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The article presents a report on the Eighth International Congress of the International Association for Analytical Psychology which took place in San Francisco, California. The themes of the congress were movements in social and cultural groups and changes in perception of the attitudes to personal relationships, to men and women in society and the relation of psyche and soul in analytical psychology. Over-valuing the positive aspects of the trickster may underestimate the destructive and ungrounded aspect of the negative role of the archetype.

An interview with Professor Constance Penley from the University of California, Santa Barbara, California is presented. He talks about his background in film studies and states that he along with other members of the Camera Obscura collective were more aligned with the semiotics, structuralism, and psychoanalysis. He states that in the rhetorical tradition, everything is seen as an argument. He mentions that he was invited to give the first media paper in the Harvard Literary Theory seminar.

This paper describes the transplantation of psychoanalysis from Europe to Los Angeles and the similarities and differences in followers, cultural attitudes, institutional organization, and patient symptoms. Psychoanalysis in both places attracted psychiatrists, psychologists, social workers, artists, writers, and movie people, all committed to "modernism" and cultural change. But special American conditions created greater institutional rigidity, medicalization, and a more diffuse patient symptomatology centered on the maternal relationship. Such conditions also fostered bitter disputes over modifications of psychoanalytic theory and practice which have only recently become less acute as the status of psychoanalysis has declined in America., (Copyright 2001 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.)

In this paper, it is my intention to show how Lacan's theory of phobia, as exposed in his fourth seminar on object relations with specific regard to the Little Hans case, deals with space in terms that are not simply analogical. Not only does Lacan produce in this work a topography of phobia, a description of the places of phobia, but he also proposes that phobia, as a particular form of symbolization, is a topology, literally a signifying logos that creates space for the phobic subject. In addition to this, I also aim to sketch briefly the outlines of a possible dialogue between Lacan's topological notion of phobia and Mike Davis's fascinating redefinition of the contemporary late-capitalist Western metropolis, especially Los Angeles, as a constellation of phobic objects.Subjectivity (2008) 24, 298–313. doi:10.1057/sub.2008.25 [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Highlights the conference about the clinical and training relevance of the practice of infant observation organized by the Psychoanalytic Centre of California in June 2005. Theme of the conference; Participants and attendees; Key note speakers.