Stillpoint Spaces Berlin

A new way to engage with psychoanalysis in Berlin

[psychoanalysis-berlin-blog]

Stillpoint Spaces Berlin together with The Zurich Laboratory presents our first international book release. The book is titled Brandpsycho - Four essays on de:branding and is written about our counselor and therapist Max Jakob Lusensky. Join our release event 22 of January 2015. More information on www.brand-psycho.com

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‪#‎derversuch‬. Only one wee away!

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http://www.derversuch.com

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Der Versuch: Stillpoint Spaces Forum 2015

Your invitation to a three day experiment in re-kindling the spirit of psychoanalysis together with Stillpoint Spaces

Stillpoint Spaces and The Zurich Laboratory invites you to a ‘Versuch’, an experiment in re-kindling the spirit of psychoanalysis before the age of standardization, medicalization and commodification has taken its complete toll on a poetic science. 

During a three-day open forum, members of Stillpoint Spaces growing international community will be sharing their unfinished works, their incomplete ideas, loose ends and passions. Together we muse around psychoanalysis not only as a medical practice but as art and a cultural perspective. The main themes during the two days of presentations will be: 'The challenged Self' & 'Frontiers in depth psychology’s thought and applications'. This will take place in Berlin. The city in where psychoanalysis was living as most wildly and freely in the early years of the 20th century with analysts and social activists such as Otto Gross, Melanie Klein, Karl Abraham, Erich Neumann and Wilhelm Reich working in the city. 

[psychoanalysis-berlin-blog]

Stillpoint Spaces and The Zurich Laboratory invites you to a ‘Versuch’, an experiment in re-kindling the spirit of psychoanalysis before the age of standardization, medicalization and commodification has taken its complete toll on a poetic science. Der Versuch: Stillpoint Spaces Forum 2015 RSVP During a three-day open forum, members of Stillpoint Spaces growing international community will be sharing their unfinished works, their incomplete ideas, loose ends and passions. Together we muse around psychoanalysis not only as a medical practice but as art and a cultural perspective. The main themes during the two days of presentations will be: 'The challenged Self' & 'Frontiers in depth psychology’s thought and applications'. This will take place in Berlin. The city in where psychoanalysis was living as most wildly and freely in the early years of the 20th century with analysts and social activists such as Otto Gross, Melanie Klein, Karl Abraham, Erich Neumann and Wilhelm Reich working in the city. The forum will, in addition to seminars and workshops, include a Psychoanalysis on the street field trip, walking in the footprints of the cities psychoanalytic past as we explore together the future of this rich tradition. The lectures and seminars will be held at Stillpoint Spaces in Berlin at Hobrechtstrasse 66. 

[psychoanalysis-berlin-blog]

Berlin Psychoanalytic – A monthly reading group

A monthly reading of psychoanalysis and culture from the Weimar Era’s Berlin. We meet once a month at Stillpoint Spaces Berlin. We read central texts related to psychoanalysis as it was taught, practiced, and lived by psychoanalysts in Berlin during the Weimar Era. We will read and explore psychoanalytical texts by classical analysts such as Wilhelm Reich, Otto Fenichel, Edith Södergren, Karl Abraham, Erich Fromm, Otto Gross and Karen Horney.

The hope is that this reading will teach us about what psychoanalysis was before it went in exile, that is, before it became an émigré science and the Berlin psychoanalytic clinic was overtaken by the Nazi-regime.

This group will meet monthly and you will be expected to read parts of the literature in between meetings. Some prior understanding of psychoanalytical key concepts is expected but you don’t need to be a practitioner.

https://www.facebook.com/groups/berlinpsychoanalytic/

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Therapy in Contemporary Society Workshop with Jungian Psychoanalyst Andrew Samuels & Dance Movement Psychotherapist Sissy Lykou.

You can partake in the workshop either via our free online stream or by visiting Stillpoint Spaces in Berlin.

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Last week I received a letter that brought me to my knees and knocked the breath from my chest. It was a letter from an old client of mine from some years ago... by Estelle Hoy

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How might depth psychologies influence or even create new social networks that incorporate psychological and emotional ways of being?

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Join our reading circle about Lacan & Language!

more info; www.stillpointberlin.com

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Thank you very much for being part of the Introduction to our Lacan & Language Reading Circle yesterday! It was a very thoughtful night in which we talked about what Lacan could say about our own feelings and ideas that we have from ourselves and others. We hope this is only the beginning of a fun and open exploration around Lacanian theory and practice. We are looking forward to seeing you all next Monday!

Stillpoint Spaces Berlin

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Opening Speech:  For the launch of the Berlin space

by Evangelos Tsempelis 

It’s wonderful to see you all here tonight. Looking at the room filled with people, I can’t help but think of a whole series of moments that have preceded this opening. It’s some of these moments that I would like to try to trace, to share and to better understand.

