Symbols And Symbol Making: Psychoanalytic Perspectives on Art

Catalog description

This course explores the links between psychoanalytic theory and art history with special focus on the work of Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung, and their followers. A central aim is to examine the way in which psychoanalytic theory has been employed by art historians and theorists as a mode of interpretation, as well as to study how, why, and what several of the most notable psychoanalysts have written about art. Topics include the interpretation of dreams, transference, the Oedipal myth, melancholia, narcissism, abjection, the structure of the unconscious, the fetish, Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious, as well as outsider art and the art of the insane. Key theorists to be discussed include: Freud, Jung, D.W. Winnicott, Melanie Klein, Jacques Lacan, Otto Rank and Julia Kristeva; individual artists studied include: Albrecht Dürer, Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, Edvard Munch, Max Ernst, Jackson Pollock, Louise Bourgeois, Mary Kelly and Victor Burgin; in addition to examples from film (Maya Deren, Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dali, as well as Stan Brakhage).