Wednesday 3 December 2014

Open Seminar (Colchester Campus)

‘Psychoanalysis, Developmental Psychology, and Neuroscience: Consilience over the First Year of Life’

Professor Jim Hopkins (Kings College London)

Abstract: Recent findings in developmental psychology (particularly attachment research), as well as new work in neuroscience, show a rapidly increasing consilience with Psychoanalysis. Neuroscience now provides accounts of what Freud called the drives and the primary and secondary processes that cohere closely with psychoanalytic theory, and also with milestones in psychological development, particularly in the regulation of conflicting emotions, that can be observed over the first year. These convergences suggest that Freud’s theories, like those of Darwin, may gain decisive support from disciplines further to those in which they were initially framed.

Jim Hopkins is Visiting Professor in the Psychoanalysis Unit at UCL and Emeritus Reader in Philosophy at King’s College London, and was Kohut Visiting Professor of Social Thought at the University of Chicago for 2008.  He was the editor, with Richard Wollheim, of Philosophical Essays on Freud (CUP) and with Anthony Savile of Psychoanalysis Mind and Art (Blackwell). Many of his essays, including recent work on psychoanalysis, attachment, evolution, interpretation, consciousness, and neuroscience, are available at: http://www.jimhopkins.org

Open Seminars all take place in room 4SB.5.3 from 5.00 – 6.30pm.
All Welcome
T 01206 873640  E cpseo@essex.ac.uk   www.essex.ac.uk/cps