Freud often made analogies between “infantile sexual theories” and metaphysical systems; he often made analogies between on the one hand ways or forms of thinking in neurosis, perversion, and psychosis and on the other hand forms of thinking in philosophy, science, religion, and art.

This workshop will follow in Freud’s footsteps guided by Lacan’s clarifying distinction between clinical symptoms and clinical structures. The clinical structures in psychoanalysis describe how the subject addresses the Other, i.e., different forms of this address. This form of address articulates a theory of the subject and the social. In analogy to this, the question is whether the structural distinctions can serve to analyze different theories of the social. Are there neurotic, psychotic and perverse theories of the social?

What is a child? What is our understanding of childhood today? I will try to seek out an answer to this question by looking at dominant but – to varying degrees overlooked – iconic metaphors in our visual culture today as they appear in relation to children and in images of children. These visual metaphors will then be subjected to a psychoanalytically inspired ideology critique of visual culture’s production of the child – and specifically the child as innocent. The main concerns of this ideology critique will be the way we see – or rather repress – the interconnections between child, adult and sexuality. In this I’ll (if you’ll pardon the metaphors) touch upon the thorny questions of intergenerational sexual relationships and pedophilia.

Freud often made analogies between “infantile sexual theories” and metaphysical systems; he often made analogies between on the one hand ways or forms of thinking in neurosis, perversion, and psychosis and on the other hand forms of thinking in philosophy, science, religion, and art. This workshop will follow in Freud’s footsteps guided by Lacan’s clarifying distinction between clinical symptoms and clinical structures. The clinical structures in psychoanalysis describe how the subject addresses the Other, i.e., different forms of this address. This form of address articulates a theory of the subject and the social. In analogy to this, the question is whether the structural distinctions can serve to analyze different theories of the social. Are there neurotic, psychotic and perverse theories of the social?

In Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego, Sigmund Freud maintains that ‘identification’ and ‘the object relation’ are the main factors in the constitution of any social group. But major questions are left unanswered in Freud’s article: Is one factor more primary than the other? How do the two factors exactly relate? And is it at all possible to uphold a distinction between them? The following presentation attempts to answer these questions by reviewing a number of key Freudian texts. This is based on the belief that any psychoanalytically inspired sociology must be able, at least, and at last, to read Freud à la lettre.

Amy Chua’s recent book Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother has aroused strong emotions both West and East. In order to account for this fact, the paper explores the Orientalist fantasies about Chinese education and, specifically, about Chinese pedagogical authority, offered by Chua to the fascinated Western gaze. The paper discusses  how these fantasies fit – and, perhaps, do not fit – into the long Western tradition of Orientalist fantasies. Above all, however, it focuses on the ways these fantasies address and amplify feelings of fear and envy peculiar to a global knowledge economy, in which competition increasingly takes place in terms of education and where the Chinese are suspected to possess the winning formula (PISA etc.). Finally, the paper discusses how Chua’s book achieves this effect by