Northwestern Events Calendar

Jan
26
2015

SHC Klopsteg Lecture: KATJA GUENTHER

When: Monday, January 26, 2015
4:00 PM - 5:30 PM CT

Where: University Hall, Hagstrum Room, UH 201, 1897 Sheridan Road, Evanston, IL 60208 map it

Audience: Faculty/Staff - Student - Public - Post Docs/Docs - Graduate Students

Contact: Natasha O Dennison   (847) 491-3525

Group: Science in Human Culture Program

Category: Lectures & Meetings

Description:

KATJA GUENTHER
History, Princeton University

TITLE Localization and Its Discontents: A Genealogy of Psychoanalysis and the Neuro Disciplines

Description:  This talk will offer a historical approach to the relationship between the “psy” and “neuro” disciplines, in particular psychoanalysis and neurology/neurosurgery. Despite their opposition, they both trace intellectual and practical roots back to the same “neuropsychiatry” (Hirnpsychiatrie) that was dominant in the German-speaking world in the late nineteenth century. The analysis of the relationship between neurology and psychoanalysis is guided by their common engagement with the principles of localization and what is best termed “connectivity”—principles of major importance in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century medicine. My historical investigation not only reframes the relationship between psychoanalysis and the “neuro” disciplines, providing resources for thinking about how they developed as independent fields, and shedding new light on their theory and practice. It also offers a new perspective on the contemporary brain sciences. I suggest that recent developments in neuroscience can be read as a re-articulation of the relationship between localization and connectivity. An understanding of this new articulation helps reframe anxieties about the place of neuroscience in contemporary academic culture, and in particular in the humanities.

 

Bio: Professor Guenther’s research focuses on the history of subjectivity and the ways in which modern ideas of the self have been constituted through the interplay of cultural and scientific norms. Her book project, Localization and Its Discontents – A Genealogy of Psychoanalysis and the Neuro Disciplines, c. 1850-1950, explores divergent practices and shared theoretical assumptions within the medicine of mind and brain. Re-conceptualizing the reflex as a clinical and hermeneutic principle, she shows a common heritage for such diverse specialties as neurology, neurosurgery, psychiatry and psychoanalysis, and provides new ways for thinking about the relationship between mind and brain in modernity.

reception to follow

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