Sessions are free and the public is welcome.
The Freud conference will include panels featuring scholars from Yale, University of California at Berkeley, UCLA, Stanford, Duke, Chicago, Rice and Cornell, as well as from France, England and Eastern Europe. The participants will consider the status of psychoanalysis as a discipline and a discourse in contemporary culture, Brooks notes. Once solidly established within medical-therapeutic practices, psychoanalysis has increasingly been challenged by other forms of therapy. Philosophers, neuroscientists, psychologists, literary critics and feminist scholars have questioned its validity, some rallying to its defense, others rejecting it. Debates have raged over some of the most basic assumptions, including recovered memories, repression and the role of psychoanalysis within the legal system.