I remember two analysts-in training regulars of a Cafe at Zurich’s Helvetia Platz sharing their angst about their chosen profession sensing how deep in the hole they had found themselves as it was becoming painfully evident that the world into which they were to graduate was a very different one than that which their training institutes were addressing. What is most striking about this memory is a prevailing sense of conviction enmeshed with an atmosphere of doom. As if the only path worth pursuing, the only path available, were a path leading to an impasse…

I remember a few years later a group of friends and colleagues in Zurich trying to address that same sense of impasse as they aimed to open up new windows to the world outside of their jungian institutional enclave; there was the first “street event” at a local avant garde gallerie on the red light district of Zurich to talk from a psychoanalytic point of view about what else, money! People from all walks of life filled that room to listen about money as a psychological symbol of the spirit or (more likely) to drink a glass of free spirit! In retrospect, I recognize that this small event came with a great sense of exhilaration, the exhilaration of having addressed/ broken a taboo. Thereafter, it was as if a great source of energy had been released. New initiatives sprung and precious partnerships were forged leading to the launching of the stillpointspaces online platform, the forging of its wonderful community of counselors from around the world and a bit later the launch of Stillpointspaces Berlin.

But, addressing taboos has come not only with exhilaration and the rewards of creative energy. It would also come part and parcel with paying a certain price. A price often measured in terms of a growing distance from former friends and colleagues or in terms of an inward struggle to fend off doubt. It seems that many of the existing structures of our field are predicated on the notion of retreat. As some of you know, it is sort of a mantra in the Jungian world that the first half of one’s life is to be dedicated in building a career and socially adapting and it is only after middle age that one is called to attend to one’s soul. In that vein, the work of individuation entails a protracted phase of withdrawal from society in order to address demands exerted by one’s interior realm of existence. Here the emphasis is not on adapting to what is exterior, but rather on recognizing, relating and integrating what has often laid dormant and undervalued in one’s interior life. Those who have had analytical training in Zurich or elsewhere can attest to the uniqueness of that experience. In some ways, it is a remarkable feat, a delicious historical oddity, that analytical training institutes still exist today. In retreat from one’s former life one steps into a 19th century world resistant to innovation, skeptical of any radical change, apprehensive of haste. It is as if all the values that are held of supreme importance in the outside world are here almost reversed. Against this background, I remember a characteristic anecdote of Jung greeting one of his clients who had been a prominent member of the business community with the following line: “So, what success have you recently suffered from?”. The desire to retreat and remain retreated becomes all the more prevalent at precarious times such as the ones we seem to be living in Europe. At the same time, the demands for adaptation and pragmatism are so harshly and urgently placed on us that the retreat and the softer values that it may reflect can seem all the more elusive to attain or irrelevant to strive for so that one may be better off forgetting all about it in the first place.

The challenge of relating to the retreat and its values while engaging with a world of affairs is one that we have faced again and again since we embarked with the Stillpoint idea. A recent example was when we met with a PR agency to discuss the promotion of the online platform. After we introduced ourselves and our project we were told that if we wanted to get the story to the press we would have to make it bare-bones simple for journalists with a short attention span. For that reason the story would have to be embellished with statistical references and linked to some growing trend! This small episode was one more reminder of the strain implicit in the attempt to exit the retreat, while not relinquishing its importance.

Walter Kaufmann uses, I think beautifully, the term “poetic science” to describe psychoanalysis as a non-materialistic, non-mathematical science. Reclaiming and refashioning room for a body of theory and practice which examines with scientific rigor, yet with poetic imagination, the terrible questions of life, love, work and suffering is more pertinent than ever today even if there is no statistical data or growing trend to support such a claim. Especially so when psychoanalysis, if not psychology writ large, has had to accommodate to the harsh realities of medicalization and professional standardization dictated by ruthless economic and institutional realities that continue to shape our times. One is warned to be prudent and mindful of the dangers that lurk in acts of naïve heroism knowing that psychological growth often entails the sacrifice of a heroic attitude that serves the wrong principles in one’s life. Yet, my closing thoughts wonder to a quote by James Baldwin that speaks about heroism as much as about remembering and forgetting in ways that directly address what continues to be at stake. James Baldwin was an american writer in self-exile; he was 24 when he arrived in Paris with $40 in his pocket in 1948 to escape from racism and to save himself as a writer. As I think of writers in exile, I think of analysts in exile and universities in exile and my heart and mind drifts to the hard work that lies ahead for all those who strive to find their place in the world without giving in to the scylla of mad remembering nor to the harivdis of mad forgetting. My hope is that here in Berlin some may find support and community as they embark to explore and define their own unique way of being-in-the-world…

“The question [says Baldwin] is banal but one of the real troubles with living is that living is so banal. Everyone, after all, goes the same dark road – and the road has a trick of being most dark, most treacherous, when it seems most bright- and it’s true that nobody stays in the garden of Eden…Perhaps everybody has a garden of Eden; I don’t know; but they have scarcely seen their garden before they see the flaming sword. Then, perhaps, life only offers the choice of remembering the garden or forgetting it. Either or: it takes strength to remember, it takes another kind of strength to forget, it takes a hero to do both. People who remember court madness through pain, the pain of the perpetually recurring death of their innocence; people who forget court another kind of madness, the madness of the denial of pain and the hatred of innocence; and the world is mostly divided between madmen who remember and madmen who forget. Heroes and rare.”, James Baldwin, Giovanni’s Room.

