To Be Continued?...
Philosophy and Psychoanalysis Today

Part II
16–18 April 2024

Holden M. Rasmussen
Marisa Žele
Aleš Mendiževec
Voranc Kumar
Alejandro Cerda-Rueda
Arka Chattopadhyay
Boštjan Nedoh
Tadej Troha
Adrian Johnston
Mladen Dolar
Henrik Jøker Bjerre
Aleš Bunta
Adam Potts
Alenka Zupančič
Lorenzo Chiesa
Joan Copjec
Emily Laurent-Monaghan
Moritz Herrmann
Arsalan Reihanzadeh
Paris Lavidis
Nadia Bou Ali
Peter Klepec
Mohamed Tal
Frank Ruda
Ray Brassier


Part I
15–17 November 2023

Holden M. Rasmussen
Emily Laurent-Monaghan
Moritz Herrmann
Paris Lavidis
Vesna Liponik
Arsalan Reihanzadeh
Adrian Johnston
Jelica Šumič Riha
Tadej Troha
Boštjan Nedoh
Marisa Žele
Aleš Bunta
Peter Klepec
Alenka Zupančič
Lorenzo Chiesa


To Be Continued? ... 
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  • We can certainly say that the dialogue between philosophy and psychoanalysis, however prolix, has so far proved very difficult, ever since the latter’s inception. Is there such thing as a philosophy-psychoanalysis relationship? Or has it always been only empty speech? In that case, should it be continued?
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Adrian Johnston (University of New Mexico)


Carnal Knowledge:  Mark Solms and the Lacanian Unconscious


Mark Solms is the founder and leading figure of Anglo-American neuro-psychoanalysis.  During the 1980s and 1990s—this was a time when psychoanalysis and the neurosciences seemed locked in a winner-takes-all conflict in which analysis appeared doomed to lose—Solms began laying the foundations for theoretically and clinically interfacing Sigmund Freud’s legacy with biological investigations into the human central nervous system. Solms’s decades-long labors in this vein have culminated more recently in a grand theoretical synthesis bringing together psychoanalysis (particularly Freud’s own work and English-language traditions of post-Freudianism), neurobiology (especially affective neuroscience à la Jaak Panksepp), and philosophy (both Baruch Spinoza’s dual-aspect monism as well as recent and contemporary Analytic philosophy of mind as per David Chalmers and others).  This extremely rich and thought-provoking synthesis is most fully represented by his 2021 book The Hidden Spring:  A Journey to the Source of Consciousness.  In this intervention, I provide a critical Lacanian assessment of Solms’s recent work—this assessment includes appreciating certain surprising convergences between Lacanian and Solmsian metapsychologies—with a special focus on the differences between Lacan and Solms apropos conflicts between epistemophilic and epistemophobic tendencies agitating the subject of psychoanalysis.