Symposium
14-15 July 2026
St John’s College, Oxford
Organizers:
Louise Braddock (Independent Psychoanalytic Thought network), Elisa Galgut (University of Cape Town), Niall Gildea (Edge Hill University), Derek Matravers (Open University).
Biographies and Abstracts:
Ann Addison is a Lecturer in The Department of Psychosocial and Psychoanalytic Studies at University of Essex. Her research focuses on the history, comparison and contemporary application of psychoanalytic concepts, with particular reference to the work of W. R. Bion and C. G. Jung. She is interested in the interface between the individual and society, and in the possibility for mutual interplay between psychoanalytic concepts and understandings and legal processes.
In a previous presentation, I considered the question of caesura and their effects on a capacity for communication. With reference to a clinical case, where the mother and the mother’s body have been central features of the work, I contemplated the caesura of birth and the possibility that new separations might re-generate a trauma associated with this original caesura. I then wondered whether there might be a need to return to a state prior to this first rupture to heal a deeply felt wound. In the case under discussion, a regression took place and during such period a state prevailed where silence permeated the intersubjective space in the consulting room. As analyst, I experienced an inability to speak, a form of mute silence where words would not form or, when they did, they could not be spoken, something unusual in my experience. Since the time of this presentation, the work has continued and gradually a new development has opened up, where speech is available and representations of the rupture and of this earlier time have begun to emerge. I should like now to explore this new phase with reference to the process of the development of meaning and understandings of meaning through pictorial representation, for example in dreams and other internal imagery. I propose to refer to the work of Marion Milner in addition to that of Klein, Segal, Bion and Winnicott for a theoretical underpinning. I shall then endeavour to link this psychoanalytic understanding with Wollheim’s psychoanalytic philosophy of mind.
Paolo Babbiotti holds a PhD in Philosophy from the University of Turin. He is the author of Cavell, Williams and the Question of Style in Philosophy (2024) and has published in several international journals, such as the European Journal of Philosophy, Inquiry, and Topoi. His current research focuses on the philosophical and psychoanalytic thought of Richard Wollheim.
This talk examines Richard Wollheim’s unpublished 1961 lecture “Psychoanalysis and Value,” delivered at the Royal Institute of Philosophy, in order to reconstruct an early and revealing moment in his engagement with Melanie Klein. Although Wollheim is usually remembered as a philosopher of art and mind, this text shows that Kleinian psychoanalysis also played a decisive role in shaping his moral outlook. The lecture is especially significant because it captures Wollheim at a transitional stage: already deeply attracted to psychoanalysis and close to beginning his own Kleinian analysis, yet still approaching psychoanalytic theory with the probing and critical eye of a philosopher. The paper begins by situating Wollheim’s interest in Klein within his biographical and intellectual trajectory, emphasizing the importance of his postwar experience, his dissatisfaction with purely academic philosophy, and his encounter with Adrian Stokes and Klein herself. It then turns to the central philosophical question of the lecture: does Kleinian psychoanalysis merely describe the genesis of certain values, or does it incorporate evaluative assumptions into its very conceptual structure? Wollheim’s answer, I argue, is subtle but far-reaching. He suggests that Klein’s theory is not simply a descriptive psychology of infant development. In its distinction between persecutory and depressive anxiety, in its account of reparation, and in its conception of successful emotional development, the theory embeds normative criteria. In particular, Wollheim focuses on the idea that depressive anxiety cannot be excessive in the same way persecutory anxiety can, and he asks whether this distinction is genuinely empirical or partly conceptual and evaluative. His analysis leads to the conclusion that values enter into the grammar of Kleinian theory itself. Rather than treating this as a weakness, Wollheim presents it as a possible condition of psychoanalysis’s clinical and theoretical force. The lecture thus offers an early and important testimony to Wollheim’s lifelong attempt to interrogate psychoanalysis from within, while also drawing on it to rethink morality, value, and human development.
Jim Berryman is a researcher based in London with an interest in art history and related fields. He is affiliated with the School of Humanities at the University of Glasgow.
