Past Event
"Love, Hate and Knowledge:
the Analyst’s Aesthetic Conflict"
Meg Harris Williams
For many years there has been an increasing interest in the nature of the psychoanalytic process as a type of art form, albeit with scientific objectives to do with gaining self-knowledge and knowledge about mental processes in general. The emotional pressures involved in this kind of knowledge were formulated by Bion as ‘Love, Hate and Knowledge’ (LHK), an extension of traditional emotional conflict, and adopted by Meltzer in his description of ‘aesthetic conflict’. Aesthetic conflict applies in all intimate emotional situations and as always, has been best portrayed by poets. According to Bion and Meltzer it applies not simply to the analysand’s material but to the analytic process itself which is the ‘aesthetic object’ for both partners in the quest for knowledge, and therefore evokes emotional turbulence. In this session I would like to focus on the experience of aesthetic conflict for the analyst him/herself, drawing on comments by these analytic authors and on some images of creative self-exploration imaged by poets (mainly Milton and Keats) within their wider narratives.
Zoom
link forthcoming
Saturday, October 9, 2021
10:00 AM - 12:30 PM
Meg Harris WilliamsMeg Harris Williams is a visual artist and a writer, and a teacher of psychoanalytic ideas, focusing on the nature of aesthetic experience and the links between psychoanalysis and the arts. Her books include Inspiration in Milton and Keats (1982), A Strange Way of Killing: the poetic structure of Wuthering Heights (1986), The Apprehension of Beauty (with Donald Meltzer; 1988), The Chamber of Maiden Thought (with Margot Waddell, 1991), The Vale of Soulmaking: the post-Kleinian model of the mind (2005), The Aesthetic Development: the poetic spirit of psychoanalysis (2010), Bion’s Dream: a reading of the autobiographies (2010), A Trial of Faith: Hamlet in Analysis (2014), The Becoming Room: filming Bion's Memoir of the Future (2016), The Art of Personality in Literature and Psychoanalysis (2017), and Dream Sequences in Shakespeare (2020). For children she has written Five Tales from Shakespeare (1996). She has written film and playscripts based on Bion’s Memoir. She teaches and lectures widely in the UK and abroad, mainly on post-Kleinian psychoanalytic ideas and their literary origins and analogies. Meg is a visiting lecturer at the Tavistock Clinic and an Honorary Member of the Psychoanalytic Center of California. She is editor of The Harris Meltzer Trust. Websites: www.artlit.info, www.harris-meltzer-trust.org.uk. Future Events
Penelope Garvey
Zoom
(link forthcoming), Berkeley, CA
Saturday, February 3, 2024
10:00 AM - 12:00 PM
Past Events
"Anorexia: Between Desire for Recognition and the Death Drive"
Domenico Cosenza, Ph.D.
"Psychoanalysis and Opera: Rejoining the Verbal and Non-Verbal"
Steve Goldberg, Dr.,
Lee Rather, Ph.D.,
""What Should I Call You? Pronouns and the Scene of Address""
Judith Butler, Ph.D.
"Link Theory and Practice: The Irreducible Effects of Presence"
Israel Katz, M.D.
"The Structure and Function of Part Objects"
Richard Rusbridger
"Psychoanalysis: the Contemporary Scene from an Editor's View"
Murray Schwartz
"Working Backwards: "Backwards Causation"and the Temporality of the Unconscious in Pre-Freudian Dream Theory"
Jake Fraser, Ph.D.
"The Significance of the Anus in Psychoanalytic Theory"
Benjamin Y. Fong, Ph.D.
"Love, Hate and Knowledge: the Analyst’s Aesthetic Conflict"
Meg Harris Williams
"The Analyst's Desire: The Ethical Foundation of Clinical Practice"
Mitchell Wilson, M.D.
"Freud’s Nietzsche: Eternal Return, Symptomatic Acts and the Gay Apophrades"
Dany Nobus
"What's uncanny in the Unheimliche?"
Sergio Benvenuto, Ph.D.
"Roads to the Unconscious: Some Parallels and Divergences between Psychoanalysis and the Writing of Poetry"
John Hart,
Helen Schoenhals Hart,
"Trans Realism: Psychoanalysis and the Trans Experience"
Patricia Gherovici, Ph.D.,
Grace Lavery, Ph.D.,
"*POSTPONED* What's uncanny in the Unheimliche?"
Sergio Benvenuto, Ph.D.
"*POSTPONED* Trans Realism, Psychoanalytic Practice, and the Rhetoric of Technique"
Grace Lavery, Ph.D.
"Creativity and the Erotic Dimensions of the Analytic Field"
Dianne Elise, Ph.D.
"Mama, Mnemo - Reading Kristeva with Montale"
Benjamin Davidson, Ph.D.
"The Maternal: Psychoanalysis, Literature and Film"
Claire Kahane, Ph.D.,
Marilyn Fabe, Ph.D.,
"Light Rooms: Medium, Mourning and Mania"
Elizabeth Abel, Ph.D.
"From Freud's Mourning to Mourning Freud"
Madelon Sprengnether, Ph.D.
"Group Discussion: The Place of the Nonrepresentational and the Nonverbal in Psychoanalysis"
Margot Beattie, Ph.D.,
Israel Katz, MD,
"Freud's Seduction: Psychoanalysis and California"
Fernando Castrillon, Psy.D.
"Trans Psychoanalysis and Livable Embodiments"
Patricia Gherovici, Ph.D.
"The Political Unconscious in Perilous Times"
Judith Butler, Ph.D.,
Lance Dodes, M.D.,
Jill Gentile, Ph.D.
"Die Meistersinger von Nurnberg: The Dream World of Wagner"
Steven H. Golderg, MD,
Jeanne C. Harasemovitch, LCSW,
"Incandescent Alphabets: Language and Art in Psychosis"
Annie G. Rogers, Ph.D.
"Homeland (In)Security: How Feminine Law Might Rescue Democracy, Truth and Free Speech"
Jill Gentile, Ph.D.
"Enigmatic Mechanisms: Some Reflections on Love, Affect, and Identification in Freud"
Marcus Coelen, Ph.D
"Refashioning Jouissance/Enjoyment for the Age of the Imaginary"
Juliet Flower MacCannell, Ph.D.
"Freud and the Frankfurt School"
Martin E. Jay, Ph.D.
"Thinking About The Future"
Christopher Bollas, Ph.D.
"Death Drive Dialogue #2"
Henry Markman, MD,
Israel Katz, MD,
"Psychoanalytic Knowledge"
Peter Hobson, Ph.D.
"The Alterability of the Memory Trace"
Rosaura Martinez, Ph.D.
"Conversion Disorder: Freud, religious transformation, Foucault and Agamben"
Jamieson Webster, Ph.D.
"Surviving Terror: An Interview with Ernst Federn"
Helen Schoenhals Hart, Dr.med.
"Rosa Luxemburg and Marilyn Monroe: Women in Depressed Times"
Jacqueline Rose
"Keeping the Other Alive: Counter-trends to the Death Drive"
Judith Butler, Ph.D.
"Cultivating the Foreigner Within: Julia Kristeva and Hannah Arendt on Uncanny Art and Human Relations in the Contemporary World"
Elaine Miller, Ph.D.
"Enduring Inequality: Racism in America"
Jeffrey Prager, Ph.D.
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