Katerina will talk about:
“The touched self: Affective touch and bodily dimensions of selfhood”
Recent decades have marked a major paradigm shift in research on early self/other differentiation. The popular view today is that infants are equipped with a sense of differentiation from birth, and this view has often been interpreted as replacing the classical psychoanalytic account in which the infant/caretaker relation was rather discussed in terms of symbiosis and undifferentiation. However, it is unclear as to whether the new paradigm ought to be interpreted as substituting or complementing the old one.
The objective of this conference is to combine insights and resources from phenomenology, psychology, and psychoanalysis in order to investigate whether there could be room for both views, thus aiming at a more comprehensive account of infantile experience.