Description: : This is a hybrid event with Marilyn Charles, Carol Owens, and Eve Watson, in-person, offering a scary psychoanalytic night at the movies on June 21st. They each consider how 21st century horror films and television work to represent what is uncanny, unassimilable, and unconscious and ponder whether the horror genre any longer really scares us to bits and if there's a point to it. The evening’s talks, which will focus on the psychoanalytic and cultural stakes at work in Stranger Things (2016-), Poor Things (2023), and A Quiet Place (2018) as well as other films, will be followed by audience discussion and Q&A to assess what's going on in representations of contemporary things that go bump...
- Things that Go Bump: Encounters with the Real on Screen - Marilyn Charles
- The Hauntology of the Monster: Remembering, repeating and not working-through - Carol Owens
- A Quiet Place: Where the Dead Do Not Die - Eve Watson
All welcome to this in-person event which offers zoom attendance for those who cannot attend in person. Detailed description of the three talks are below.
Marilyn Charles, PhD, ABPP is a psychologist and psychoanalyst at the Austen Riggs Center; Chair, Association for the Psychoanalysis of Culture and Society (APCS); and Scholar of the British Psychoanalytic Council. Affiliations include Chicago Center for Psychoanalysis; Universidad de Monterrey; Harvard Medical School. Research interests include creativity, reflective function and the intergenerational transmission of trauma. Marilyn is also an artist, a poet, and a writer. Books include: Working with Trauma: Lessons from Bion and Lacan; Psychoanalysis and Literature: The Stories We Live; and Introduction to Contemporary Psychoanalysis. Forthcoming: Trauma, Identity, and Development: A Clinician’s Guide.
Carol Owens is a psychoanalytic clinician and scholar. A convenor of the Irish Psychoanalytic film forum (IPFF), she has co-edited, and written in Psychoanalysis and the Small Screen: the year the cinemas closed (Owens & Meehan O'Callaghan, Routledge, 2023), and is the corresponding editor on the PCSReview section of Psychoanalysis, Culture and Society (thepcsreview@gmail.com).
Eve Watson is a psychoanalyst, lecturer and writer. She is course director of the Freud Lacan institute, Dublin and editor of Lacunae, the International Journal for Lacanian Psychoanalysis. Books include Clinical Encounters in Sexuality: Psychoanalytic Practice and Queer Theory (2017, w/Noreen Giffeny) and Critical Essays on the Drive: Lacanian Theory and Practice (2024, w/Dan Collins).
TALK DETAILS
Things that Go Bump: Encounters with the Real on Screen - Marilyn Charles
Bion invites us to shift away from the particular stories that pull our attention to try to recognize the patterns at the core. In this way, he recognizes how myth has held constellations of human meaning and being in ways that allow us to shift from the individual elements to their interrelationships to the larger whole. In current times, when our relationships to classical myths that accrued through religion and culture have waned in the collective mind, the small and large screen have come to reflect our current cultural concerns. In these media, we find representations of the fears and struggles facing us all. In this current moment of crisis, we see how young adult programming has taken on concerns that feel apocalyptic, as the consequences of years of blind greed and disregard come due. We see dramas in which characters either face death, as in Flanagan’s Midnight Club or break through from this dimension into another, as in Matt and Ross Duffer’s Stranger Things, enacting the wish that, like the phoenix, we might rise from the ashes and be reborn anew. On the larger screen, we also see these themes of death, destruction, and the possibility of transformation playing out. Whereas, in Von Trier’s Melancholia, two sisters confront the ramifications of their own willful blindness as they face the end of the world, in Lanthimos; Poor Things, a young suicide is afforded a new possibility of life through the very life she had thought to terminate. In these dramas, there is a depressive turn that becomes the vehicle for transformation, either in line with the reality principle or seeking to move beyond, a familiar wish that likely keeps us caught in what seems to be an inexorable journey towards extinction.
The Hauntology of the Monster: Remembering, repeating and not working-through - Carol Owens
In his ground-breaking study and theory of monsters Jeffrey Cohen claims that monsters can be pushed to the farthest margins of geography and discourse, hidden away at the edges of the world and in the forbidden recesses of our mind, but they always return. This tendency to “always return” we recognise in psychoanalysis in at least two ways. First there is the return of the repressed, in the Freudian sense, in dreams, symptoms, bungled actions and slips of speech, and in Lacan’s definition as the return of real (always to the same place). Secondly, there is the return in the form of the repetition. What is repeated is taken seriously in the psychoanalytic clinic for how it figures in the analysand’s libidinal economy and jouissance. When we use theories from psychoanalysis to interpret a cultural product such as a film, we can also consider what is being repeated, and why, in the various iterations and remakes (make-overs) of a particular cultural object or figure. We only have to think of the manifold takes on the vampire and the zombie in this light.
In this presentation, I want to review some of Cohen’s ideas on the Monster applied to Jorgio Lanthimos’s recent film Poor Things and consider what kind of return is mobilised by Bella Baxter as one of the latest returns of Frankenstein’s monster. The film is the penultimate of the 65 versions to date from the original 1931 production (the latest is Lisa Frankenstein released just a couple of months ago). In order to think about what is happening in Poor Things that warrants yet another return, I will bring in Mark Fisher’s use (of Derrida’s concept) of hauntology. Can it be that when it comes to monsters there is nothing new under the sun? In this way, Bella is nothing other than a commodity of the ‘nostalgia industry’, a symptom of our failure to mourn what is lost to us culturally (not then, a post-modern Promethean). Or is there yet the possibility to interpret what is slightly different in each version of the monster, and therefore Bella’s difference, as that which correlates to a symptom in time and culture that cannot be otherwise expressed?
A Quiet Place: Where the Dead Do Not Die - Eve Watson
This talk explores the 2018 film, A Quiet Place, which is a ground-breaking film that offers a re-imagining of a post-capitalist world, one that is noiseless, idyllic, and terrifying. Playing on the elementary terror of catastrophically re-encountering the object-voice as pure jouissance, the film asks us to consider how important sound is and offers it as both desirable and deadly. In this noiseless world where even children are fair game to the alien creatures, the unmourned walk the earth and eat all before them. The film in effect draws attention to the problem of insufficient mourning, a postmodern problem in our world of noise and busyness which doesn’t allow for it, at least not properly. The family in the film attempts to bring a child in to occupy the place of their un-mourned departed child. The entire film could be seen as a kind of terrible procrastination that has ensued as a result of this incomplete process, everyone is waiting for something to happen. The consequences of this are very serious and culminate in a sacrificial point that opens out to emptiness and real loss. This allows for separating from it, and for cathartic soundings of irretrievable, irrecuperable absence and loneliness.
