Mixed Signals: Analysing Ambivalence

I hate and I love. Why do I do this, perhaps you ask. I know not, but I feel it happening and I am tortured. (Catullus)

An intimate friend and a hated enemy have always been indispensable to my emotional life… not infrequently… friend and enemy have coincided in the same person. (Freud)

What does it mean to be in two minds — and what are the uses of mixed feelings? Introduced into psychiatry by Eugen Bleuler in 1910, ambivalence describes the coexistence of conflicting impulses toward the same person or object. For the psychoanalyst Melanie Klein, the ability to live with ambivalence was a developmental achievement: Klein’s infant grows from the good-versus-bad, black-and-white ‘paranoid-schizoid position’ to the level-headed, rough-with-the-smooth ‘depressive position’, learning to integrate love and hate. But if mental health means seeing shades of grey, sometimes ambivalence still leads to illness: from Leon Festinger’s ‘cognitive dissonance’ to Gregory Bateson’s ‘double binds’, irresolvable contradictions can drive us out of our minds. Ambivalence is also of broader interest across disciplines, from philosophy (skepticism, nondualism, paradox) to politics (voter apathy, doublethink) to literary studies (what should we make of books we conflictedly ‘love to hate’—or hate to love?) In our polarised world, is ambivalence a desirable trait—an open-minded, unbiased ability to see debates from both sides—or is it the antithesis of commitment, a route to confusion and indecision? This symposium s gathers academics and mental health practitioners to analyse ambivalence from all angles: psychological, social, political, aesthetic and more.

Speakers and participants will include:

• Akshi Singh, author of In Defence of Leisure: Experiments in Living with Marion Milner (Penguin, 2025), associate editor at Parapraxis and deputy editor at Critical Quarterly.  

• John Havard (SUNY Binghamton), academic and literary scholar; author of Disaffected Parties (Oxford, 2019) and Late Romanticism and the End of Politics (Cambridge, 2023). 
• Ben Kafka (Columbia University), psychoanalyst in private practice; associate professor of clinical psychoanalysis, Columbia University, fellow at the DeWitt Wallace Institute of Psychiatry at Weill Cornell Medicine  
• Carol Owens (Dublin), psychoanalytic psychotherapist with clinical expertise on adolescence; co-author of Psychoanalysing Ambivalence with Freud and Lacan (Routledge). 

• Harry Daniels (University of Oxford), scholar of literature and psychoanalysis; currently working on “oceanic feeling” and environmental mysticism in British Literature and Object Relations Psychoanalysis.  

• Sahanika Ratnayake (Manchester University), historian and philosopher of science; recent publications in Philosophy, Psychiatry and Psychology and BMJ Medical Humanities. 

• Katharina Junejo (Manchester), psychotherapist and consultant child and adolescent psychiatrist in the NHS. 

• Jess Cotton (Cambridge University), current book project Lonely Subjects: Loneliness in Postwar Literature and Psychoanalysis, 1945-1975. 

• Michael Kalisch (University of Bristol), author of The Midcentury Minor Novel (Edinburgh, 2024). 

• Ben Bateman (Edinburgh University), author of Queer Disappearance in Modern and Contemporary Fiction (Oxford, 2023). 

• Ben Jones (NHS Broadmoor), forensic psychiatrist and trainee psychodynamic therapist. 

• Veronica Esposito (Berkeley, CA), psychotherapist; literary translator; writer and transgender advocate; regular contributor to The Guardian, Literary Hub, etc.

This event is free to attend. The virtual link will be circulated closer to the event.

This symposium is hosted by the Affective Experience Lab at the Discovery Research Platform for Medical Humanities, Durham University.

Please contact Dr Josh Pugh (david.j.pugh@dur.ac.uk) or Dr Fraser Riddell (f.i.riddell@dur.ac.uk) with any questions.