Workshop
Monday 21 July 2025, 10am-5pm
St John’s College, Oxford
This is the second of two one-day workshops in Summer 2025 exploring new openings on the intersection of mind, art, and psychoanalysis in the work of Richard Wollheim. The programme can be found below. There will be no video-link for remote access. The workshop is free, but registration is essential at wollheimcentenary@gmail.com and will be confirmed to you with details of venue. The order of speakers may vary.
Speakers:
Celia Batten (Consultant in Perinatal Psychiatry and Psychoanalytical Psychotherapist): ‘ANNUNCIATION: Good, Bad, or ‘Fake’ News?’
David Collins (Cambridge): ‘Artistic Expression and Projective Identification’
Whitney Davis (UC Berkeley): ‘Projection and Completion in Art History’
Louise Gyler (Australian Psychoanalytical Society): ‘On the Edge: Dangerous Moments in Navigating Two-ness’
Henrike Moll (Southern California): ‘Disorganized Attachment, Dissociation, and Mutual Recognition’
Anna-Lisa Sander (Heidelberg): ‘The Boundary of Self and Other – Wollheim on Projective Identification’
Jing Wang (Oxford): ‘Entangled Gazes: Projective Identification in User-Generated Documentary Cinema’
Abstracts:
Celia Batten (Consultant in Perinatal Psychiatry and Psychoanalytical Psychotherapist): ‘Annunciation: Good, Bad, or ‘Fake’ News?’
The iconic representation of the Annunciation is explored in this presentation, using psychoanalytical concepts and illustrating the narrative with different paintings, video, and a clinical vignette. The evolution through the years in the artistic message of the Annunciation is explored. In particular, I consider how the changing means of communication affect not only how the “message” is received, but also the modern woman’s responses to conception and pregnancy.
David Collins (Cambridge): ‘Artistic Expression and Projective Identification’
My paper will explore the intersubjective aspect of art as a relation between artist and audience ‘through’ the work that one produces and one apprehends, and specifically how the psychoanalytic idea of ‘projective identification’ as a model of how imagined objects/experiences and their affective charges can be communicated between patient and analyst in a therapeutic context might be extended to art in order to illuminate how artworks can function as expressions (vs. merely being ‘expressive’). It will also consider how this model might give criteria for justifying an audience-member’s judgment that a work of art is an expression, and what it is an expression of, and/or their interpretation of the artist’s intentions, creative choices and actions, and other elements of the process of the work’s creation. I will draw on ideas around projection, identification, and imagination that Wollheim, following Melanie Klein, discusses, along with Collingwood’s account of expression – including his idea of successful expression as a remedy for ‘corruption of consciousness’ – and will build on recent work of my own on the intersubjective relation of artist and audience and the role of the imagination in an audience-member’s engagement with a work of art as (the result of) an artist’s ‘doing.’
Whitney Davis (UC Berkeley): ‘Projection and Completion in Art History’
My topic will be, broadly, projection, and will draw on the use of images in diagnostics in psychiatry and elsewhere. Art historians (e.g. Gombrich, Summers) often work with the notion that beholders ‘complete’ a picture (as they do any ‘view’ of the world in natural visual perception) by filling in indeterminacies (e.g. resolving geometric ambiguity, specifying motifs symbolically, etc.). Sometimes this notion overlaps with (quasi-)psychoanalytic notions of projection, with which it is affiliated historiographically. The paper outlines these approaches and their tensions; for instance, Gombrich identified the ‘origins of depiction’ in projection, but disavowed psychoanalytic framings of the idea.
Louise Gyler (Australian Psychoanalytical Society): ‘On the Edge: Dangerous Moments in Navigating Two-ness’
There are moments in the therapeutic encounter where the possibility of transformation turns on a knife-edge. In this clinical paper, I explore responses to the confrontation with otherness, separation and separateness. Tustin exquisitely opened a space for naming and reflecting on the precarious nature of transitioning between the psychic states of oneness and twoness. The transitions between these states for some patients are terrifying, leaving them exposed to falling into an internal state of collapse and catastrophe. I consider through the case illustrations of a small child and an adult woman some destructive strategies that can be employed to avoid this experience; the small child with an abusive and traumatic history attempted to attack the analyst with scissors; and the adult woman who had a long history of serious psychopathology and self-mutilation reaching back into adolescence shifted from self-harm to threatening to harm the analyst. I shall suggest that the analyst’s relationship to her own emotional resonances played a significant role in determining the therapeutic action and the outcome of interpretive intervention. Additionally, I consider how the role of the unspoken elements in making an interpretation is crucial to the question of transformation and navigating ‘the tantrum of two-ness’.
