Call for Papers

Culture and the Unconscious: Psychoanalysts, Artists and Academics in
Dialogue

Conference to be held on July 11th and 12th 2003, at School of
Oriental and African Studies, London WC1.

Jointly organised by the British Psychoanalytical Society, the
Tavistock Clinic and the University of East London

Confirmed Keynote Speaker: Prof. Slavoj Zizek

Outline of Conference

Psychoanalysis has always wandered beyond the consulting room.
Alongside clinical texts, Freud and his followers wrote speculatively
on art and artists, politics, war and civilisation, and this cultural
engagement has been fully sustained by later analytic generations. The
creative arts and literature have been widely admired by
psychoanalysts, many of whom believe that creative artists have
conveyed the deepest of all understandings of unconscious mental
life. More recently, psychoanalysis in many hues has permeated
cultural criticism and the universities, influencing studies of film,
television, the visual arts, biography, fiction, theatre and poetry,
and other art forms. Although psychoanalysts and academics are often
drawn to the same painting, film or play, their approaches commonly
use psychoanalysis differently and address different audiences.

Until now, conversations between these three worlds of
psychoanalysis, the academy, and the creative arts, have rarely taken
place. Such conversations will form the basis of Culture and the
Unconscious, an international interdisciplinary conference that will
bring together psychoanalysts and psychotherapists, artists and
academics to discuss such fields as film and television, literature,
drama and poetry, the visual arts, and biography. Through these
conversations Culture and the Unconscious will bring together the
worlds of psychoanalysis, academia, and the creative arts. It will
produce a lively, illuminating and thought-provoking event that should
be of interest to all those interested in psychoanalysis and culture.

Conference Themes Will Include:

· Creativity and the artist

· Culture and emotion

· Culture as resistance

· Psychoanalytic aesthetics

· Genres and the unconscious

· Morality and art.

Call for Papers and Contributions

Offers of papers or other contributions for the above Conference are
invited. These may be from psychoanalysts or psychoanalytic
psychotherapists, academics, critics or journalists, or creative
artists. They may also be for panels involving co-operation between
any of these participants. Contributions may be focused on a
particular genre of work (for example film or poetry), a particular
artist or writer, or a particular psychoanalytic perspective. Because
the purpose of the conference is to facilitate dialogue between these
different spheres of work, the organisers will be particularly pleased
to receive proposals for collaborative or joint sessions between
psychoanalysts, academics and artists. We will also however be very
glad to receive offers of individual conference papers.

The Conference will have both plenary sessions, with speakers drawn
from the different contributing fields, and smaller panel sessions.
The organisers will discuss with those offering contributions what
would be the most appropriate setting for the presentation and
discussion of their work.

Offers should be made to the Organising Committee at the email or
postal address given below, by November 30 2002. They should take the
form of an abstract of not more than 500 words.

Conference Organising Committee

Caroline Bainbridge, Christine Clegg, Marilyn Lawrence, Susannah
Radstone, Michael Rustin, Candida Yates.

Offers of papers to Prof Michael Rustin, School of Social Sciences,
University of East London, Barking Campus, Dagenham RM8 2AS
(<mailto:m.j.rustinuel.ac.uk>m.j.rustinuel.ac.uk).