After Wollheim

Background

The Richard Wollheim Centenary Project (2023-2025) aimed to show how Wollheim’s intellectual intrepidity could renew philosophical thinking about the relation of mind and body. Bringing together the dual perspectives of art and psychoanalysis on that relation suggested a different theoretical configuration of the relation between art and psychoanalysis themselves. ‘After Wollheim’, its successor, will pursue the question of how art and psychoanalysis, named by Wollheim as the two great influences on his thought, can be understood as working together, rather than, as some critics have thought, just getting in each other’s way. This will involve giving, and at times beginning from scratch, a philosophical account that can with justice situate Wollheim’s key ideas together in one framework, making the relation between art and psychoanalysis more equal, and more integrated. Such an account, as intended by Wollheim, would require philosophy to change in a way that would incorporate psychoanalysis and art together.

The proceedings of the 2023-2025 Centenary Project—the papers, discussions and visual works of the first two phases—make clear that Wollheim’s work should be understood with a methodology which goes beyond the confines of academic philosophy. He should be read as listened to, and listened to with a psychoanalytic ear and also, for echoes of the past—of past thinkers whose thought, while not acknowledged by him, may yet have come to him indirectly. The line of philosophical debate from Kant’s contemporaries to his successors in the German classical tradition was not of primary interest to Wollheim; his only acknowledged interest in it was his early monograph on the British idealist philosopher, F. H. Bradley.

Wollheim’s interest in Bradley itself requires explanation, arising as it did in the period of analytic philosophy’s rejection of the longstanding (and by then perhaps somewhat tired) influence of Hegelianism against which the ‘flight into pluralism’ of Bertrand Russell, G. E. Moore and others took place. Apostrophised by Isaiah Berlin as a ‘maverick’ (as noted by Lesley Chamberlain), Wollheim might, in turning to Bradley, have been performing an act of resistance to the authority of positivism. But equally, the resonance between a Hegelian cast of thought in Bradley’s developmental (hence contingent) account of the moral sense, and psychoanalysis presented Wollheim with a common ground on which to draw the connection.

This topic, addressed in a workshop in January 2023, provided both impetus, and material to be taken further, in a project for Wollheim’s centenary that year. The first phase of the Wollheim Centenary Project was inaugurated in December 2023 by Derek Matravers’s lecture on ‘The Role of Psychoanalysis in Richard Wollheim’s Philosophy of Art’. Under the title ‘Richard Wollheim’s Philosophy and the Arts’, a second workshop was held in January 2024, with papers on iconicity, twofoldness, the archaic theory of mind, Wollheim’s ‘Babylon’, and his inchoate literary theory. Six further papers were given, as gallery talks, along with two films, in conjunction with an art exhibition, ‘The Presence of Absence’, exhibiting the collages of the artist Patrice Moor, made to represent memories of a mother lost in infancy.

In 2025 the Centenary Project completed its second phase. Fifteen working papers were given at three more workshops. Under the general rubric of ‘Words and Pictures: How Art makes the Mind’ we heard, in January, papers on style, the ‘mind’s image’, Wollheim as ‘maverick’, mind-making through art, and ritual and the symbolic machinery of the social; and, in June, under the title ‘Drama, Art and Writing’, papers on calligraphy and the mother’s body, the ‘caesura’ and muteness in attachment and separateness, images and the sublime, and Hegel on object relations. Finally, in July’s ‘Projection, Projective Identification, and Complex Projection’, there were papers on art and the Annunciation, documentary film-making, expression and projection, two-ness in clinical work, projection and completion in art history, attachment in infancy, and intersubjectivity.

Research Programme

If from all this we try to extract a manageable number of concepts, we find any one of them to be so connected as to bring others into play: corporeality, style, projective mechanisms, phenomenology, imagination, depiction, pictorial representation and pictorial meaning, expression, seeing-in, twofoldness, dispositions, phantasy, iconicity, and so-on. But the more exhaustive the list becomes, the more we find the synthesis to be elusive.

All this interconnectedness suggests what Wollheim himself left largely implicit, and why he did! It intimates, and indeed promises, a systematic theory that unifies art and psychoanalysis, something that, as pointed out by the art historian Whitney Davis, it does not deliver. This is so despite Wollheim’s naming art and psychoanalysis as the two great influences on his thought. Such a unifying theory should be situated within philosophy, but so far remains couched in concepts that (whether through suggestive ambiguousness, or a privileging of intuition over analytic precision) can sit at the ‘crossroads’ between art and psychoanalysis. Once introduced there, the direction of travel they indicate is largely one-way, the most readily accepted concepts being those supplying psychoanalytic ideas to a substantive philosophy of art. The contributions of art to psychoanalysis are less documented by Wollheim or explored by philosophers (though there are exceptions). But from what Wollheim writes, often outside of his academic productions, we may see art as the key to understanding his philosophy, because it is the key that will help explain psychoanalysis, both to itself and to those whose understanding of the mind comes from their engagement in it, as analysands and analysts.

The question that ‘After Wollheim’ will now pursue is, then, how the two great influences on Wollheim’s thought—art and psychoanalysis—should be understood together and can be brought together. As already noted, such a unifying account would require philosophy to change; specifically, in a way that allowed it to incorporate both psychoanalysis and art within it, and to bring them together as a unity. This would in turn allow philosophy to retrieve itself from being ‘the discipline in which [Wollheim] was originally instructed’ and bring back, by bringing out, its humanistic potential.

Recent Publications

These are publications arising from and/or acknowledging the Wollheim Centenary Project.

Lesley Chamberlain, ‘A “Sublime” Friendship’ (Dublin Review of Books). Part of this essay on Wollheim and Isaiah Berlin develops and expands on a paper given by the author at the workshop, ‘Words and Pictures: How Art makes the Mind’, on 18 January 2025.

Jim Berryman, ‘On Style and Mere Stylishness in AI-generated Art’. Forthcoming in The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism.

Louise Braddock, ‘Bernard Williams and Richard Wollheim: Silent Interlocution’. Forthcoming in Philosophy.