23 May 2024 - 23 May 2024
9:30AM - 5:30PM
Tom Percival Annex, Brooks House, St Cuthbert's Society Parsons Field
FREE
A symposium hosted by the Affective Experience Lab at the Discovery Research Platform in Medical Humanities, Durham University.
Mixed Signals: Analysing Ambivalence
I hate and I love. Why do I do this, perhaps you ask. I know not, but I feel it happening and I am tortured. (Catullus)
An intimate friend and a hated enemy have always been indispensable to my emotional life… not infrequently… friend and enemy have coincided in the same person. (Freud)
What does it mean to be in two minds — and what are the uses of mixed feelings? Introduced into psychiatry by Eugen Bleuler in 1910, ambivalence describes the coexistence of conflicting impulses toward the same person or object. For the psychoanalyst Melanie Klein, the ability to live with ambivalence was a developmental achievement: Klein’s infant grows from the good-versus-bad, black-and-white ‘paranoid-schizoid position’ to the level-headed, rough-with-the-smooth ‘depressive position’, learning to integrate love and hate. But if mental health means seeing shades of grey, sometimes ambivalence still leads to illness: from Leon Festinger’s ‘cognitive dissonance’ to Gregory Bateson’s ‘double binds’, irresolvable contradictions can drive us out of our minds. Ambivalence is also of broader interest across disciplines, from philosophy (skepticism, nondualism, paradox) to politics (voter apathy, doublethink) to literary studies (what should we make of books we conflictedly ‘love to hate’—or hate to love?) In our polarised world, is ambivalence a desirable trait—an open-minded, unbiased ability to see debates from both sides—or is it the antithesis of commitment, a route to confusion and indecision? This symposium s gathers academics and mental health practitioners to analyse ambivalence from all angles: psychological, social, political, aesthetic and more.
Speakers and participants will include:
This event is free to attend. The virtual link will be circulated closer to the event.
This symposium is hosted by the Affective Experience Lab at the Discovery Research Platform for Medical Humanities, Durham University.
Please contact Dr Josh Pugh (david.j.pugh@dur.ac.uk) or Dr Fraser Riddell (f.i.riddell@dur.ac.uk) with any questions.