Reading Room: A Talk with the Author

Lacan, Kris and the Psychoanalytic Legacy: The Brain Eater — Sergio Benvenuto  

Friday, October 25, 2024
6:30 PM – 8:00 PM (ET)

The case of “Professor Brain” was written about by three important psychoanalysts, in three different languages: in German in 1934 by his first analyst, Melitta Schmideberg; in English in 1948 by his second analyst, Ernst Kris; and in French by Jacques Lacan, who referred to it several times, starting in 1954, in his Seminars and his Écrits. “Professor Brain” was convinced he was forced to plagiarize the ideas of others, and for this reason was unable to publish his own research. His routine ordering in a restaurant of his favorite dish — fresh brains — understandably drew the attention of Kris and especially of Lacan, who would ultimately raise the question, through his reading of his predecessors’ clinical responses and his strenuous opposition to Kris’s Ego psychology, of who should be heir to Freud’s thought and practice.

Location: In-person in NYC and online via Zoom. 

Fee: Attendance is free and open to the public.

—

Sergio Benvenuto is a psychoanalyst practicing in Rome, and a philosopher, a researcher at Rome’s National Council for Scientific Research (CNR), and president of Italy’s Institute for Advanced Studies in psychoanalysis (ISAP). The founder and editor of the European Journal of Psychoanalysis, he is also a member of the Editorial Board of Psychoanalytic Discourse and American Imago. His many publications include, in English, What Are Perversions? (Karnac, 2016) and Conversations with Lacan (Routledge, 2020).