AIP Public Lecture
“When everything seems double” Psychoanalysis, gender & text
Psychoanalysis, literary studies and gender have a long, entwined and often uneasy history. It has been argued that much psychoanalysis, at least as written, has had a literary base since Studies in Hysteria; and likewise that literature has always been fundamentally concerned with the unconscious, ’how mind reformulates the real” (Peter Brooks). In thinking about mind, identity, the interpersonal, the literary provides, as it did for Freud and many who came after him, a proving ground, a stable artefact to help think about the interpersonal storms of the here-and-now. Can literature help to unravel, or at least contemplate, some of the puzzles of gender, sexuality, identity and what might this look like in psychoanalytic theory? This talk will reflect some of these questions, particularly as they are manifested in the work of Wilfred Bion, whose oeuvre spans the literary and the clinical in the most unexpected ways. The double in literature and psychoanalysis will be considered, and how that might help to think about gender complexities. Dr Kay Souter is a literary and cultural critic who taught English and psychoanalytic studies at La Trobe University and RMIT for over thirty years. She has a special interest in representations of motherhood and post-Kleinian theory, and is widely published in these areas. For the last ten years of her career, she worked in the management of student learning in higher education at several universities. She is now retired and works as a viticulturist on her small family vineyard in north-east Victoria.
When: Thursday 25 November 2021 7.15 p.m. – 8.45 p.m. CST
Where: Zoom Conference Link details: TBA
Cost: $77 Inc. GST