Leading articles

THE VIENNA PSYCHOANALYST wants to give not only already internationally established psychoanalysts, but also still unknown psychoanalysts the opportunity to post a self-written and not yet published article on the FrontPage of our online magazine!

Our Users then can leave comments, ask questions or discuss the articles in our forum. Our aim is to provide an international platform where for the first time anyone interested in psychoanalysis can exchange ideas on certain topics.
Articles are welcome in German and/ or English.

If you are interested, please send your article to
leadingarticle@theviennapsychoanalyst.at


(For reasons of readability, the male form is used with personal names, however the female form is also always intended.)

In our interview series "in conversation with“, we will briefly present the authors of the leading articles. We want to give our users the opportunity to read the leading article from a different point of view.


This week we are very glad to welcome Katja Kolšek from Ljubljana, Slovenia:

She is currently employed as the researcher at the Faculty of Arts, University of Ljubljana (Slovenia). She has BA in Sinology (Faculty of Arts in Ljubljana) and PhD in Philosophy (Faculty of Arts in Ljubljana). She worked as a research fellow at the Institute of Philosophy SRC SASA in Ljubljana and the Theory department of the Jan van Eyck Academy. The post-academic institute for research and production in the fields of fine art, design, and theory. She has lectured on Introduction to Philosophy and Theory of Ideology at the Faculty of Humanities in University of Primorska in Koper. Her selected bibliography includes the monograph The Other of Democracy. The Concepts of Immanence and Otherness in Contemporary Theories of Democracy (Annales, Koper 2010), the article »The Parallax Object of Althusser´s Materialist Philosophy« in Encountering Althusser. Politics and Materialism in Contemporary Radical Thought, edited by Katja Diefenbach, Sara R. Farris, Gal Kirn and Peter Thomas (Bloomsbury Press, 2013), and »The Shift of the Gaze in Žižek´s Philosophical Writing« in Repeating Žižek, edited by Agon Hamza, Duke University Press, Durham and London, 2015. Her research areas are philosophy, psychoanalysis and modern and contemporary Chinese literature.



DWP: What brought you to psychoanalysis?

Katja Kolšek: My first encounter with psychoanalysis was at the lectures of professor Mladen Dolar at the Department of Philosophy of Faculty of Arts, University of Ljubljana, Slovenija. Of course, since Slavoj Žižek is a Slovene, I also grew up with some superficial knowledge of it, from  my highschool years on.


DWP: If you had the opportunity to talk with Sigmund Freud, what would be the topic?
Are there any specific questions?

Katja Kolšek: I would of course ask him, if he would take me as his analysand, and just free associate. Maybe I would ask him, why he never focused on the problem of mothers not as a structural notion, but as a subject (patient).


DWP: Fabric or leather couch?

Katja Kolšek: Leather couch.


DWP: I dream,….

Katja Kolšek: I dream and I have nightmeres. I have always been very much conscious of the unconscious, since childhood. I had severe nightmeres, and I was always interested and thrilled by peculiar feelings of the uncanny. I was also a moonwalker.
 

DWP: What do you find good or particularly good in psychoanalysis and is there anything you do not like about it?

Katja Kolšek: I find psychoanalysis as a marvellous tool, which enable me to conduct my philosophical research from different, from an unorthodox perspective. To study philosophy, let’s use Alain Badiou’s term antiphilosophical position, which is "extimity" (if I use the term of Jacques Alain Miller) to philosophy.

I could say that I don’t like the organizational forms (forums) of contemporary psychoanalytical communities, which are often very hermetical and only speak a jargonated language. As a philosopher I prefer to study connection of psychoanalysis and philosophy. But maybe it is also because, I never went through a clinical process.

 
DWP: Do you have a favorite Freud - quote?

Katja Kolšek: My favourite two quotes are probably, »Was will das Weib?« and »The Ego is not the master of its own house.«


DWP: Are there other psychoanalysts, in addition to Sigmund Freud, who you like to study?

Katja Kolšek: Yes, Jacques Lacan, Colette Soler, and the Slovenian School of Theoretical Psychoanalysis, the so called »Troika« (Slavoj Žižek, Mladen Dolar and Alenka Zupančič).


Thank you very much for this conversation, we are already looking forward to your leading article!



Contact information of the author:
Katja Kolšek