This paper revisits an important, though now largely forgotten, essay by E. H. Gombrich entitled ‘Psycho-Analysis and the History of Art’. Written for the British Psychoanalytical Society in 1953, Gombrich gives an intriguing (and at times amusing) explanation for stylistic change in art. Gombrich’s lecture examined the connection between oral gratification and aesthetic taste. Food is not merely a synaesthetic metaphor for taste in art, it is “a genetic model for aesthetic pleasure.” To illustrate his case, Gombrich looks at French academic painting of the nineteenth century and asks why we find its pictorial perfectionism so unsatisfying, and indeed so unappetising. He takes aim at the “syrupy” and “saccharined” pictures of William-Adolphe Bouguereau, a painter whose faultless technique exemplified the Art Officiel of the Paris Salon. In view of this style, we can appreciate Cézanne’s imperfections and Picasso’s distortions, and the regressive pleasure that came from “primitivism,” a panacea for the sickly-sweet glibness of academicism. Wollheim was familiar with Gombrich’s essay, and its impact can be seen in his writings about art. In a late and little-known paper, ‘Why Art Changes?’, Wollheim would use similar ideas but a different bodily metaphor – fatigue – to explain stylistic change in art.
Marissa Sappho Bitton LCSW, BCD-P, CEDS-C is a board-certified psychoanalyst, certified eating disorder specialist, and the founder and clinical director of Aurora Center NYC, an outpatient eating disorder practice in New York City. A devoted educator, she has taught at the undergraduate and graduate levels, presented nationally and internationally, and holds faculty and supervisory roles at a post-graduate psychoanalytic training institute.
This paper examines If I Had Legs I’d Kick You through the lens of Richard Wollheim’s psychoanalytic aesthetics, foregrounding his account of pictorial meaning as rooted in bodily experience and unconscious phantasy. Wollheim’s philosophy of art, shaped by Freudian drive theory and Kleinian object relations, understands artworks not as symbolic representations to be decoded, but as expressions that arise from, and speak through, the body. Central to this account is projective identification, through which unconscious phantasy is externalized into aesthetic form and re-encountered by the viewer at the level of affect. Through close analysis of the feeding-tube removal scene and the film’s persistent water imagery, the paper argues that the film operates as an aesthetic enactment of maternal overwhelm rather than a narrative depiction of it. The body, strained, flooded, depleted, becomes the primary site of meaning, aligning with Wollheim’s insistence that art mediates between corporeality and inner life, giving “voice” to the unconscious. Drawing selectively on Kleinian and Bionian concepts such as containment, attacks on linking, and primitive anxiety, these psychoanalytic ideas are treated not as interpretive endpoints but as psychic contents that the film renders sensuously available through rhythm, gesture, and visual density. Water functions as a privileged site of complex projection, oscillating between amniotic holding and annihilating flood, and compelling the viewer into a shared affective field. In this way, the film exemplifies Wollheim’s claim that aesthetic experience involves a bodily grasp of meaning prior to conceptual articulation. The paper concludes by suggesting that If I Had Legs I’d Kick You demonstrates the reciprocal movement between art and psychoanalysis: while Wollheim drew psychoanalytic insight into philosophy of art, works such as this film reveal how aesthetic form itself actively shapes our understanding of psychic life, dependency, and survival.
Chiara Brozzo is Assistant Professor in Philosophy, School of Philosophy, Theology and Religion, University of Birmingham. She has done research on olfaction from the point of view of aesthetics, arguing that some perfumes are works of art (Brozzo, C. (2020). Are Some Perfumes Works of Art? The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 78(1), 21-32). She explores the interactions between aesthetically appreciating some nature-inspired perfumes and aesthetically appreciating nature (Brozzo, C. (2022). Perfumes and the Aesthetic Appreciation of Nature. In A. Keller & Young, B. (Eds.), Theoretical Perspectives on Smell). Enrico Terrone is Professor of Aesthetics, University of Genoa: Enrico Terrone has worked on the role of perception, imagination and cognition in pictorial experience, considering both still pictures and films. He has conceived of pictures as artifacts having the function of eliciting perceptual experiences of absent things. (Terrone, E. (2021) The Standard of Correctness and the Ontology of Depiction. American Philosophical Quarterly, 58(4), 399-412, DOI: https://doi.org/10.2307/48619323 Terrone, E. (2021b). Seeing-in and Singling Out: How to Reconcile Pictures with Singular Thought. Pacific Philosophical Quarterly, 102(3), 378-392, DOI: https://doi.org/10.1111/papq.12366
The aim of this paper is twofold. The first is to extend the notion of depiction to the olfactory domain. The second is to uncover a middle ground between depiction and conventional representations such as linguistic ones. We will call this middle ground evocation, and highlight the role of associations between sensory experiences and what is evoked. Consider the perfume Vol 870 YUL-CDG by perfume house Monsillage. The inspiration for it is a flight from Montreal to Paris, and the three different temporal stages of this perfume are inspired respectively by Canadian forests, the experience of being airborne, and Parisian elegance. We will argue that the first stage can be understood as an olfactory depiction of the experience as of being in Canada, since it elicits an olfactory experience as of a Canadian forest. But a question remains as to how to interpret the other two stages of this perfume. Isabelle Michaud, the perfume’s nose, used bright notes, such as bergamot, for the experience of being airborne, and opulent resins to capture Parisian elegance. But neither scent reproduces an experience as of either being airborne or being somewhere in Paris, and therefore it is not a depiction. We will propose that in order to capture the relationship between bright notes such as bergamot and the experience of being airborne we need a hitherto unexplored kind of relationship, which we propose to call evocation. The perceptual experience of the vehicle for evocation has a role in grasping what is represented, but it does not count as an experience as of what is represented. A fundamental role is played by (not strictly perceptual) associations between the perceptual aspect of the medium and what it is supposed to evoke–for example, opulent resins could be associated with Parisian elegance.
