Annual Lecture with Josh Cohen (Public Tickets)

Please note that if you are a bpf member, you need register on the members' event page here.

On Compromise

Few words in our everyday language are more ambiguous than compromise. Compromise signifies both a mature reconciliation of conflicting perspectives, and an expedient betrayal of moral, political or aesthetic values. Complicating the picture still further, in the vocabulary of espionage and undercover policing, it connotes the exposure of a concealed identity.

This ambiguity is especially evident in the psychoanalytic concept of compromise, at once central and underexplored. As ‘compromise formations’, Freud suggests, dreams are the product of an ongoing wrangle in the sleeping mind between drive impulses and their repression. In his late vision in Civilization and Its Discontents, of this same compromise the very foundation of society, Freud presented social life as held together only by way of the unhappy and often dysfunctional effort to renounce our id wishes in the name of order and stability.

For psychoanalysis, compromise is only secondarily a choice we make. It is first of all a structural feature of the mind and body, an ineliminable division within us between the impulse to say yes and the imperative to say no to unconscious desire. What can this insight – that the human being is in essence a compromised being – tell us about clinical practice, as well as the conduct of politics and the making of art?

This lecture will explore this question through a series of overlapping reflections on each of these regions of life.

About the speaker 

Josh Cohen is a psychoanalyst in private practice and a Fellow of the British Psychoanalytical Society. He is the author of numerous books and articles on psychoanalysis, literature and cultural theory, including The Private Life, Not Working and, most recently, All the Rage. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.

Photo Credits: Josh Cohen. Photograph: Charlotte Speechley

*If you are a psychotherapist or counsellor residing in an active conflict zone, you are eligible to attend this event free of charge (regardless of whether you are a bpf member or not). Please email membership@bpf-psychotherapy to enquire about a ticket.