Past Event

"The Maternal:
Psychoanalysis, Literature and Film"

Claire Kahane, Ph.D. and Marilyn Fabe, Ph.D.

Theorizing our relation to the concept of "the Maternal" has been an ongoing psychoanalytic project:

Dr. Claire Kahane will speak about the underplayed aspect of "maternal rage", an ambiguous term, referring both to the child's rage against the maternal object, and the mother's rage against not only the child, but the very concept of the maternal. The two are inevitably intertwined, more so if the child is a girl. Referring to psychoanalytic writers who have explored the dark side of maternal subjectivity as well as its recuperation of agency, she will exemplify her more abstract remarks with references to the fiction of Flannery O'Connor et.al.

Dr. Marilyn Fabe in order to better understand the workings of Woody Allen's comic genius, will look through the lens of self-psychology, and especially the theoretical perspective of the founder of self-psychology, Heinz Kohut. Based on evidence of Allen's early life laid out in his biographies and interviews, plus evidence of recurring jokes and themes that appear in his writings and films, she argues that the incompatibility between Allen's parents and their precocious, gifted son resulted in psychological wounds that he was able to assuage through his extra-ordinary gift for comedy. Dr. Fabe's focus will be the dynamic jokes in Allen's comic writings that target mothers or maternal figures.


Berkeley City Club
2315 Durant Avenue

Saturday, October 12, 2019

10:00 AM - 12:00 PM


ClaireClaire Kahane, Ph.D.

Claire Kahane is Professor Emerita of English at the University at Buffalo, a research Associate in the Department of English at the University of California, Berkeley, a community member of the San Francisco Center for Psychoanalysis, where she trained, and a board member of the Berkeley Psychoanalytic Society. She has published numerous articles and a few books on gender theory, modern British and American fiction, gothic literature, and literary representations of Holocaust trauma. Currently based in Berkeley, Dr. Kahane has just completed a picaresque memoir entitled Nine Lives: Adventures in Becoming, and is working on a book-length connection of essays on Ian McEwan's fiction entitled Redeeming the Imp of the Perverse: Ian McEwan's Fictional Trajectory.


MarilynMarilyn Fabe, Ph.D.

Marilyn Fabe is a Senior Lecturer Emerita in the Department of Film and Media at the University of California, Berkeley where she has taught courses in film history and film theory for over forty years. In addition to her book Closely Watched Films: Introduction to the Art of Narrative Film (University of California Press, 2004, rev. ed. 2014), Dr. Fabe has written psychobiographical articles on Maya Deren, Orson Welles, Charles Chaplin and Alfred Hitchcock. Her latest essay on Hitchcock, "Shooting to Kill: Hitchcock's Heroines and the Perverse Scenario" is forthcoming in William Runyan, ed., Examining Lives: Self-Reflections in Psychobiography, Oxford University Press. Dr. Fabe is currently working on a psychobiography of Woody Allen.


Future Events

Coming soon


Past Events

Saturday, February 3, 2024

"Questioning the Superego"
Penelope Garvey


Saturday, December 2, 2023

"Rossellini Beyond Repair"
Ramsey McGlazer, Ph.D.


Saturday, October 14, 2023

"Anorexia: Between Desire for Recognition and the Death Drive"
Domenico Cosenza, Ph.D.


Saturday, April 15, 2023

"Psychoanalysis and Opera: Rejoining the Verbal and Non-Verbal"
Steve Goldberg, Dr.,
Lee Rather, Ph.D.,


Saturday, January 21, 2023

""What Should I Call You? Pronouns and the Scene of Address""
Judith Butler, Ph.D.


Saturday, December 3, 2022

"Link Theory and Practice: The Irreducible Effects of Presence"
Israel Katz, M.D.


Saturday, October 1, 2022

"The Structure and Function of Part Objects"
Richard Rusbridger


Saturday, April 30, 2022

"Psychoanalysis: the Contemporary Scene from an Editor's View"
Murray Schwartz


Saturday, February 5, 2022

"Working Backwards: "Backwards Causation"and the Temporality of the Unconscious in Pre-Freudian Dream Theory"
Jake Fraser, Ph.D.


Saturday, December 4, 2021

"The Significance of the Anus in Psychoanalytic Theory"
Benjamin Y. Fong, Ph.D.


Saturday, October 9, 2021

"Love, Hate and Knowledge: the Analyst’s Aesthetic Conflict"
Meg Harris Williams


Saturday, April 24, 2021

"The Analyst's Desire: The Ethical Foundation of Clinical Practice"
Mitchell Wilson, M.D.