Henrike Moll (Southern California): ‘Disorganized Attachment, Dissociation, and Mutual Recognition’
Dissociation is a mental process and defense mechanism whereby a person disconnects from overwhelmingly painful feelings and experiences. A widespread assumption among mental health professionals is that dissociation is a response to trauma, defined as the emotional impact of physical abuse, rape, wartime violence, natural disasters, and other mortal danger. Recent research in developmental psychopathology, however, suggests an alternative route to dissociation – one that does not involve life-threatening harm but originates from a disorganized attachment in infancy. Developmental studies found that this attachment “pattern”, in which parents confuse their infants with contradictory affect communication, is a stronger predictor of later dissociation than is exposure to life-threatening events. The thesis argues that the link between dissociation and disorganized attachment demands a reconsideration not perhaps of the trauma model of dissociation, but of our understanding of what constitutes trauma. I suggest that the definition of trauma must be broad enough to include the quiet, cumulative forms of assault on a developing child seen in disorganized attachment. The thesis concludes with the proposal, derived from Winnicott’s and others’ ideas, that being deprived of a holding environment and of the mutual recognition that the parent should be a source of comfort, not alarm, puts children at risk of escaping into dissociation.
Anna-Lisa Sander (Heidelberg): ‘The Boundary of Self and Other – Wollheim on Projective Identification’
How does the other subject impact the life of the mind according to Wollheim? We may ask, to what degree Wollheim is compatible with the paradigm change of intersubjectivity of modern psychoanalysis? On the one hand, he seems to be both thematizing and affirming intersubjective phenomena, such as projective identification and internal objects, thereby referring to psychoanalysts like Melanie Klein, who is as an object relations theorist, an early proponent of focusing on intersubjective relationships. In that sense he seems to veer beyond Freud towards an intersubjective theory of the mind. On the other hand, he is a clearly Freudian thinker, while Kleinian theory itself might not be that intersubjective by today’s standards. Focusing on ‘The Mind and the Mind’s Image of Itself’ I will investigate how firm or diffuse the lines are between self and other in Wollheim’s basic claims about the self and imagination.
Jing Wang (Oxford): ‘Entangled Gazes: Projective Identification in User-Generated Documentary Cinema’
This paper explores how projection and projective identification function within the emerging aesthetics of user-generated documentary cinema, focusing on This is Life (2024), a film composed from over 800 short videos contributed by Chinese laborers via the platform Kuaishou. As both producer and researcher of the project, I propose that the documentary’s multi-layered structure – wherein individual videos are assembled into a collective portrait – offers fertile ground to revisit Richard Wollheim’s insights on visual experience, especially his theory of “seeing-in” and the imaginative mechanisms of artistic perception.
Three entangled forms of projection are identified: first, the audience’s projective identification with mobile-shot vertical videos, which often mirror their own digital interactions and familial emotions; second, the filmmaker’s curatorial projection through the act of selecting and structuring UGC material, shaping fragmented self-narratives into broader social meaning; and third, a recursive identification by the contributors themselves, who encounter their own footage reframed within a shared cinematic space, recognizing themselves as part of a collective body. I describe this process as video entanglement – a feedback loop of filming, assembling, and watching. By examining these layered dynamics, the paper argues that user-based screen media generate new aesthetic and psychological modes of identification, extending Wollheim’s theory into a contemporary cinematic context shaped by digital participation and collective authorship.
Please register at wollheimcentenary@gmail.com. Please confirm your status as academic (includes students), mental health practitioner, or other (please specify). A confirmation email with further details about the venue will be sent to attendees.
After Wollheim: The Richard Wollheim Centenary Project, phase 3 