Does Writing an Autobiography Bring About Catharsis?

October 1, 2026

The top of the poster writes "UCLA College | Social Sciences Anthropology Co-Sponsored by Center for Social Medicine and Humanities Leo Rangell Professional Endowment in Psychoanalysis." Below the poster advertises "Does Writing an Autobiography Bring About Catharsis? John Borneman Emeritus Professor of Anthropology, Princeton University." The right dark blue box writes "THURSDAY • OCTOBER 1, 2026 John Borneman TIME • 12:15 PM LOCATION • HAINES HALL 352." The box sits next to a framed picture of Borneman, a white person with white hair, glasses, and a collared blue shirt staring stoically into the camera. Below writes: "ABOUT THE TALK The writing of an autobiography is a considerable investment in the flow of emotional energy. I expended an obsessive amount, you might say, over 6 years of writing, he las 3 of which occupied me fully, often from early morning into late evening. Catharsis is the emotional release of his energy, often expressed as a purification, purging, or cleansing. Cathexis is the opposite: an investment of mental energy in o something; when that investment is deep and intense, we might call it an attachment. In this talk, I draw upon family scenes as we I as scenes of participants observation in fieldwork, following an oscillation between catharsis and cathexis, and between cathecting and decathecting. I argue they are part of an, epistemology of writing, true for both ethnographic and autobiographical accounts. ABOUT THE SPEAKER John Borneman, Emeritus Professor of Anthropology at Princeton University, received his Ph.D. from Harvard (1989) and taught at Cornell (1991-2000) and Princeton (2001- 2022). His long-term fieldwork has been in Germany and Syria, and he has written extensively on the relation of the state and law to intimacy and practkes of care. lln 2013 he was awarded the Boyer Prize for contributions to psychoanalytic anthropology. His most recent book is I Was Married to a Horse, and Other Tales of an Accidental Anthropology, published in 2026."
Please join us on Thursday, October 1st, 2026 at 12:15 pm in Haines Hall 352 for a talk with John Borneman titled, Does Writing an Autobiography Bring About Catharsis? 
October 1, 2026