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Berkeley Psychoanalytic Society
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Oakland, CA 64610

 

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Love, Hate and Knowledge: the Analyst’s Aesthetic Conflict

Saturday, October 9, 2021 @ 10:00 am - 12:00 pm

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Speaker

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.

SPEAKER

Meg Harris Williams

Meg 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.

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