Beyond the Pleasure Principle

NB: This series is held in Italian.

Cycle description

This project is a cycle of six public seminars held in Milan between March and November 2027, bringing economists, historians of economic thought and psychoanalysts into a sustained conversation about the methodological foundations of their disciplines.

The starting point is a problem the two fields share. Economics and psychoanalysis both study conduct, expectation and decision, and in both the observer belongs to the object observed. This reflexivity is not a nuisance to be controlled away; it shapes what counts as evidence, what generalisation is legitimate, and what kind of objectivity a frontier science can claim. Keynes and Freud each confronted it directly, and each left a body of methodological reflection that is still largely read in isolation within its own field. The connection between them is frequently invoked, yet it is usually treated as a metaphor rather than as a mechanism. The cycle takes it seriously as a question of method.

The six sessions address: questions of method in Freud and Keynes; the critique of the hedonistic foundation of economic theory; the cosmologies and origin narratives through which disciplines account for themselves; theoretical pluralism and the relation between rival research programmes; decision, confidence and judgement under uncertainty; and the place of mathematical formalism in sciences whose objects resist measurement.

Speakers confirmed to date include Anna Carabelli, Mario Cedrini, Pasquale Cirillo, Carlo Zappia, Teodoro Dario Togati, Lorenzo Esposito and Marcello Spanò on the economics side, alongside analysts and scholars from the psychoanalytical area, including Franco Baldini, Luca Possati and Silvana Dalto. The cycle is promoted by the Scuola di Psicanalisi Freudiana, active in Milan since 1983, and holds the patronage of STOREP, AISPE, the Association for Heterodox Economics, the Freud Museum London and Mimesis Edizioni.

Each session runs on a Saturday morning and follows the same format: three papers of twenty minutes, a chair, and an extended discussion with the audience. Drafts are circulated to speakers and registered participants fifteen days in advance, so that the discussion begins from the arguments rather than from first exposure to them. Sessions are open to all, with no registration fee.

What participants can expect is a genuine working seminar rather than a showcase. The format is built around disagreement: the two traditions proceed from incompatible premises on several of these questions, and the sessions are designed to let that incompatibility be stated precisely instead of smoothed over. Young scholars are particularly welcome, and there is scope for YSI members to take part as discussants.

Two permanent outputs follow. All six sessions are recorded and published as a freely accessible video archive, and the revised papers appear in a monographic issue of the journal Metapsychologica (Mimesis Edizioni) in open access. Both are available to anyone who cannot attend in person.

You can find the detailed plan here.