Saturday, February 27, 2021

"Freud’s Nietzsche: Eternal Return, Symptomatic Acts and the Gay Apophrades"
Dany Nobus


Saturday, December 12, 2020

"What's uncanny in the Unheimliche?"
Sergio Benvenuto, Ph.D.


Saturday, October 31, 2020

"Roads to the Unconscious: Some Parallels and Divergences between Psychoanalysis and the Writing of Poetry"
John Hart,
Helen Schoenhals Hart,


Saturday, October 10, 2020

"Trans Realism: Psychoanalysis and the Trans Experience"
Patricia Gherovici, Ph.D.,
Grace Lavery, Ph.D.,


Saturday, April 4, 2020

"*POSTPONED* What's uncanny in the Unheimliche?"
Sergio Benvenuto, Ph.D.


Saturday, March 21, 2020

"*POSTPONED* Trans Realism, Psychoanalytic Practice, and the Rhetoric of Technique"
Grace Lavery, Ph.D.


Saturday, January 25, 2020

"Creativity and the Erotic Dimensions of the Analytic Field"
Dianne Elise, Ph.D.


Saturday, November 23, 2019

"Mama, Mnemo - Reading Kristeva with Montale"
Benjamin Davidson, Ph.D.


Saturday, October 12, 2019

"The Maternal: Psychoanalysis, Literature and Film"
Claire Kahane, Ph.D.,
Marilyn Fabe, Ph.D.,


Saturday, April 13, 2019

"Light Rooms: Medium, Mourning and Mania"
Elizabeth Abel, Ph.D.


Saturday, January 26, 2019

"From Freud's Mourning to Mourning Freud"
Madelon Sprengnether, Ph.D.


Saturday, December 1, 2018

"Group Discussion: The Place of the Nonrepresentational and the Nonverbal in Psychoanalysis"
Margot Beattie, Ph.D.,
Israel Katz, MD,


Saturday, October 20, 2018

"Freud's Seduction: Psychoanalysis and California"
Fernando Castrillon, Psy.D.


Saturday, March 3, 2018

"Trans Psychoanalysis and Livable Embodiments"
Patricia Gherovici, Ph.D.


Saturday, January 27, 2018

"The Political Unconscious in Perilous Times"
Judith Butler, Ph.D.,
Lance Dodes, M.D.,
Jill Gentile, Ph.D.


Saturday, October 28, 2017

"Die Meistersinger von Nurnberg: The Dream World of Wagner"
Steven H. Golderg, MD,
Jeanne C. Harasemovitch, LCSW,


Saturday, October 7, 2017

"Incandescent Alphabets: Language and Art in Psychosis"
Annie G. Rogers, Ph.D.


Saturday, May 20, 2017

"Homeland (In)Security: How Feminine Law Might Rescue Democracy, Truth and Free Speech"
Jill Gentile, Ph.D.


Sunday, March 26, 2017

"Enigmatic Mechanisms: Some Reflections on Love, Affect, and Identification in Freud"
Marcus Coelen, Ph.D


Saturday, March 18, 2017

"Refashioning Jouissance/Enjoyment for the Age of the Imaginary"
Juliet Flower MacCannell, Ph.D.


Saturday, January 28, 2017

"Freud and the Frankfurt School"
Martin E. Jay, Ph.D.


Saturday, October 29, 2016

"Thinking About The Future"
Christopher Bollas, Ph.D.


Saturday, September 24, 2016

"Death Drive Dialogue #2"
Henry Markman, MD,
Israel Katz, MD,


Saturday, May 21, 2016

"Psychoanalytic Knowledge"
Peter Hobson, Ph.D.


Saturday, April 23, 2016

"The Alterability of the Memory Trace"
Rosaura Martinez, Ph.D.


Saturday, April 2, 2016

"Conversion Disorder: Freud, religious transformation, Foucault and Agamben"
Jamieson Webster, Ph.D.


Saturday, March 26, 2016

"Surviving Terror: An Interview with Ernst Federn"
Helen Schoenhals Hart, Dr.med.


Saturday, October 17, 2015

"Rosa Luxemburg and Marilyn Monroe: Women in Depressed Times"
Jacqueline Rose


Saturday, May 9, 2015

"Keeping the Other Alive: Counter-trends to the Death Drive"
Judith Butler, Ph.D.


Monday, March 30, 2015

"Cultivating the Foreigner Within: Julia Kristeva and Hannah Arendt on Uncanny Art and Human Relations in the Contemporary World"
Elaine Miller, Ph.D.


Saturday, January 31, 2015

"Enduring Inequality: Racism in America"
Jeffrey Prager, Ph.D.



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