Writing, Art and Drama

Workshop

Saturday 28 June 2025, 10am-5pm

St John’s College, Oxford

This is the first 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:

Anne Addison (Essex): ‘Mute Silence and Caesura: Attachment and Separation Processes’

Katie Fleming (QMUL): ‘Pasolini, Lanthimos, and Greek Tragedy on Film in the Long Freudian Century’

Charlie Gere (Lancaster): ‘Writing and Drawing (on) the Mother’s Body: Psychoanalysis and Chinese Calligraphy and Landscape Painting’

Susanne Herrmann-Sinai (Independent scholar): ‘Hegel on Object Relations’

Natalia Pérez Juncal (Madrid): ‘The Role of Images in the Context of a Crisis of Sublimation’

Abstracts:

Anne Addison (Essex): ‘Mute Silence and Caesura: Attachment and Separation Processes’

This presentation considers the transference involved in early object experiences and considers the development of internal objects and their fate. The first section will review some vignettes from a two-year infant observation, which began a few weeks before the birth of the baby boy and continued until his second birthday. I will include a discussion of the experiences of weaning, object loss, symbolic equation and caesura, as witnessed by the observer, myself. This will be followed by a brief account of a clinical case, where an abrupt rupture in early adulthood led to an interesting therapeutic journey. Both cases have been characterised by an experience of mute silence in the countertransference, and it would be interesting to discuss the significance of this.

Katie Fleming (QMUL): ‘Pasolini, Lanthimos, and Greek Tragedy on Film in the Long Freudian Century’

This paper reflects on the long relationship between ancient tragedy and – specifically – Freudian psychoanalysis, and the fusion of these in film in the latter half of the twentieth century and in the early twenty-first century. Taking as specific case studies Pasolini’s Edipo Re (1967) and Medea (1969) and Lanthimos’s The Killing of a Sacred Deer (2017), I will consider the persistence and fascination for filmmakers of the association between Greek tragedy and the psychoanalytic, and for the continued expression of the tragic in psychoanalytic terms.

Charlie Gere (Lancaster): ‘Writing and Drawing (on) the Mother’s Body: Psychoanalysis and Chinese Calligraphy and Landscape Painting’

In my presentation I will bring together the psychoanalyst Serge Tisseron’s notion that ‘all writing is drawing’ and his analysis of mark-making in relation to the absence of the mother’s body, with a consideration of the expressivity of the handmade mark in Chinese literati ink painting and calligraphy, and in particular in relation to so-called ‘shan shui’ or ‘mountain water’ images, which aim not for an objective representation of landscape but a subjective engagement with the experience of flux and emptiness. I then connect this to Xiongbo Shi’s use of Richard Wollheim’s notion of retrieval to understand the Chinese calligraphic mark.

Susanne Herrmann-Sinai (Independent scholar): ‘Hegel on Object Relations’

This paper seeks to trace a potential dialogue between a Kleinian understanding of object relations in newborns and Hegel’s account of mother-child relation in his Anthropology. In attempting to disambiguate various readings of ‘object-relation’ in Melanie Klein, Hegel’s concepts in understanding the transition from pre-birth to post-birth mother-child relations are proving to be a helpful framework. While the separation of the baby’s body from the mother’s body might superficially be conceived of as a natural-biological process, Hegel’s emphasis by contrast is on the process of the mind to integrate this separation into its self-image

Natalia Pérez Juncal (Madrid): ‘The Role of Images in the Context of a Crisis of Sublimation’

Sigmund Freud always acknowledged the limits of sublimation as a way to cope with civilization’s restraints and its resulting discontent. However, an increasing difficulty in the sublimatory derivation of the drive has been noted in the last decades. Authors such as Herbert Marcuse have conceptualized this as a process of repressive desublimation, while more recent thinkers like Alenka Zupančič describe it as a crisis of sublimation. In today’s increasingly hedonist cultural setting, which promotes the pursuit of constant and immediate satisfactions, it seems like the drive is less compelled to take the detour necessary for sublimation, given this vicissitude implies a substitute and not direct satisfaction of the drive. If art once constituted a privileged object for triggering this sublimatory satisfaction, we must now question whether the current frenetic consumption of objects – including artistic ones – leads to a state of saturation that neutralizes art’s traditional sublimatory potential.

One contemporary thinker concerned with the relationship between images, imagination, and critical thought is Georges Didi-Huberman. He suggests that, in a similar way in which the lack of the subject defines its desiring condition and mobilizes desire, the commotion experienced when confronting an image can spark a movement toward new images, awaken the imagination, and foster a process of thought. This paper aims to establish a dialogue between the crisis of sublimation described by Marcuse and Zupančič, and Didi-Huberman’s exploration of the role of images in the contemporary scene. By bringing these perspectives together, it seeks to address the challenges posed for the sublimatory vicissitude of the drive while considering the potential art and its images still hold to prompt it.

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.