Vicissitudes : histories and destinies of psychoanalysis

This is a collection of articles and artists’ pages, originating in a conference of the same name, held at the Institute of Germanic and Romance Studies in January 2008, the concluding event in the programme: ‘Psychoanalysis in the Arts and Humanities: a multilingual perspective’, with funding from the Arts and Humanities Research Council networks scheme. The specific goal of the project was to explore what issues were being aired in psychoanalysis and its relation to the humanities, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, in three continents, by people speaking English, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, and Spanish. Each of the sections in the conference consisted of three papers: an introduction by the seminar series leader, a guest lecture by a visiting speaker, and a presentation by an artist. The line-up was multi-disciplinary and multi-national. The volume’s remit was that of replicating the conference of the same name that summed up the fifteen months of work from the eight seminar series that led up to it. The eight sections of this book follow the same pattern, and reproduce the contributions, although they have been revised or in most cases, extended. The remit included reflections on psychoanalysis in particular geo-cultural areas as well as the wide variety of relations between psychoanalysis and contemporary artistic practice as represented by the participant artists involved in each series. Contributors: Christine Anzieu-Premmereur, Julia Borossa, Lesley Caldwell, William Cobbing, Juan Cruz, Sandor Gilman, Ahuvia Kahane, Sharon Kivland, Jaspar Joseph-Lester, Zoe Laughlin, Martin Liebscher, Stéphane Le Mercier, Claudio Magris, Juliet Mitchell, Mark Nash, Uriel Orlow, Mario Plotkin, Malcolm Quinn, Alison Sinclair, Marcella Vanzo, Hugo Vezzetti, Andrew Webber, Amy Wygant.