All registrants will receive their link to join via ZOOM. Attendees will also receive access to the recording on the Monday after the course, available to watch back for 1 month.
______________________________________________
Freud saw works of art as belonging to the same category as neurotic symptoms – which suggests that psychoanalysis should try to ‘explain’ what artists do, and ‘explain’ what art itself is. But it can be argued that Freud got the relationship between art and psychoanalysis the wrong way round. Rather than psychoanalysis being seen as a kind of ‘science’ – as having emerged from the development of scientific psychology in the 19th century – psychoanalysis is more accurately understood as emerging from art, specifically, from the advance in self-understanding made by the great literary artists of the late 18th and early 19th centuries. The true source of psychoanalysis lies in autobiographical writings of Rousseau and Goethe, and thus, it is art that can ‘explain’ psychoanalysis, rather than the other way round.
The course will examine the relationship between art and psychoanalysis, beginning from Freud’s writings on art and on artists (including Leonardo, Michelangelo and Goethe). We will also set out in detail the alternative to Freud’s dismissive view of the function of art in Jungian psychotherapy which recognises and makes full use of the healing potential of art and of imagery in general – visual and linguistic. This will lead into an exploration of the twentieth century discipline of ‘Art Therapy’ which has evolved to incorporate both art and psychoanalysis.
We will also study the evolution of thinking about art, and the artistic process, by later psychoanalytic writers, including Melanie Klein, Marion Milner, Donald Winnicott, Jacques Lacan and Julia Kristeva.
_____________________________________________________________
Keith Barrett BA PhD received his first degree in philosophy from Oxford University after having spent three years working as a nursing assistant in psychiatric hospitals. It was in this practical context that Keith first encountered existentialism and psychoanalysis. He then began postgraduate studies on both Freud and Heidegger, leading finally to a PhD from the Wellcome Centre for the History of Medicine at UCL for a dissertation on ‘Freud’s Self-Analysis’. Keith has been a philosophy teacher for over 20 years, and has been delivering courses at the Freud Museum for over a decade, where he has developed a series of introductory lectures on Freud, psychoanalysis after Freud, and exploring the overlap of philosophy and psychoanalysis.
_______________________________________________________________________
Schedule:
This course will take place over 2 days: 12 and 13 September 2024, from 13.30 – 17.00 each day (time includes a tea break). All attendees will also receive access to the recording.
_______________________________________________________________________
Tickets £ 45
Members’ Discount: Freud Museum Members will be able to receive a 20% discount on tickets with a special promocode. Details will be circulated to all Members via email.
Bursary: A limited number of £15 bursary places will be available for those under financial hardship. Priority will be given to UK unemployed and PIP/ESA claimants. Please email [email protected] to apply for a bursary.
The purpose of this course is to raise funds for the Freud Museum London, which receives no regular public income.
