Join us for this round of the reading group in which we will read several segments from Lacan’s seminar on Transference, trying to understand the way in which Lacan redefines love in psychoanalysis on the basis of this Platonic dialogue. We will investigate several Lacanian notions such as love being the objective of psychoanalysis, the analyst knowledge about love, the fact that “love is giving what you do not have”, as well as the way love necessarily passes through desire (“like a camel through the eye of a needle”).

Following the Schema approach, the workshop will present ways of acknowledging and connecting with the vulnerable parts in ourselves, and begin to understand our own patterns in life. By learning how to listen to the voices of demanding or punitive parents, the voice of the vulnerable or angry child, one can strengthen the voice of the Self of today.

During this performative lecture on artificial intelligence, artificial consciousness and artificial desire, the speaker will be at the same time connected to a robot, which traces circles on a piece of paper, sensing the speaker’s excitement, anxiety or any physical response, and expresses them as data through deviations from the perfect circle. The final question of this exploration is: can a robot become a desiring body?

Bauman’s concept of liquidity is examined within Jungian, post-Jungian and relational psychoanalysis and it is shown that, following Jung, it is crucial to learn the art of meditation (“to envisage new possibilities. To imagine new ways of consideration” (Shamdasani, 2013). Otherwise, as suggested by Bauman, we will continually move from one life/identity to another in a perpetual cycle of dissatisfaction, of killing time.