David Collins is the Rubinoff Fellow in Art as a Source of Knowledge at Churchill College, Cambridge, where his work brings together aesthetics, ethics, and the philosophy of mind. Originally from Canada, and with a background in film and theatre prior to his move to philosophy, he earned his PhD at McGill University in Montreal.
Bringing together Wollheim’s and Collingwood’s views on art may seem a surprising choice, given how critical Wollheim was of what he took to be an objectionably ‘Idealist’ bent in Collingwood’s aesthetics, according to which artworks were mental entities existing only ‘in the heads’ of artists and their audiences, and not the physical objects or events that spectators encounter, such as painted canvases, marble sculptures, sounds produced by instruments, bodies moving in a dance performance, etc. As influential as Wollheim’s critique has been among analytic philosophers of art, it is based on a misreading, and when properly interpreted Collingwood’s account of art and its value is remarkably close to Wollheim’s own; however, because of this misreading, the parallels and compatibilities that can be found their writings on art and on the human mind have been under-explored. Also under-explored is Collingwood’s engagement with psychoanalysis, which is something he shared with Wollheim and which has been more widely discussed in the latter’s case. In this talk I will argue that their shared interest in psychoanalysis led both men to develop similar understandings of artistic expression, the value of art for self-knowledge, and the importance of art for avoiding the disavowal of parts of our emotional lives that Collingwood termed the ‘corruption of consciousness’. I will also argue that Wollheim’s and Collingwood’s writings on art and the mind were not only influenced by psychoanalysis but have the potential to influence psychoanalysis in turn; in particular, its understanding of the connection between works of art and their creators’ mental lives.
Whitney Davis is Professor in the Graduate School at the University of California at Berkeley and 2024-29 Distinguished Scientist & Scholar of the NOMIS Foundation, Zürich. He has a forthcoming book on theories and methods of art history and several articles on the early history of psychoanalysis in relation to developments in psychiatry, anthropology, and philosophy.
In his often overlooked essay on R. B. Kitaj’s paintings, pastels, and drawings, Wollheim sketched a critical approach to postwar art (roughly, art since 1950) that distinguished its two main strands—an art of ‘fragments’ (presenting just ‘one aspect’ of objects and the world, as in ‘Conceptual Art’, not to speak of practices such as Sherrie Levine’s) and an art attempting to recreate ‘whole’ objects and states of affairs. (To its ultimate benefit, Wollheim thought, Kitaj’s practice had developed from the former to the latter.) The paper explicates Wollheim’s model and his examples as presented in various critical writings: for the art of fragments, for instance, his 1964 essay on ‘Minimal Art’, and for the art of wholes, his assessments not only of later Kitaj but also of Adrian Stokes’s Kleinian art criticism, which Wollheim commented on in several contexts (notably, in ‘The Image in Form’ and his Preface to Stokes’s The Invitation in Art). Despite widespread interest in Wollheim’s philosophy of art, not much attention has been paid to his art criticism in essays on Kitaj, Wayne Thiebault, and others. The paper attempts to redress this imbalance. (The recent Uncollected Writings on art, though admirable and useful, doesn’t include Wollheim’s texts relevant for this paper, including lectures delivered in British art schools.) I emphasise Wollheim’s distinctively Kleinian perspective in this as in all other spheres of his work, and as deeply indebted to Hanna Segal’s ‘Psycho-Analytic Aesthetics’. But in assessing Wollheim’s critical judgments I also suggest its limitations: above all, in his relative downgrading of major movements in postwar art he validated artists whose achievements—whilst bespeaking maverick points of view on the psychic tasks of postwar art—might now be seen to be middling at best.
