Wednesday, April 26, 2006

Dream Horizons?


If you didn't already know, this year is the 150th anniversary of Freud's birth. The Annual Freud Memorial lecture, entitled 'Dream Horizons', will be held at the University of Essex on Friday 26th May. It will be given by Adam Phillips who was formerly the Principal Child Psychotherapist at Charing Cross Hospital. For details and to reserve a free place click here. Details of all sorts of related events throught the year can also be found here.

2 comments:

Unknown said...

I was somewhat taken aback to learn from our own medhum students and from my neice who is studying for a psychology BSc, that Freud is now treated with derision by most university departments. I can appreciate that more biomedical views now dominate the field, but his ideas are still so prevalent, especially in the interpretation of art and film. Maybe the 150th anniversary of his birth will revive interest in the contribution he's made -- to culture, if not to medical science.

Beth Williamson said...

My own experience is that current thinking in psychoanalytic aesthetics is more concerned with the work of Lacan on the one hand and Klein on the other. (French and British schools respectively). My own work is concerned with British object relations as a way of exploring the experience of the artist in the act of creation and the experience of the viewer in the act of beholding an artwork. I suppose you could say that none of this would have been possible if it hadn't been for Freud's initial formulation of the death drive and the ego.