Jamieson Webster keynote presentation: Masturbation Fantasies Redux

Redux, bring back, also means, turning to its latin root reduce, to restore, until the 17th century when it could also mean to diminish. Psychoanalytic mythology surrounding masturbation fantasies indicates a mode of work that is a bringing back to its place, a restoration of, but also a diminishment, reduction of the fantasy, while fantasy itself participates in this logic of reversals, inversions, revisions, repetitions, and axiomatic reductions. What is the ideal meeting point of the work of fantasy and psychoanalytic work? Looking again at Freud’s 1919 paper, "A Child is Being Beaten," and some of Lacan’s commentary on it, comparing this paper with Freud’s Mass Psychology text (1921), as well as, turning to some clinical examples, historical specimens, and anonymously collected masturbation fantasies, I will bring back the importance of these scenes for the clinic and for an understanding of infantile anxieties in group psychology.