Elisa Galgut is Professor of Philosophy, University of Cape Town. Her main interests lie in the philosophy of literature, the philosophy of psychoanalysis, and animal ethics. She has recently published Mentalization and Literary Form; she is also a published poet.
In The Thread of Life, Wollheim examines some of the ways in which elements of narrative can be exploited to give a false account of behaviour. For example, the Rat Man describes his replacement of the stone in the road as an undoing of an initial irrational action, whereas Freud noted that both the removal and the replacement of the stone formed two parts of the same irrational activity. Wollheim argues that certain elements of narrative – its sequential nature, its use of perspective – can provide a façade for irrational behaviour, making it seem more rational than it is. This is possible in part because narrative lies at the core of folk psychological explanation. In this talk, I’ll explore some of the ways in which features of narrative can be used to disguise irrational activity. I’ll also gesture to the ways in which this discussion illustrates important connections between our understanding of art (in this case, literature) and the mind. Wollheim’s unpacking of the ways in which features of narrative can be used to disguise (as well as reveal) mental activity is an illustration of the important ways in which aesthetics and art / literary criticism can contribute to psychoanalysis.
Louise Gyler is a child and adult training analyst of the Australian Psychoanalytical Society. Publications include The Gendered Unconscious and papers on the clinical process and gender. She is currently editing the forthcoming collection, The Desiring Woman in the Asia Pacific: Ambiguities, Displacements and Contradictions.
‘Tear’ or ‘tear’ with its double meaning and pronunciation in English is used as a metaphor to explore what lies behind the mask of apparent passivity and social compliance adopted by some women. Female identity and sexuality have always been elusive and troublesome for psychoanalysis, in part, reflecting something about the category of “femaleness” in culture. In “Womanliness as a masquerade” (1929), Joan Riviere, foreshadows contemporary themes in gender theory: what is covered by the masquerade and what are the motivations for it? Answers might include negation or repression of feminine desire, denial of the lack of an adequate desire in women and, according to Riviere, a reaction formation against oral aggression and the fear of retribution for masculine identifications (possession of the penis/phallus). In this paper, I suggest that, when the symbolic mask is resisted, the psychic phenomena revealed include the tear of loneliness, sadness and emptiness and these emotions relate to the tears in identity wounding a sense self-esteem and value, that is, creating narcissistic vulnerability. I explore this psychic situation in relation to a brief clinical example, and to Han Kang’s writing in her The Vegetarian.The protagonists reveal the psychic workings of suffering, family expectations, complex power dynamics and violence when the masquerade of compliance is loosened. For both, the body is the battleground of refusal, loss and desire. The juxtaposition of the Western clinical illustration and the Eastern literary narrative deepen understanding of the universality of themes concerning gender dynamics, bodily autonomy and personal identity.
Susanne Hermann-Sinai is Head of German, Magdalen College School Oxford; Reviews Editor, the Hegel Bulletin. Her publications include “Second Nature and Self-Determination in Hegel’s Philosophy of Spirit”, Life, Organism and Human Nature: Perspectives on Classical German Philosophy, L. Corti, J. Schülein (eds.) (2023) and “Hegel on the Difference between Social Normativity and the Normativity of Right”, Hegel-Studien 53 (2020).
Having a mother is a universal of the human condition. Not in a mere biological sense but in a sense that articulates a social relation, or as Melanie Klein called it: an ‘object-relation’. Her use of ‘object’ differs widely from the term used in philosophy, yet philosophy, especially the philosophy of G. W. F. Hegel, allows for an articulation of social relations as a central theme. Comparing the psychoanalytic route (Klein) and the philosophical route (German Idealisms, Hegel) alongside shared themes rather than shared words will open up a dialogue into what the universal of a mother is and how it can be conceptualised.
