by Team
‘Transgenerationality: Concepts and Counter-Concepts for a Mechanism of Cultural Transmission’
A workshop organised by Prof. Dr Johann Kreuzer and Bianca Pick.
- Featuring Dr Ulrike Jureit (Hamburger Institute for Social Research) and PD Dr Christian Schneider (University of Kassel, Institute for Psychoanalysis)
- on 25 November 2015, 9.30 am–1.00 pm in Room A3 1-109 (DFG-RTG “Selbst-Bildungen”)
- Registration required: please contact Bianca Pick (Bianca.Pick@uni-oldenburg.de)
“Over the past ten years, generational research has gained substance, particularly through interdisciplinary exchange, both theoretically and conceptually. Despite significant disciplinary differences, the concept of ‘generation’ has now become a fundamental scientific term which, despite a certain lack of precision, is frequently drawn upon. With regard to basic theoretical assumptions, the concept of transgenerational processes and their transfer to other academic disciplines and research contexts is of particular relevance. Analytically, this has not only been, and continues to be, advantageous. The complexity of a transgenerational concept – which identifies a conflict-ridden generational entanglement with a compulsion to repeat in the ‘Oedipus complex’ – regularly degenerates into a theory of imprinting that, moreover, is scarcely capable of detaching itself from its therapeutic setting. One might ask whether the distinction between the analysis of parent-child interactions and a culturally and historically oriented generational theory offers added value in terms of social theory that would also be of interdisciplinary interest. This could also benefit the approaches to cultural memory theory and the intergenerational transmission of historical consciousness, which have, after all, been largely exhausted. It also seems illuminating to ask why transgenerationality, as a concept of cultural transmission, has proved so enormously attractive, particularly in the context of Holocaust research.”
Source text (to be sent by Bianca Pick to all registered participants)
Schneider, Christian (2004): The Holocaust as a generational object. Generational-historical remarks on a German identity issue. Mittelweg 36(13), 56–73.
On the eve of the workshop, PD Dr Christian Schneider will give a lecture as part of a series of lectures “Processes of Recognition” organised by the DFG-RTG “Selbst-Bildungen”.
’S LECTURE “The Living and the Dead”
24 November 2015, 6.00 pm, BIS Hall
“The ideal of all processes of recognition is a communicative symmetry based on complete reciprocity between the partners. I would like to examine two asymmetrical communication processes which, nevertheless, cannot do entirely without the aspect of reciprocity. On the one hand, the dialogue between the adult and the child; on the other, I would like to explore the question of whether a sui generis discourse of recognition is conceivable beyond the boundary of life.
In psychoanalysis, mourning is conceived as an act of acknowledging a loss. Mourning for a deceased person essentially consists of gradually withdrawing the investment in them as a significant object and thereby psychologically ratifying the loss. Freud embedded this process within a rigid framework of ‘work’ (‘mourning work’), which largely disregards the dialogical aspect of this process.
In this paper, I attempt to discuss the possibilities and aporias that arise when one understands the communicative content of mourning as a specific form of a dialogical process of recognition, which shifts the problem of intersubjectivity away from the paradigm of embodied reciprocity.”