Seminar: Signe Vikkelsø, "Appropriate scales of anxiety – on the frail operation of a therapeutic technique"

Past Event

Date
20 May 2010, 5:00pm - 6:30pm

Location
Said Business School
Park End Street, Oxford OX1 1HP

Signe Vikkelsø is interested in the specific question of how unconscious phenomena become surfaced and materialised. She generally situates herself in a phenomenological research tradition which considers that research methods used generate (or ‘enact’) their objects.

This has led her to consider psychologist Wilfred Bion’s experiments of group therapy (a method called ‘the Experience Group’) as a potentially useful way to study the rise of a phenomenon – in this case, the mental state of anxiety – as a result of certain types of group interactions and interpretations. To do so, Vikkelsø suggests looking at the socio-technical makeup of Bion’s psychoanalytical groups, as well as the risks and associations which are deployed in order to produce and manage the state of being anxious.