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Open to Interpretation: Inaugural Postgraduate Conference

02 February 2024, 9:00 am–6:00 pm

Photograph of plaque ceremony at Bellevue-Höhe, Vienna

A Hybrid Conference, In-Person, and via Livestream

This event is free.

Event Information

Open to

All

Availability

Yes

Cost

Free

Organiser

Jake Roberts

About

Join us on Friday 2nd February 2024, for Open to Interpretation, the first postgraduate research conference to be held by UCL's Psychoanalysis Unit.

The conference will take place away from the Portland stone façades of Bloomsbury, and instead at the newly completed UCL East campus in Stratford.

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Since the founding of the MSc in Theoretical Psychoanalytic Studies in 1996, the Psychoanalysis Unit at UCL has engendered research on a broad array of topics, reflecting differing perspectives on what Psychoanalysis is, what it does, and how it interacts with other fields of thought.

This sense of interdisciplinarity represents an ongoing reciprocal exchange between clinical work and theoretical work, each informing and deepening the other.

Open to Interpretation will be an opportunity for former students and recent graduates of the Psychoanalysis Unit at UCL to present work that perhaps straddles this exchange - neither purely clinical, nor purely theoretical.

We’re hoping it will provide an opportunity for former students to meet and share their research with other graduates from the wider alumni network. 


Image Credit: Archive Ref. IN/3273, Freud Museum London

Conference Programme

Programme

Panel 1 - Psychoanalytic Interpretations of the Arts

"Mozart-Effect": Hype, Hysteria, High Mass of Pleasure
Tobias Vollstedt

The role of sublimation in creative works: The interpretation of the works of Yayoi Kusama
Kazue Niki

Utopian Fantasies of the Movida Madrileña: Pepi, Luci, Bom Open to Interpretation
Dawid Poblocki 


Panel 2 - Lacanian Interpretations of Literature and Culture 

The False Category of Nature: Sexuality and Hegel
Rafael Holmberg 

The Burari Deaths: Acting out as a mode of subaltern speech?
Ritika Shah

Fräulein Else's Passage à l'acte
Ruby Towers


Panel 3 - Contemporary Interpretations of Psychoanalytic Problems

Mentalising Internalised Stigma
Wilson Adolfo Gallego Hoyos

The Quest for Everything: A Neuropsychoanalytic Exploration of Human Destructiveness
Ali Bagherzanjani 


Panel 4 - New Interpretations of the Psychoanalytic Tradition

Searching for synthesis: how Bowlby, Anna Freud and Winnicott combine to benefit short term talking therapy
Gillian Wells

How can Winnicott’s concept the ‘use of an object’ develop understanding of the psychoanalytic concept of narcissism?
Gabby Waghorn 


Keynote
Liz Allison
Director, UCL Psychoanalysis Unit

Recordings

After the event a recording of the conference will be available to registered participants (on request) for 4 weeks.