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Landscapes of the Impossible: Psyche, Psychoanalysis and the Climate Crisis [Session 1: Mourning the Impossible - Freud, Mourning, Landscape]

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Venue: Birkbeck 43 Gordon Square

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This event is free to attend - please register using the link above.

Seminar 1 (of 2) for researchers and students, developed by Dr. Catherine Lord (Media and Culture, Literature and Cultural Analysis, University of Amsterdam)

Synopsis for 2-part Seminar:

These two sessions offer an introduction to the burgeoning field of eco-psychoanalysis. With its emphasis on the climate crisis, environmental humanities can engage in a fruitful dialogue with psychoanalysis. In our current environmental emergency, how do we mourn what we are losing from the more-than-human world? The psychoanalytic field of object relations helps us consider what is meant by psychical environments and their landscapes. The first session focuses on mourning, and the second addresses how environmental humanities can ‘de-home’ and decolonize itself from what Bruno Latour termed the ‘old climate regimes’. Key to this endeavour is an analysis of essays and one suggested case study for each session. Students can bring in their own case studies, be this a literary work, film or media object. The goal is to make explicit connections between landscape, psyche and the contemporary practice of psychoanalysis. 

These sessions are geared towards MA students, but PhD candidates may find them helpful.

 

Session 1: Mourning the Impossible: Freud, Mourning, Landscape

 

Introductory Articles: Read in the order set out (if you like). These articles set out the field. They can be referred to throughout the session, and will be key in my 15 minutes intro to our 2 seminar course.

 

Weintrobe, S. 2012. “Introduction.” Engaging with Climate Change: Psychoanalysis and Interdisciplinary Perspectives. Edited by Sally Weintrobe. 1-15.  London: Routledge.

 

Kasouff, S. 2017. “Psychoanalysis and Climate Change.” American Imago. 74(2): 141-171.

 

Focus Articles: It is useful to read the articles in the suggested order.

 

Freud, S. [1915] 1916. “On Transience.” S.E. 14. London: Hogarth. 303-307.

(Contextual reading is readily available online: see Freud’s “Mourning and Melancholia” which you may already have studied, and is important to read with “On Transience”).

 

Leertzman, Renne Aron. 2012. “The myth of apathy: Psychoanalytic explorations of environmental subjectivity.” Engaging with Climate Change: Psychoanalysis and Interdisciplinary Perspectives. Edited by Sally Weintrobe. 117-133. London: Routledge.

 

Weintrobe, Sally. 2012. “On the love of nature and on human nature: Restoring split internal landscapes.” Engaging with Climate Change: Psychoanalysis and Interdisciplinary Perspectives. Edited by Sally Weintrobe. 199-213. London: Routledge.

 

Case Study:

Duffy, Carol Ann. 2011. “Parliament.” The Bees. London: Picador.

 

Supplementary but important Reading/Viewing

 

Professor Rose’s lecture/text are close read in Michelle Stephens’ article – please see the Works Cited section from this article to source Jaqueline Rose’s article in the LRB, and its precise title. Here is what it is based on, her lecture for the Freud Institute Annual lecture, 2020, “To Die One’s Own Death – thinking with Freud in a Time of Pandemic.”

https://youtu.be/uPCGf2pqxng

 

Catherine Lord is an author, scholar and lecturer at the University of Amsterdam. She teaches in Literature and Cultural Analysis, as well as Media and Culture. Her research explores the interdisciplinary fields between environmental humanities, philosophy, queer studies, psychoanalysis and feminism. In literary studies she has published on the writings of Walter Benjamin, George Eliot, Virginia Woolf and Jeannette Winterson, and in eco-cinema, the films of Werner Herzog, Franny Armstrong, Terrence Malick, and Lars von Trier. She is currently working on a book about eco-feminisms and psychoanalysis in contemporary women’s poetry (US and UK). She is also a performance-based researcher in art film and theatre. https://www.uva.nl/en/profile/l/o/c.m.lord/c.m.lord.html

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