Tanner Lecture on Human Values at Princeton University – “Psyche and the City”

Amia Srinivasan’s lectures will explore the intersection of psychoanalysis and politics, examining how attention to the complexities of the human psyche might inform the collective human task of living together.

Lecture I: Trauma and Identification
In her first lecture, Srinivasan will discuss psychoanalytic explanations of political violence in terms of unprocessed historical trauma, and the ethics of traumatic transmission and identification as it concerns historically oppressed groups.

Lecture II: Reduction and Resistance
Amia Srinivasan’s second lecture will examine the place of psychoanalysis and other reductive discourses in the interpersonal and public spheres, asking whether such discourses can be reconciled with the duty to treat each other as rational persons.

Together, the lectures will ask how psychoanalysis can deepen our understanding of trauma, identity, and freedom in political life.

Commentators:
Dagmar Herzog, Distinguished Professor, History, Social Welfare, Women’s and Gender Studies, City University of New York
Mark Lilla, Professor of Humanities, Columbia University
Richard Moran, Brian D. Young Professor of Philosophy, Harvard University
Jacqueline Rose, Professor of Humanities and Co-Director, Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities
About the speaker
Amia Srinivasan, Chichele Professor of Social and Political Theory, All Souls College, University of Oxford

Sponsors
Department of Anthropology
Department of Comparative Literature
Department of History
Department of Philosophy
Department of Politics
Department of Sociology
Princeton University Public Lectures
Department of Psychology