This January, I am delighted and honored to host Peter Jansson in Berlin. Over three events, we will explore cinema, psychoanalysis, and philosophy through a shared question. What can film show us when words fail.
In this small series we will move from clinical practice, to theory, to an open public encounter with film. No prior expertise is required for the public events.
Peter Jansson is a psychoanalyst and cultural theorist based in Gothenburg, Sweden. He is head of the Academy for Psychoanalysis in Gothenburg. His work focuses on cinema and psychoanalysis, and on how films give form to experiences that resist clear meaning. He has written extensively on Ingmar Bergman and works clinically with questions of desire, melancholy, and silence.
Event 1
Case Discussion Group
15 January, 6 pm
Peter Jansson will join the Berlin case discussion group as a guest supervisor. This is a closed clinical meeting. It is open only to members of the Berlin case discussion group and intended for practicing clinicians.
The focus is on clinical listening and orientation.
If you practice in Berlin and are interested in joining the group in the future, feel free to contact me.
Event 2
Kieślowski with Lacan. The Truth of the Real in Film
16 January, 5 pm
International Psychoanalytic University Berlin
Lecture Hall 3, Stromstraße 3b, 10555 Berlin
In person and online
Krzysztof Kieślowski is often discussed through ethics or politics. In this lecture, Peter Jansson takes a different path. He treats film as a way of thinking.
Rather than applying theory to cinema, Kieślowski’s films themselves think through what psychoanalysis calls the Real. This refers to moments where meaning breaks down. Where something insists but cannot be clearly said.
Drawing on Jacques Lacan, Peter links Kieślowski’s attention to everyday life, anxiety, and moral tension to clinical concepts such as lack and desire. He also opens the question of melancholy. Not as a topic, but as a way of relating to absence and loss.
The lecture is relevant for clinicians, students, and anyone interested in film as more than storytelling.
Free Zoom registration: https://www.ipu-berlin.de/kieslowski-with-lacan-the-truth-of-the-real-in-film/
Or just join us in-person.
Event 3
The Truth of the Real in Ingmar Bergman’s The Silence
17 January, 3 pm
Ingmar Bergman is known for his uncompromising films about vulnerability, desire, loneliness, and faith. The Silence from 1963 is one of his most challenging works. It centres on strained intimacy, silence, and emotional distance.
This event is open to a wide audience. No prior knowledge of the film or of psychoanalysis is required. Peter will screen selected scenes during the session, so the discussion stays grounded in the images themselves.
Here too, the method is reversed. Instead of explaining the film through theory, Peter shows how the film itself gives shape to what Lacan calls the Real. What escapes language. What remains unresolved. What cannot be fully shared.
Following the lecture we will discuss as a group what this film show about relationships. About bodies. About loneliness and desire.
Join us at Nollendorfkiez in Schöneberg, Berlin, or online.
To receive the exact address or get a Zoom link please donate in this link: https://ko-fi.com/c/b61fb98131
* All donations go directly to Peter
Leon Brenner 