Fellows


Ricky DeSantis
Fulbright ifk_Junior Fellow


Duration of fellowship
01. October 2024 bis 30. June 2025

Translating Psychoanlysis: From Vienna to New York and Back Again



PROJECT DESCRIPTION

In the years following the Anschluss, many Jewish psychoanalysts and philosophers crossed the Atlantic, making their homes in New York City. These immigrants brought with them not only a new psychiatric tradition, but also a slew of political commitments. Like any migration, however, the tradition that arrived was translated and reworked into something new. In the first part my project, I look at the translation of psychoanalysis into the American lexicon and culture, with particular focus on the ways in which figures like Wilhelm Reich and Herbert Marcuse brought with them a psychoanalytically inspired politics of sexual liberation.

Since the early 1980s, however, psychoanalysis has largely been replaced in the US by a combination of cognitive-behavioral therapy (often branded as »mindfulness« therapy) and pharmaceutical drugs. Many of these changes have in turn been exported around the globe—for instance, CBT is now the most widely practiced form of therapy in the world. The second part of the project looks at the current state of psychotherapy in Austria (and Western Europe more broadly), focusing on the ways in which American approaches to psychiatry have in turn influenced the political values of contemporary Austria.



CV

Ricky DeSantis is a doctoral candidate in the philosophy department at Fordham University where he is working on a dissertation tentatively titled »The Question of Desire: Time, Logic, and Contradiction in Psychoanalysis.« The dissertation attempts to give a re-reading of Freud’s account of the »timeless« and »contradictory« nature of the unconscious by drawing on resources from the German Idealist tradition and the work of psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan.

Ricky completed a BA in philosophy with a minor in neuroscience from San Diego State University and a master’s in philosophy at Miami University where he was an Altman Fellow. He has previously published and presented research on the philosophical underpinnings of cognitive-behaviorial therapy, the psychiatric works of Michel Foucault, and the phenomenology of Martin Heidegger.



Publications

»Love’s Resistance: Heidegger and the Problem of First Philosophy«, in: Journal of the British Society of Phenomenology 2022, Vol. 53: No. 1, 61–74.