This talk is part of the conference ‘What is “Nature” in Human Nature’, held at the Sigmund Freud Museum Vienna, June 12 and Friday, June 13, 2025
‘What is “Nature” in Human Nature’ is an international conference on the annual theme ‘Being Human’. In memoriam of Donna Orange.
Speakers include: Sam Adriaenssens, Marlen Bidwell-Steiner, Max Cavitch, Marcus Coelen, Dominik Drexel, Nadine Hartmann, Esther Hutfless, Ulrike Kistner, Georgia Panteli, Nicholas Ray, Jil Salberg, Raluca Soreanu, Ruud Welten, Herman Westerink, Jenny Willner
‘Blue Psychoanalysis: Ferenczi’s Exploration of the Sea in Thalassa’
In our times voices of the ‘blue humanities’ start from the sea as a political act, placing cultural history in an oceanic rather than terrestrial context. Human civilisation has been situated mostly in pastoral fields, enclosed gardens or cities. What happens if we start from the sailor and swimmer, from sea critters, from the movement across oceans, and from estrangements at sea, rather than from settlements on land? This is a project for a ‘blue psychoanalysis’. In his 1924 book Thalassa, Ferenczi starts from the sea and sea life, and he intervenes in both the understanding of the drives, and the theory of sexuality. He works with analogies from organic life, paying close attention to marine beings, learning from their breathing techniques, their resilience, and their ways of splitting themselves up. He constructs a version of psychoanalytic theory that accounts for the psychic life of fragments and organs. His reflections on the secret life of organs can be opened up for current theoretical debates in contemporary feminism and new materialism, particularly in works by Donna Haraway and Alexis Pauline Gumbs. Furthermore, Ferenczi presents us with a particular modification to the sphere of the dualism death drive/life drive: he renames them the ‘drive of self-assertion’ and the ‘drive of conciliation’. The ‘selflessness’ he evokes includes the ‘selflessness’ of organs: it emerges in relation to the scene of trauma and it describes a complex psychic state, which considers otherness and the relationship to the environment. The ‘drive for conciliation’ expresses the fact that in order survive, as any sort of individuality, one needs to practice a kind of politics of self-limitation. Ferenczi names this ‘the feminine principle’ and ties it with a revision of conceptions of genitality. He invites us to a democratisation of forms of erotism, via the notion of amphimixis: he has in mind a clever combination of mechanisms of pleasure, with rich mixtures and transpositions.
The programme is available here: https://www.freud-museum.at/en/detail/what-is-nature-in-human-nature
