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.
The Lost Objects of Childhood Author’s talk: Deborah Levy
Talk: House/Museum by Dr Anthony Hudek
Freud’s Collection: Passion, Loss and Recovery
Radio Schreber, Soliloques for Schziophonic voices
Maggi Hambling: On the Artist’s Couch
Hubris: The Road to Donald Trump, Power, Populism, Narcissism with David Owen
Words and Signifiers Still Matter - Yael Baldwin
Protest Psychosis: Race, Stigma, and the Diagnosis of Schizophrenia
The Enigma of the Hour: Artist’s Talk, Jennifer Higgie in conversation with Daniel Silver and Simon Moretti
Freud in Prison - Pamela Windham Stewart and Kelly
The Hidden Persuader
The Book You Wish Your Parents Had Read
David Lomas: A Language of Flowers: Surrealism, Psychoanalysis, and the Botanical Imaginary
Krzysztof Fijalkowski: The Question of Play Analysis: Surrealism, Psychoanalysis and the Game of Symbolically Functioning Objects
Martin Bladh: The Rorschach Text (reading)
Roundtable: The Private Life: Why we Remain in the Dark
Narcissus, Oedipus and the Persistence of Memory
Curator's talk: Dawn Ades in conversation with Darian Leader
Freud's Women Lisa Appignanesi in conversation with Susie Orbach
Conference: Solitary Pleasures in art and psychoanalysis- Open discussion end of session 4
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