Book Presentation

Then and Now: On the Crowd, the Subject, and the Collective 

Betty Bernardo Fuks, Paola Mieli, Rosalind Morris

Saturday, November 16, 2024
10:30 AM – 1:00 PM  (ET)

This collection of essays offers some novel reflections on the nature of the crowd, the collective, and the subject’s relation to the social link. Prompted mainly by Freud’s Group Psychology and Analysis of the Ego, the authors analyze crucial issues ranging from La Boétie’s late Renaissance theory of voluntary servitude to the early 20th-century Europe’s collapsed empires and revolutionary uprisings, to progressive South Africans’ turn to segregationism, to Bolsonaro’s adoption of Nazi rhetoric. How, in today’s climate of individual freedom and delusion of autonomy — a promise animating both progressive identity discourses and racist, supremacist, and totalitarian discourses — are we to relaunch a bond of community that respects differences and takes responsibility for social well-being? Freud's study of the nature of the superego and Lacan’s articulation of the divided subject may offer us a path toward new forms of the relation between subject and collective.

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

Fee: Attendance is free and open to the public.

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Betty Bernardo Fuks is a psychoanalyst practicing in Rio de Janeiro. She holds a PhD in Communication and Culture (Federal University of Rio de Janeiro) and she is Professor in the Postgraduate Program in Psychoanalysis, Health, and Society at University Veiga de Almeida (Rio de Janeiro). The author of numerous articles on psychoanalysis, her books include: Freud e a cultura and Freud e a judeidade, published in English as Freud and the Invention of Jewishness, O Homem Moisés e a religião monoteísta, o desvelar de um assassinato.

Paola Mieli is a psychoanalyst practicing in New York City. She is the president of Après-Coup Psychoanalytic Association (New York), a member of Le Cercle Freudien (Paris), of Espace Analytique (Paris), and the Co-Chair of the section of Psychoanalysis in Psychiatry of the World Psychiatry Association (WPA). She is the author of numerous essays on psychoanalysis and on culture.

Rosalind C. Morris is an anthropologist and cultural critic. She is Professor of Anthropology at Columbia University. Her books include Unstable Ground: The Lives, Deaths, and Afterlives of Gold in South Africa; The Returns of Fetishism: Charles de Brosses and the Afterlives of an Idea; and Accounts and Drawing from Underground, with William Kentridge. She is the author of many essays on art, social media, and politics.