On February 27, at the Likeside Theatre, at the University of Essex, Professor Raluca Soreanu delivered her inaugural lecture titled ‘The Psychic Life of Fragments’.
In her lecture, Raluca Soreanu asked what we can do with trauma, in the psychoanalytic clinic, if we constantly work to enrich our clinical imagination around psychic fragmentation. She looked at the psychic life of fragments and at their creativities. She discussed her understanding of collective trauma and asked what it means to work-through collective wounds. She also reflected on method, authorship, montage and co-montage.
Raluca Soreanu is the author of Working-through Collective Wounds: Trauma, Denial, Recognition in the Brazilian Uprising (Palgrave, 2018) and co-author, with Jakob Staberg and Jenny Willner, of Ferenczi Dialogues: On Trauma and Catastrophe (Leuven University Press, 2023). She is also leading interdisciplinary research project FREEPSY: Free Clinics and a Psychoanalysis for the People: Progressive Histories, Collective Practices, Implications for Our Times (UKRI Frontier Research Grant).
The lecture brought together an audience of over 90 colleagues, students and friends of the speakers, in person, and many more online, as the lecture was livestreamed via the YouTube channel of the University of Essex.
The event was introduced by Professor Chris Greer, Pro-Vice-Chancellor (Research), and Professor John Preston, Executive Dean for the Faculty of Social Sciences. Professor Raluca Soreanu was introduced by Professor Matt ffytche.
On this occasion, Professor Raluca Soreanu shared the floor with Professor Sue Kegerreis, also based at the Department of Psychosocial and Psychoanalytic Studies, University of Essex.
Raluca Soreanu would like to thank those who were there on the day to celebrate this special occasion.
Here is the recording of the lecture (starting at min. 47):
