Reading Group: Psychoanalysis and Visual Culture in Historical Perspective

Monday 9th July, 6.30-8pm

Room G01, 43 Gordon Square

This series of reading groups looks at key texts in the history of psychoanalysis, exploring their connections to visual culture. Readings are intended for anyone interested in delving into this literature with a like minded group of non-experts from disciplines across art history, film and media studies etc.

For the second session on Monday 9th July, 6.30pm in room G01, 43 Gordon Square, we’re returning to some classics by Freud:

1) Freud & Josef Breuer, ‘On the Psychical Mechanism of Hysterical Phenomena: Preliminary Communication’, in Studies on Hysteria (1893)

2) Freud, ‘A Dream is the Fulfilment of a Wish’, in The Interpretation of Dreams (1900)

3) Freud, ‘Fragment of an analysis of a case: Dora’ (1905)

Note – this is a fairly long text, so you might want to just read some of the beginning and end parts of it.

4) Freud, ‘Mourning and Melancholia’ (1917)

Readings available to download via google drive:

https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1I5SBj_5Zb_V-wEbH4dddpd00zzsK5ynT?usp=sharing

If you’re only able to read two or three of the texts, please do still come along. We’re also inviting people to bring a few images that they’re working on – to help spark our visual thinking and draw out any potential connections, applications, tangents etc.

Assuming there’s an appetite to continue the readings, we’ll pick the texts and date for the next session following on from this second one. Please bring suggestions for readings if you have them!

To RSVP and for more information contact:

Alistair Cartwright (Birkbeck, History of Art) — alistaircartwright@gmail.com

Christy Slobogin (Birkbeck, History of Art) — cslobo01@mail.bbk.ac.uk