Wednesday 21 February 2018, 3-5pm
School of Fine Art. History of Art & Cultural Studies
University of Leeds
A special ‘hands on’ lecture and conversation.
One of the several things to succumb to amnesia when psychotherapy made its Faustian pact with the pharmaceutical industry, was the stubborn fact that Freud had written texts called Civilization and its Discontents or Moses and Monotheism. These texts established that psychoanalysis was never simply concerned with a psyche whose locations could be made subject to pharmacological intervention.
Darian Leader, a practicing analyst and the founder of the Centre for Freudian Analysis and Research in London, knows this well. In his several provocative studies of melancholia, depression, bipolarity, madness, he has insisted on this deeper ambition of Freud’s project.
Very recently, he has taken up the human hand, the organ that figured so centrally in Engels’ account of the role of labour in the becoming human of the ape. In doing so he has again brought psychoanalysis into probing and fundamental contact with cultural sinews of the human, contact that from Sennett to Farocki, has stimulated enormous excitement in contemporary art theory and practice.
