A Scientific Meeting Presented by Diane O’Donoghue
Event Price: Event is free. No CEs offered.
Attendance: This is a hybrid event - in person and online attendance is available. Online attendees will have a webinar experience which will not include the ability to ask questions of the speaker.
NOTE: Pre-registration is encouraged. Walk-ins are welcome.
Reception 6 - 6:30 p.m. at the Center before the presentation.
Course Description:
There is a considerable bibliography of writings about the vast collection of early objects, most from Egypt and the classical Mediterranean, filled Freud’s working spaces at Berggasse 19 in Vienna. He spoke frequently of the close relationship between his methods and those of the archaeologist; indeed, the language of fieldwork appeared in a number of his writings. Although it is not difficult to imagine this first psychoanalytic site as akin to excavation, there is a layer of meaning that existed for many of these fragments before their unearthing: they were taken from graves, never intended to be disturbed. However, for Freud’s metaphor to function, the disruption of the burial and subversion of the intentions of those whose objects he collected must essentially be forgotten. This talk will consider the functioning of cultural amnesia that accompanied acts of collecting, both in spaces devoted to the aesthetic and to the psychical.
Diane O'Donoghue is a visual and cultural historian who directs the Program for Public Humanities at the Jonathan M. Tisch College for Civic Life at Tufts University, USA, where she is also the Senior Fellow for the Humanities and has served as chair of the University’s Department of Visual and Critical Studies. She is a scholar member on the faculty of the Boston Psychoanalytic Society and Institute and on the editorial board of American Imago. She has received the CORST Prize from the American Psychoanalytic Association, the Sigmund Freud/Fulbright Scholar for Psychoanalysis award at the University of Vienna and the Freud Museum, and an Erikson Scholar fellowship.