After Wollheim: The Richard Wollheim Centenary Project, phase 3

Workshop and research discussion

Saturday 18 January 2025, 10am-5pm

St John’s College, Oxford

The workshop presents new perspectives on Richard Wollheim’s philosophy of mind, art, and psychoanalysis. Both Sessions are free but Session 2 places are limited. There will be no video-link for remote access. Registration is essential at wollheimcentenary@gmail.com and will be confirmed to you with details of venue. Please specify if for one or both Sessions, and give an academic or professional affiliation. The order of speakers may vary.

The workshop will be in two parts. The morning session (10am-1:30pm) will feature presentations, detailed below, which engage with the theme of the workshop. The afternoon session (2:30pm-5pm) will be given over to a discussion of future directions for research on this theme.

Speakers:

Jim Berryman (Glasgow): ‘The Psychological Reality of Style in Wollheim’s Understanding of Painting as an Art’

Louise Braddock (Independent scholar): ‘The Mind’s Image’

Lesley Chamberlain (Independent scholar and writer): ‘Maverick in the Making’

David Collins (Cambridge): ‘Making Up Our Minds with Art’’

Craig Reeves (Birkbeck): ‘Ritual and Drama: Two ‘Poles’ of Symbolic Machinery’

Anna-Lisa Sander (Heidelberg): ‘Wollheim – an Intersubjective Thinker?’

Programme:

Jim Berryman (Glasgow), ‘The Psychological Reality of Style in Wollheim’s Understanding of Painting as an Art’

Wollheim’s account of pictorial style has received relatively little attention, at least compared to other aspects of his philosophy of art. This is surprising, given that Wollheim described style as a precondition of expression and necessary for understanding painting as an art. Style can refer to general styles or individual styles, the latter of which was of particular interest to Wollheim. While general styles can be learned, individual styles must be formed; importantly, an artist’s individual style will have both external and internal characteristics. Although Wollheim was committed to a psychological understanding of style and would pit his conception against rival views, his thinking about style has not been widely discussed in the philosophy of art and cognate fields. To understand Wollheim’s view of style as a ‘psychological reality,’ it is necessary to place style in relation to his broader thinking about art and the mind. It is also necessary to understand the context in which Wollheim’s thinking was formed, especially contemporary debates about style.

Louise Braddock (Independent scholar), ‘The Mind’s Image’

Wollheim offered the British Psychoanalytical Society the following conclusion to his Ernest Jones Lecture: ‘All conceptions of the mind derive ultimately from an assimilation of the mind to the body, of mental contents to the parts of the body. So the mysterious union of mind and body occurs also at a stage further back than the traditional philosophers apprehended. It is not merely that we are at home in our body: we are at home in our mind somewhat as in a body. This we may say is the mind’s image of itself. But if it is, if this is the image that the mind sees when it sees itself this is in part at least because it is this image that the mind draws when it draws itself.’ The lecture can be said to define his understanding of psychoanalysis. In my paper I attempt to decode this remark and so provide a fuller construal of Wollheim’s meaning.

Lesley Chamberlain (Independent scholar and writer), ‘Maverick in the Making’

After graduating in PPE in 1949 Wollheim took up a post teaching philosophy in A. J. Ayer’s new department at the University of London. Yet he must very soon have realised that analysing language under aegis of logical positivism was not going to be his way forward. He turned back to the Idealist F. H. Bradley (1846-1924) to assess his options. Francis Herbert Bradley could not have been more out of fashion in post-war British philosophy. But in a talk broadcast on the BBC Third Programme in autumn 1954 Wollheim praised Bradley’s monism and his interest in meaning. It was not just discreet things in the world, over which language could place a grid, that philosophy should pursue, but the meaning of every one thing in relation to everything else. It was a view akin to that of  ‘the aesthetic critic’, Wollheim suggested. It was akin particularly to how we approach a work of visual art, where ‘we are often so susceptible to the importance of unity.’ Wollheim’s major, book-length study, F. H. Bradley (1959) took up the theme of the mind’s creative role in forging a unity of thought and world, and, linked to it, the creation of a self. In an early reference to Melanie Klein he examined Bradley’s claim that a ‘good self’ depends upon the mind’s active ‘interest’ in the world around.

David Collins (Cambridge), ‘Making Up Our Minds with Art’

This talk will explore how making and engaging with art can play a role in the development of the psychological and cognitive ‘perspectives’ that comprise what might be called one’s mental ‘horizon’, or the background from which one’s emotions, judgments, beliefs, knowledge, and other mental activities are formed and shaped. I will argue that in artistic creation, part of what the artist creates by working in and with a medium and materials is a new way of experiencing, conceiving, or understanding. By articulating this way of ‘taking’ things (or ‘perspective’) through the medium, with this articulation embodied in the finished work, the artwork allows those who engage with it (audiences, spectators, readers, etc.) to take on, and so acquire, these ‘perspectives’, thereby adding to the mental (including emotional and imaginative, as well as intellectual) categories through which they can experience and understand the world—in a sense, expanding and ‘re-making’ their minds. This view will be developed through reference to philosophers of art such as Wollheim, Collingwood, and Li Zehou, practices such as art therapy, and examples of particular artworks.

Craig Reeves (Birkbeck), ‘Ritual and Drama: Two “Poles” of Symbolic Machinery’

The ‘words and pictures’ workshop theme draws out interesting questions about the mind and its relation to the social – what else is there, one might say, but words and pictures? Well, actions, performances, vocalisations, gestures […] all the components of making art.  Wollheim’s ‘The Sheep and the Ceremony’ advances the idea of ritual practice as a symbolic, quasi-artistic act: “you care for the sheep, I care for the ceremony”, says Confucius, while in his book The Thread of Life Wollheim likens the unconscious to a theatre. I examine how these two poles connect in relation to the ‘symbolic machinery’ question: how, that is, mechanisms in society function to transform and transmit, alternatively to distort and divert, the fundamental human vocation to pursue self-knowledge.

Anna-Lisa Sander (Heidelberg), ‘Wollheim – An Intersubjective Thinker?’

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.

Please register at wollheimcentenary@gmail.com. It is essential that you indicate whether you will be attending the morning presentations, the afternoon research discussion, or both.

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.