Philosophy and Psychoanalysis: What’s love got to do with it?
Overview
The mystery of love is greater than the mystery of death.
(Oscar Wilde, Salome)
The question of love is largely avoided and suspected in the contemporary political and philosophical terrain though once was one of the most significant philosophical concepts (Plato’s eros, Aristotle’s philia and Augustine’s caritas, Kierkegaard’s love for the other human being or the love for God); while for the field of psychoanalysis, love is the cure (Freud).
Today, at best, erotic love is synonymous with sexual desire, while philosophers seem to have little or nothing to say about it. Whereas on the one hand, love is constantly pursued and uniquely desirable, mainly in popular culture, art and literature, on the other hand, it is perceived as being conspicuously naïve. Does love lead to the deepest insights encouraging the mind to grow and understand the language of the soul, or is love totally blind with mystifying myopia?
Where love reigns, the ego, the ominous despot, dies.
(Sabina Spielrein, Destruction as the cause coming into being, 1912)
The course's location, House of Annetta is just off Brick Lane, in Shoreditch, East London. The closest station is Shoreditch High Street overground.
The price includes all three sessions. If the cost is a challenge, please don’t hesitate to reach out to us at x@shoshincollege.org. We want this offering to be accessible to everyone!
Session Dates
Week 1: Fri 26 Sep 2025, 6:30 pm
Week 2: Fri 3 Oct 2025, 6:30 pm
Week 3: Fri 10 Oct 2025, 6:30 pm
In these 3 seminars we will delve into the mysteries of Love and its ambivalences, through a range of fields such as philosophy and psychoanalysis, but also poetry, literature, myths and music. The seminars will blend both theoretical and experiential elements including writing practices in an attempt to achieve “a developed understanding of the process of life with its central existential issues such as questions of meaning and purpose, our smallness and greatness, our limits, uncertainties and sufferings, our longings and joys, our light and our shadow and how we are embedded into the mysterious” (Mackinnon, Shamanism and Spirituality in Therapeutic Practice, p.36).
Teacher Profile
Dr. Chrysanthi Nigianni is a Lecturer in the BA Psychosocial studies and the MA Psychodynamic Counselling and Psychotherapy at Goldsmiths. She is also a psychoanalyst in private practice. She has published in the fields of feminist philosophy, sexuality, queer theory, continental philosophy, cinema, and ethics. Her published work includes three co-edited collections: Deleuze and Queer Theory (EUP, 2009), Deleuzian Politics (New formations, Issue 68, 2009) and Undutiful Daughters (Palgrave, 2012). She is currently working on the intersection of posthuman feminist philosophies, animal studies and psychoanalysis as well as on alternative therapeutic modalities that draw on spiritual and indigenous healing practices.