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Since its inception in Freud’s work, psychoanalysis has demonstrated its awareness that psychoanalysis and art share their operational terrain of unconscious processes: the question of how they do so is another matter - one which is largely still up for grabs.ÌýÌý

Juliet Mitchell, 2019Ìý

This module investigates dynamic interactions of art, psychoanalysis, and politics. From the Surrealist revolution to the present, art, film, performance, and visual culture have seized on radical ideas of psychoanalysis to articulate—to connect--subjectivity and politics. Psychoanalysis for its part has looked to art to develop its theories of the unconscious, sexuality, violence, and death. The fundamental proposition of psychoanalysis, its core idea, is the unconscious. In this module, we look at the role of the unconscious in representation, focusing especially on trends of sexuality, gender, and violence. We reflect upon the family, war, sexual violence, and groups. Among the concepts we explore are: dream-work, free association, play, the drives, sexual difference, gender difference, bisexuality, the symptom, hysteria, polymorphous perversity, humour, the death drive, the uncanny, fetishism, work of mourning, melancholia, mastery, repression, resistance, and transference. We may read selections from the theoretical writings of Sigmund Freud, Melanie Klein, Wilfred Bion, Jacques Lacan, D.W. Winnicott, Marion Milner, André Green, Franz Fanon, Franco Fornari, Hanna Segal, Julia Kristeva, and Juliet Mitchell, among others. We may consider the work of artists and filmmakers including Louise Bourgeois, Claude Cahun, Sophie Calle, Andrea Fraser, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Mona Hatoum, Isaac Julien, Mary Kelly, Silvia Kolbowski, Yayoi Kusama, Glenn Ligon, Sarah Lucas, Steve McQueen, Ana Mendieta, Laura Mulvey and Peter Wollen, Senga Nengudi, Yoko Ono, Carolee Schneemann, Cindy Sherman, Rosemarie Trockel, Kara Walker, and Carrie Mae Weems. We may draw upon the critical writings of Parveen Adams, Sara Ahmed, Jo Applin, Leo Bersani, Rizvana Bradley, Judith Butler, Douglas Crimp, Tim Dean, Briony Fer, Shoshana Felman, Hal Foster, Margaret Iversen, Kobena Mercer, Jose Muñoz, Griselda Pollock, Jacqueline Rose, Christine Ross, Kalpara Seshadri-Crooks, Hortense Spillers, Susan Suleiman, and Michele Wallace, among others. There will be occasional film screenings and exhibition visits, and students will be encouraged to explore the plethora of lectures and public events on and around psychoanalysis and culture at Ïã¸ÛÁùºÏ²Ê and in London.Ìý