UCL Interdisciplinary Seminar Series: ‘The Aesthetic Experience – Psychoanalysis and the Uncanny’, 11 February 2016

Interdisciplinary Seminar Series
Organised by Lesley Caldwell

“The Aesthetic Experience – Psychoanalysis and the Uncanny”
Gregorio Kohon in conversation with Professor Sharon Morris

Date: Thursday 11 February 2016
Time: 6pm – 7.30pm
Location: UCL Main Campus

For more information and to register please visit: http://www.ucl.ac.uk/psychoanalysis/events/interdisciplinary-seminars
For any additional queries please contact: events.psychoanalysis@ucl.ac.uk
*Please note that admission is free but places are limited

Psychoanalysis Unit
Research Dept of Clinical, Educational and Health Psychology
University College London

Art, literature and psychoanalysis are concerned with the unrepresentable, making silence heard, darkness visible. They share a “commonality of experience”, and the uncanny, as described by Freud, is a fundamental component of that commonality. This also includes the bleakness of borderline experience, uncertainty, anxiety, aloneness, silence; the reception of an artwork may evoke or touch or awaken in ways that may be difficult to understand or even bear. Psychoanalysis and the aesthetic share the task of making a representation of the unrepresentable, but they are separated by their own individual and contrasting ways of making the attempt. The artist Sharon Morris will explore these ideas with the psychoanalyst Gregorio Kohon.

Speaker Biographies
Gregorio Kohon is a Training Analyst of the British Psycho-Analytical Society. Originally from Argentina, he moved to England in 1970, where he studied and worked with R.D.Laing and his colleagues of the anti-psychiatry movement. He has edited and written several books on psychoanalysis and has published four volumns of poetry in Spanish. In 2015, he published Reflections on the Aesthetic Experience –
Psychoanalysis and the Uncanny.

Sharon Morris is an artist and poet, born in west Wales, trained in photography and video at the Slade School of Fine Art, UCL, where she is currently Deputy Director and Head of the Doctoral Programme. She also holds an MA in psychoanalytic theory from Middlesex University. Her research is concerned with the relationship between words and images and is best described as cross-disciplinary.