traces of their journey nourish the conceptualization of the new notions and concepts.