ANNUAL LECTURE- January 2026: Michael O'Loughlin: Unspeaking the self through troubling childhood memory

Abstract:

Rather than seek to offer a cohesive narrative account of my origins I offer what Teresa Carmody (2021) calls “a profusion of interpretive threads”. Minimizing the artifice of an authorial voice, I present vignettes—most particularly from an interview with my mother—photographs, and the voices of other writers to offer a variety of interpretive strands which offer glimpses into the possibility of narrating a life in all of its psychic and genealogical complexities. The text I present, then, is polyvocal and hopefully open to interpretation. For each family photograph, for example, there is a surface figure, but also, necessarily, a ground, an under-side that can also be subjected to interrogation. The same is true for the vignettes from my mother’s story of my early years. The interspersed discussion of the writings of Maria Stepanova, Carolyn Steedman, Gaston Bachelard, Adam Phillips, and Leonor Arfuch are designed as reminders not to get seduced by the surface veracity of my text or photos, but to hold everything constantly in question, to read the surface and the under-side simultaneously. It is a quixotic effort to simultaneously tell my story and upend the narrative that I am constructing to explain my coming to be.

Bio

Michael O’Loughlin is Professor in the College of Education and Health Sciences and in the Derner School of Psychology at Adelphi University, New York. He co-edited [with C, Owens & l. Rothschild] Precarities of 21st century childhoods: Critical explorations of time(s), place(s), and identities (2023), and [with L. Rothschild & S. Akhtar] Between amnesia and recollection: Environmental, creative and clinical pathways toward memory, forthcoming from Karnac in 2026. He will also edit [with A. Voela] the Handbook of Psychoanalysis, Culture & Society, forthcoming from Anthem Press. Since 2018 he has been coeditor of the journal Psychoanalysis, Culture and Society. He is also editor of the book series, Psychoanalytic Interventions: Clinical Social, and Cultural Contexts, and co-editor of the book series Critical Childhood & Youth Studies. He directs the Adelphi Asylum Project and he has a private practice for psychotherapy and psychoanalysis on Long Island, NY. He is a Founding Scholar of the British Psychoanalytic Council.

Web: michaeloloughlinphd.com

University profile: https://www.adelphi.edu/fa