Conversations Between Bloomsbury & Psychoanalysis: Mutual Influence or Incomprehension?

In histories of modernist literature and psychoanalysis in Britain, few topics have been as much discussed and mythologised as the relations between Bloomsbury and Psychoanalysis. This conference reexamines the meeting point between psychoanalysis and the Bloomsbury group, and the tensions and contradictions that occur when such large appellations are linked. The topic has been approached from an array of perspectives, ranging from gender studies, discourses of modernism to literary history. However, the first hand testimony of figures, such as James Strachey and Virginia Woolf, is often as odds with the considered views of subsequent critics and theorists. Literary scholars and historians will bring to bear new research and fresh perspectives on this intersection and discuss the possibilities of a new understanding of the relations between Bloomsbury and Psychoanalysis. There will be contributions from those studying Bloomsbury writers, the critics of Bloomsbury and British psychoanalysts in the pre-World War Two period.

Speakers

Professor Sally Alexander (Goldsmiths College London), "Winnicott's Women Analysts."

Professor Fuhito Endo (Seikei University Tokyo), "Joan Riviere in Masquerade, or Her Implicitly Kleinian Criticism of Freud."

Dee McQuillan (University College London), "Documentation versus Interpretation: James Strachey as a Link between Psychoanalysis and Bloomsbury."

Professor Kunio Shin (Tsuda College Tokyo), "Some Versions of Anti-psychoanalysis: Lewis, Richards, and Auden in the 1930s."

Helen Tyson (Queen Mary University London), "On 'Freudian Fiction' - Virginia Woolf, Modernist Readers and Psychoanalysis."

Cost: £35; Registered students (with proof): £25; UCL staff and UCL students: free.

Booking: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/conversations-between-bloomsbury-psychoanalysis-mutual-influence-or-incomprehension-tickets-17863364805

Financially supported by the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science.