L’illusione del Super-Io. Riflessioni su Freud e Kelsen

In this essay I propose to analyse Kelsen’s reading of Freud’s Massenpsy- chologie by showing how the Austrian jurist used Freud’s essay to highlight their shared struggle against the application of the theological method in the social sciences. The re- sult of this analysis, beyond noting some punctual divergences between the two authors, is that both proposed the idea that the authoritarian state and its religious connotation should be replaced by a scientific form of government, i.e. one free from the illusion that responsibility for our life in common can be replaced by a knowledge that guaran- tees its subsistence once and for all

Therapy and conflict. Between pragmatism and psychoanalysis. Introduction to the Symposium

The history of the relationship between pragmatism and psychoanalysis is both complex and fragmentary. On the pragmatist side, the engagement with Sigmund Freud’s thought – and with the psychoanalytic tradition more generally – tends to be cursory, nonlinear, and at times slightly adversarial. For instance, William James notoriously rejects the unconscious as a concept and develops a different theory of the subconscious. Similarly, Charles S. Peirce frequently refers to the unconscious dimension of the mind, although he does so without referring to psychoanalysis. By contrast, both George Herbert Mead and John Dewey discuss the commonalities and differences between their own perspectives and the psychoanalytic one, but they fall short of doing so in detail. On the psychoanalytic side, the encounters are even more infrequent, with the exception of the pragmatist imprint in Harry Stack Sullivan’s work and the extensive references to William James in Carl Gustav Jung’s work. In some cases, pragmatists have been (wrongfully) accused by psychoanalysts of defending a naive – or at least overly optimistic – picture of the human condition

Survival analysis via hierarchically dependent mixture hazards

Hierarchical nonparametric processes are popular tools for defining priors on collections of probability distributions, which induce dependence across multiple samples. In survival analysis problems, one is typically interested in modeling the hazard rates, rather than the probability distributions themselves, and the currently available methodologies are not applicable. Here, we fill this gap by introducing a novel, and analytically tractable, class of multivariate mixtures whose distribution acts as a prior for the vector of sample-specific baseline hazard rates. The dependence is induced through a hierarchical specification of the mixing random measures that ultimately corresponds to a composition of random discrete combinatorial structures. Our theoretical results allow to develop a full Bayesian analysis for this class of models, which can also account for right-censored survival data and covariates, and we also show posterior consistency. In particular, we emphasize that the posterior characterization we achieve is the key for devising both marginal and conditional algorithms for evaluating Bayesian inferences of interest. The effectiveness of our proposal is illustrated through some synthetic and real data examples

Creare la maschera: crisi e critica in Freud

In questo saggio vorrei sostenere come Freud, diversamente dalla tradizione che lo ha preceduto, torni in una maniera del tutto peculiare a collegare persona e maschera, così che la psicoanalisi, e in particolare il lavoro terapeutico (anche nel senso della riflessione tramite cui ogni individuo si dimostra attento e si prende cura della propria vita psichica9), non si configuri come un lavoro di smascheramento, ovvero come un’impresa di scavo e di ritrovamento del vero sé sotto i travestimenti del falso sé, ma come un “lavoro sulla maschera”, ossia come uno sforzo di «personalizzazione della maschera»