Psychoanalysis involves lots of work: dream-work, the work of mourning, working through, and so on. In this talk, I want to reflect less on metaphorical work than on the practical kind, particularly the work of interpretation in the analytic setting, and its relationship to interpretation in the human sciences. I will speak a bit about the challenges of relearning how to make interpretations in a new context, and what analytic and academic interpretation might be able to teach, or unteach, each other.

Ben Kafka is Associate Professor of Media, Culture, and Communication at New York University and a psychoanalyst in private practice. He is currently working on a book entitled The Grand Unified Theory of Unhappiness.