Episodes
Monday Oct 12, 2015
Yom Kippur 1939: The Last Day of Freud's Life and its Immediate Aftermath
Monday Oct 12, 2015
Monday Oct 12, 2015
Thursday Oct 08, 2015
Psychoanalytic Poetry Festival 2015: The Creative Unconscious
Thursday Oct 08, 2015
Thursday Oct 08, 2015
The Poetry Society and the Freud Museum present an all-day event examining the creative unconscious, with leading speakers from the worlds of poetry, academia and psychoanalysis.
The unconscious, in so far as it refers to the processes of the mind that are not conscious, has always been a central concept in the arts. In science, however, the unconscious only found brief legitimacy in models of the unconscious/subconscious developed by Freud and William James before being relegated to the margins by the ascendency of positivist models of knowledge. Behaviorism dismissed ideas about the unconscious because they could not be empirically verified; logical positivist orthodoxy rendered what is not testable and falsifiable as ‘meaningless’. In this vein, Karl Popper famously claimed that psychoanalysis was a pseudo-science. However, new and ongoing discoveries in cognitive neuroscience during the last twenty years demonstrate that very little of what goes on in the brain is actually conscious, making it possible not only to re-examine earlier models of the unconscious but to witness the role of the unconscious in the human mind as the new frontier of knowledge. This paper will chart the relations between the unconscious and memory as they have been configured in psychoanalytic criticism and cognitive neuroscience to consider the innovations that might emerge from the correlation.
Thursday Oct 08, 2015
Psychoanalytic Poetry Festival 2015: The Creative Unconscious
Thursday Oct 08, 2015
Thursday Oct 08, 2015
The Poetry Society and the Freud Museum present an all-day event examining the creative unconscious, with leading speakers from the worlds of poetry, academia and psychoanalysis.
Kathryn Maris discusses ‘I Remember’, a cult classic poem-memoir by New York School artist and writer Joe Brainard, and other poets such as Louis MacNeice and Lyn Hejinian, who have also written transformatively about memory. Maris will talk about how these poetic models were used in a recent writing workshop, in order to generate poems which draw on hidden or unexpected memories; and invite some of the participating poets to share the work which resulted.
Performative reading with unconscious and conscious patternings followed by discussion.
Thursday Oct 08, 2015
Psychoanalytic Poetry Festival 2015: The Creative Unconscious
Thursday Oct 08, 2015
Thursday Oct 08, 2015
The Poetry Society and the Freud Museum present an all-day event examining the creative unconscious, with leading speakers from the worlds of poetry, academia and psychoanalysis.
Yeats understood his poetry was equestrian. It was the exercise of skill and control over the vitality of the unconscious in the struggle to govern the dreamlife of the body and its desires. This talk explores the force of the unconscious in Yeats’s life, including some of its more amusing manifestations, as well as emphasizing the quasi-violent tension between order and lawlessness in the great poems.
Dr Ronald Britton talks with Beatrice Garland about the parallel lives that being both a poet and a psychoanalyst involves. She talks about the influence her two analyses, and her subsequent work as an analyst, has had upon her capacity to write; and reads a selection of poems that derive from unconscious mental process. How, coming from a distinguished scientific background, and in the face of some opposition from the parental generation, does one become both a psychoanalyst and a poet?
Thursday Oct 08, 2015
Psychoanalytic Poetry Festival 2015: The Creative Unconscious
Thursday Oct 08, 2015
Thursday Oct 08, 2015
The Poetry Society and the Freud Museum present an all-day event examining the creative unconscious, with leading speakers from the worlds of poetry, academia and psychoanalysis.