Barbarians at the Gate! Or: Healing the Past – The Secret Birth of Intersubjectivity.

Cutting Edges: Analytical Psychology

A Series of Talks initiated by Dr. Gottfried M. Heuer

 Barbarians at the Gate! Or: Healing the Past –

The Secret Birth of Intersubjectivity.

Tuesday 28 May 2013 – Starting at 8.15 p.m. at AJA

Speaker: Dr. Gottfried M. Heuer

Following Oscar Wilde’s, “The one duty we owe to history is to rewrite it”, the historian’s endeavour may well be likened to that of the psychoanalyst: by re-membering the past, we create a different one with the intention to heal. US historian Edmund Jacobitti speaks of “Composing useful pasts”. Yet, just as changes are resisted in analytic work to protect a status quo, the rewriting of history also meets with resistance. Appropriately, historian Antony Beevor suggests “a mischief of historians” as the collective noun . . . More provocatively, Erich Fromm called the historiography of psychoanalysis “Stalinistic”: just as dissidents became non-persons in the Soviet Union, numerous analysts were “purged” from the records. A history that returns the repressed thus fulfils a healing function. I shall focus on Otto Gross (1877 – 1920), initially highly praised, later branded a dissident whose name neither Freud nor Jung wanted us to know — and who to this day provokes more orthodox historians to expletives (hence my title) — and some of the important ways in which he influenced the development of analytic theory and clinical practice.

Biography:  Dr. Gottfried M. Heuer,  AJA Training–psychoanalyst and –supervisor, Neo-Reichian bodypsychotherapist, in clinical practice for 40 years in West-London; independent scholar: over 65 published papers in the main analytical journals. His books include 10 congress– and symposium–proceedings for the International Otto Gross Society (www.ottogross.org/); Sacral Revolutions. Reflecting on the Work of Andrew Samuels and Sexual Revolutions: Psychoanalysis, History and the Father (Routledge 2010, 2011).

Advance booking is essential as space is limited

Admission: £6.00 for AJA members, £ 12.00 for non-members

– please post cheque to  Association of Jungian Analysts: Flat 3, 7 Eton Avenue, London NW3 3EL

 Tel:  020 7794 8711 – email: aja@dircon.co.uk