Natalia Perez Juncal is PhD candidate in Philosophy at Universidad Complutense de Madrid. She holds an MA in Psychoanalysis and Theory of Culture (UCM) and a Bachelor’s degree in Psychology from Universidad de la República (Uruguay), with clinical training in psychoanalysis.
This paper examines how Julia Kristeva’s early reflections on the chora can help us rethink aesthetic experience through the relation between the body, the semiotic, and the symbolic. In her early work, the semiotic names a rhythmic and bodily modality of signifiance that precedes full symbolic articulation while continuing to disturb and traverse it. I argue that this framework clarifies Kristeva’s later account of sublimation in Black Sun: Depression and Melancholia, where poetic form secures a provisional hold over the Thing – a notion Kristeva reworks in dialogue with psychoanalytic accounts of das Ding – through rhythm, melody, and semantic polyvalence. Read together, these moments suggest that aesthetic experience may be understood not primarily as a matter of representation or art theory, but in terms of how sensation becomes form without ever fully leaving behind its bodily and pre-symbolic ground.
Anna Samosudova is an MPhil student in Music at Somerville College, Oxford. She works at the intersection of philosophy and musicology. One strand of her research engages with post-Kantian aesthetics, particularly the thought of Nietzsche and Adorno, while another focuses on analytic philosophy of art, with a special emphasis on music.
Wollheim’s aesthetics inherits a systematic commitment from its Freudian-Kleinian foundations: affect becomes available to experience only through representation. Projection operates through depicted content, Kleinian phantasy is structured as phantasy of an object, and expression is anchored in figuration. In his account of pictorial experience, corporeality plays an important role — but the body’s contribution is consistently routed through the image. I argue that this follows from the model of mind Wollheim inherits, in which the passage from drive to mental life is understood as a passage into representation. Against this background, I introduce music as a contrastive case. Musical experience engages the body — through rhythmic entrainment, vocal resonance, and the felt dynamics of tension and release — in ways that are affectively structured yet not organised around imagistic or object-directed content. I argue that music is not a representation of pre-imagistic affect, but an instance of it: a mode in which affect is organised and articulated without being mediated by an image or object. This has two consequences for Wollheim’s project. First, music gives his framework a new epistemic resource. Psychoanalysis typically accesses pre-representational affect indirectly — through its traces in transference (Bion) or through infant observation (Stern). Music offers a third route: direct acquaintance with structured corporeal affect within adult aesthetic experience — not an illustration of what psychoanalytic theory already knows, but an independent form of access that Wollheim’s aesthetics is uniquely positioned to theorise. Second, music reveals that the central mechanisms of Wollheim’s aesthetics — projection, corporeal engagement, the link between body and aesthetic experience — reach further than his own pictorial examples suggest. They do not depend on the image; they operate at a more fundamental level. Music, I argue, does not mark the boundary of Wollheim’s framework but discloses its deeper structure.
Edward Winters is an independent researcher.
These are: (i) body as content, (ii) bodily configuration of the work, and (iii) the artist’s body of work. I shall relate each aspect to Richard Wollheim’s conception of painting. Wittgenstein writes, “The concept of an aspect is akin to the concept of [a mental] image. In other words: The concept ‘I am now seeing it as…’ is akin to ‘I am now having this image’”. The kinship is important but so is the contrast. When looking at a picture, I see an orange disk as the sun. When I form a [mental] image of the sun (in my head) there is nothing I am looking at – and so, there is nothing to be ‘seen-as’ the sun. This demonstrates that mental images are not like pictures in the head. Rather, they are like three-dimensional images in the head. This matters for (ii). If contents of artworks are virtually three-dimensional images, then connection with the the painting is compromised. However, it shows that when Apollinaire mentioned ‘the internal frame’ – an intervention of language or material into the picture-space – he was identifying a way in which the compromise can be accommodated. In Wollheimian terms, what is ‘seen-in’ the picture surface becomes virtually three-dimensional. In each of the three sections (i – iii) Wollheim is in plain sight. (i) body as content: Wollheim on what is ‘seen-in’ the painting; (ii) bodily configuration of the work: Wollheim on the fabricated picture surface; and (iii) the artist’s body of work. Wollheim on the nature of individual style. Walker’s work is – as Wollheim demands – an artist whose work is generative. It amounts to her achievement of style – the shadow puppet-like use of silhouette flattens the picture space, inverting the narrative of the collaged Illustrated Civil War.
After Wollheim: The Richard Wollheim Centenary Project, phase 3 