Special Event
AIPCT is pleased to present a seminar, November 13 (Thursday) at 5:30 PM Central Time US). Professor Ilona Błocin, University of Wrocław, Poland.She has been at SIU on a prestigious IDUB Fellowship from the Polish government, and we will recognize her stay with this special seminar.
This event is free and open to the public. Light refreshments and drinks will be provided, but attendees are welcome to bring snacks to share and their preferred beverages. The seminar will be followed by a reception in honor of Professor Błocin’s visit to SIU.
Those attending in person may arrive as early as 5 pm. The AIPCT is at 411 N. 9th Street in Murphysboro, IL.
Those who wish to join on-line can send a request for a link to personalist61@gmail.com.
The Seminar
“The Philosophy of Imagination of Gaston Bachelard and His Dialogue with Freud and Jung”
The relationship between Gaston Bachelard’s philosophy of imagination and psychoanalysis can be characterized as dynamic, with periods of both convergence and divergence. The common points and ruptures, the departures and returns, the criticisms and reformulations of the source concepts linked to the ambivalent attitude that Bachelard had regarding psychoanalysis, overlapped with the changes already inscribed in his philosophy. He drew on Freud’s concepts (usually critically) and Jung’s thought (strongly reformulating them). However, it is challenging to conceptualize his philosophy of imagination without invoking the concepts of the unconscious, archetype, and primordial image. Concurrently, the philosophy of imagination places greater emphasis on the human condition in the world, integrating the imagination into material reality and the movement of the elements (images of fire, water, etc.), exploring the environmental context of human life in more depth.
The Seminar Leader
Ilona Błocin is Director and co-founder of the Cassirer Center for International Scholarship and Cooperation. She is Professor in the Institute of Philosophy of the University of Wrocław. She is a Distinguished Visiting Professor, here in the US on an award from the Polish Government’s IDUB visiting researchers program. Her books include (all in Polish) Psychoanalytic Interpretations of Myth: Freud, Jung, Fromm (Warsaw: Eneteia, 2011); (co-author) Gaston Bachelard and the Philosophies of the Image: Psychological and Socio-political Aspects of Imagery (Wrocław: University of Wrocław Press, 2018); C. G. Jung: Social Thought and Criticism (Wrocław: Publishing House of the University of Wrocław 2018); Le numéro 2/2021 (2022) de la revue „Études Bachelariennes” éditée par Ilona Błocian et Marta Ples-Bęben, Bachelard et la psychanalyse (Bachelard and Psychoanalysis).