[theparisreview]

Douglas Heubler

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Berlin Psychoanalytic: Self-experiments in the city, yesterday and today.

Berlin 14 February 2015 / by Jakob Lusensky

“Dear Professor Freud, things are moving”, wrote the early psychoanalyst Karl Abraham from Berlin in a personal letter to Sigmund Freud in Vienna, August 1908. The thing that was moving was psychoanalysis, a back then radically new theory for the understanding of human psyche, a cultural theory and vehicle for human liberation through individual insight. A young new science that had wind in it sails, so much wind, that it the following year, in 1909 brought Freud together with Carl Gustav Jung to America to Clark University to present lecture that would sparked the psychoanalytical movement to take of also in the USA and later spread like a plague around the world. In these lectures they both presented their own findings of their “experimental psychologies” that would bring them worldwide attention, turn them into cultural icons and in our time plastic action toy figure.

Experimental psychology? Perhaps for some of you this term brings associations of experiments with rats or other type of animals in a laboratory more closely related to the field of behavioral psychology? But no, these men went further then that, they turned themselves into animals, or at least into experiments. Freud developed his theory of dream interpretation by rigorously writing down, studying and analysing his own dream life. Jung developed his theory of complexes, psychological types and archetypes after his own “creative illness” and psychological breakdown, in which he carefully started to write down his fantasies and illustrate them in his “Red Book”. Like alchemists, in a time of turmoil and confusion they travelled in their own chambers, as they turned their work Freud and Jung were far from the only people turning into self-experimentation and self-discovery at turn of the century Europe. On the hills of Ascona, in the south of the Italian part of Switzerland the Utopic artist commune Monté Verita was established around the same time. It became a pole of gravity for an intellectual and spiritual European elite, with Jung, Herrman Hesse, Max Weber, dance choreographer Rudolf Laban, and psycho-anarchists Otto Gross on the guest list. Otto Gross was more then a curiosity in the early psychoanalytical movement and was by Freud seen as the only one, except for Jung, that could truly bring an original contribution to the field. 

Freuds biographer psychoanalyst Ernest Jones called him "the nearest approach to the romantic ideal of a genius I have ever met”. For Gross psychoanalysis was not only a theory for individual liberation but for collective revolution, staying true to his Marxists belief, when stating that: “The psychology of the unconscious is the philosophy of the revolution”. A change of the individual was not possible according to Gross, if not also society changes. He wrote that: “Who ever wants to change the structures of power in a repressive society, has to start by changing these structures in himself and to eradicate the "authority that has infiltrated one's own inner being”. Gross was too much for the leaders of the psychoanalytical movement and he was soon labelled an un-analysable schizophrenic, became a drug addict and rejected by the progressive new “scientists”. His self-experiment “failed” and he died of Pneumonia (nu-mo'ne-a) related to drug abuse, after having been found near-starved and frozen, out here on the streets of Berlin, 95 years.

Left to right, seated: Sigmund Freud, Sándor Ferenczi, and Hanns Sachs. Standing; Otto Rank, Karl Abraham, Max Eitingon, and Ernest Jones. Photo 1922

A week later that same year, 1920, in another part of Berlin, an opening reception took place at Potsdamer Strasse 29 for the newly established Berlin Poliklinik. This was the world’s first psychoanalytical counselling space and later training institute, that still today stands as the blueprint, for psychoanalytical training around the world. Karl Abraham, who ten years earlier had written that later to Freud about that “things are moving in Berlin” read at this opening ceremony a paper called, “The rise of the poliklinik from the unconscious”. His colleague Ernst Simmel read poetry by Rielke. There were performances of a Beethoven piano sonata, Chopin, pieces by Schubert and Schoenberg. This, the birth of the psychoanalytical counselling space and the death of the rejected theorist Otto Gross was happening in a Berlin that were dancing on top of a Volcano.

This was the spirit of the Weimar Republic, its chaos and creativity, the new jazz, the colour cinema, a time economic depression, female liberation and radical new ideas in form and movement such as the Bauhaus School and the Dadaist movement. Freud was in Vienna but it was in Berlin things were moving, and the Poliklinik became its hub, a pull attracting young talented psychoanalysts from all parts of Europe to move in.

