Exploring the Unconscious: Arts, Science and the Humanities
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Psychoanalysis: the Contemporary Scene from an Editor’s View
Saturday, April 30, 2022 @ 10:00 am - 12:00 pm
Scanning the contemporary psychoanalytic scene from the perspective of a journal editor, I will present (necessarily partial) observations and questions about recent and long-term continuities and changes. Aiming to initiate discussion, I will touch on a variety of topics: theory and theorists, infancy, sexuality, society and politics, art and literature, the environment, history and psychoanalytic history. Where is Freud today? What is essential to the field? Is psychoanalysis thriving, or is it irreversibly fragmented?
SPEAKER
For over fifty years, Murray Schwartz taught Shakespeare, psychoanalysis and Holocaust literature. His writing spans a wide range of interdisciplinary interests and includes essays on Shakespeare's last plays, the work of Erik Erikson, applied psychoanalysis, modern poetry and trauma studies. He has co-edited several anthologies, including Representing Shakespeare: New Psychoanalytic Essays (1980), Memory and Desire: Psychoanalysis, Literature, Aging (1985). With Peggy Schwartz he wrote The Dance Claimed Me: A Biography of Pearl Primus (2011). He was President of the PsyArt Foundation and edited the online journal, PsyArt (www.psyartjournal.com) for twelve years. Murray was Dean of the Colleges at SUNY/Buffalo (1979-83), Dean of Humanities and Fine Arts at UMass Amherst (1983-91), Provost of the Claremont Graduate University (1991-97) and Academic Vice President at Emerson College (1997-99). He is a scholar member of the Boston Psychoanalytic Society and Institute, and has participated in studies of the September 11, 2001 attacks, and the writing of psychoanalytic history. In 2015 he retired from teaching at Emerson College in Boston. He is an Honorary Member of the American Psychoanalytic Association and Editor-in-Chief of American Imago.