Composing a Psychoanalytic Metropolis – Faculty Talk by Aleksandra Wagner
“Composing a Psychoanalytic Metropolis: Making it Better for You” was a faculty talk delivered by Aleksandra Wagner, assistant professor of Sociology at the Schools of Public Engagement, The New School, on December 6th, 2017.
A sociologist and a student of the history of psychoanalysis, Wagner rendered a movable feast –stories of, and about, the European Subjects, whose moved and moving lives were lived in American cities undergoing radical changes. Do Ă©migrĂ©s have an interest in their new country? What is their political consciousness? What are the limits of their perceptions; of our perceptions of them? By telling the story of an Austrian psychoanalyst who lived in Detroit between 1939-1989, Wagner revisits the question, what was at stake in the move memorably, yet incompletely, described as the one between Berggasse 19, the site of Freud’s office in Vienna, and Central Park West? So, what about Detroit?
Special thanks were given to: Kyong Park (2000), Detroit, Making it Better for You [Video]; Mark Slobin (2016), Improvising a Musical Metropolis: Detroit, 1940s-1960s [Library of Congress Webcast]; Lebbeus Woods, Vladan Nikolic, Shannon Mattern, Julia Foulkes, and the students of The New School (2010) class, Psychoanalysis and the Secular Subject.