Wilhelm Reich

Melanie Klein

Otto Fenichel

Karen Horney

Edith Jacobson

Annie Reich

Erich Fromm

Many of these pioeering psychoanalysts, who later would form their own schools of psychoanalysis, were as much political activist, cultural theorists and artists of psyche, as brilliant theorists and clinicians. They were taking psychoanalysis far out of the analytical room and into the streets. Freud had at the fifth psychoanalytical conference in Budapest toward the end of the first world-war in 1918, proclaimed for a “social conscience of psychoanalysis”. He was in his own writing not only analysing individuals but also culture, art, literature, civilization, and its discontent. At the Berlin poliklinik an ethos were in the atmosphere, that infused the classical school of psychoanalysis with a political and cultural, activist Geist and spirit.

So, what happened with the Weimar spirit of classical psychoanalysis? Today when you say the word psychoanalysis, people often tend to associate to an expensive psychotherapeutic treatment available for a wealthy few neurotics. A dinosaur from a forgotten age, no longer taken seriously in the Academia or in the present cultural debate. One thing that happened, was that psychoanalysis was exiled from it’s own origin. 

In 1933, thirteen years after it’s opening, the Berlin institute was taken over by the Nazi regime, it became “Aryanized,” its operations and principles absorbed into Nazi ideology, in-officially relabelled “The Göring Institute”.

Psychoanalysis became an émigré science and many of the Berlin analysts fled to America. In America psychoanalysis would after World-War II shape itself a new persona. It turned into a lucrative field and established profession of status, a speciality discipline within the field of medicine and psychiatry. No longer was it open to the layman and wild-psychoanalysts, something that Freud early had envisioned would be it’s creative death. Psychoanalysis became professionalized, specialized, sanitised, individualized, more and more limited to a focus on treating individuals from neurosis while less focused on bringing out cultural or political ideas. 

In the American McCarthy era and the cold war between west and east, the Weimar spirit got lost. It repressed its political past and earlier involvement in changing society and culture through the individual changing himself.

Today, things are moving in Berlin again. Although the rises in apartment prices and gentrification, artist and creative people from all over the world continue to move in to Berlin in the hope of living a different life, reinvent themselves, dance to techno music or explore facets of their personality perhaps not accepted back home. Also our time have similarities with the Weimar era, its economic and political turmoil, fascism, terror as well as left-wing political forces on the rise all over Europe. People are trying to find a grounding, finding themselves lost, searching for roots, community and identity in a time characterized by fluidity. It is in this creative chaos, in this city of acceptance of differences, a city that carries it’s wounds so visibly, that we are gathered here today to celebrate the opening of Stillpoint Spaces. 

We are not a psychoanalytical institute but a new type of counselling space, inspired by the old ethos of the classical school of psychoanalysis. Here, in these four counselling rooms we facilitate psychoanalytic treatment as well as counselling by my colleagues, Andrea Monroy Toro, Evangelos Tsempelis, David Schmid, Johanne Schwensen, Andrés Ocazionez, Estelle Hoy, Tom Bärlin and myself, Jakob Lusensky.

We don’t imagine us carry the geniuses or originality of a Wilhelm Reich, Otto Fenichel,Melaine Klein, Eric Fromm or Otto Gross and also our ambitions are smaller. We aim to facilitate a safe place for rigorous self-experimenting and exploration. To here in the open-space where we stand today, what we call the laboratory, arrange with encounters between psychoanalysis with arts, politics and culture in the broadest sense of the world. We like to re-open up our space for a psychoanalysis also of culture. To stand for depth, and perhaps death, in a culture worshipping surfing, swiping and the psychology of eternal youth.

When I in this opening address, look back in history, turn around and look at what was forgotten, or at least our fantasies of it today, I am merely following the basic psychoanalytical procedure to go back in biography in order to go forward in life. What psychoanalyst James Hillman, called “the renaissance solution”. To in a culture that is floating and lost make the same move that people made at other times, the move of going back so that one can find somewhere to stand. To learn to see how an earlier time were concerned with the same struggles as we are today but perhaps more essentially.

Something truly new can only come alive when staying related to the old. The spirit of the time, our time, needs too learn to listen carefully to hear the lament of the dead, the spirit of the depth.

Or as Rielke puts it more poetically, in the “Notes of the melody of things”:  Our fulfilments take place in the radiant backgrounds. There, in the background, is motion, and will. There play out the histories; we are only the dark headlines.

[psychoanalysis-berlin-blog]

Psychoanalysis on the Street (Berlin)

Lacan’s language puzzles. Simply it is not easy to deal with what he writes and how he writes.In this Meetup we would like to introduce some Lacanian concepts and perspectives.