Heinz Hartmann II Lecture: Mind as Text: Freud’s (Typo)graphical Model of the Mind

Event Phone: 212-879-6900

  • February 6, 2018
    8:00 pm - 10:00 pm

Presenter and Awardee: Adele Tutter, M.D., Ph.D.

Introduction by:  Daria Colombo, M.D.

Freud developed the topographical model of the mind at a time when not only literary, but all academic, scientific, medical, and publications—especially those dealing with sexuality—were subject to strict governmental censorship that specifically sought to distinguish between “real” academic scholarship, and subversive, salacious “fictions” that masqueraded as such. Increasing suspicion was directed in particular toward doctors who used cures based on suggestion, a skepticism that found expression in fin de siècle texts—including Arthur Schnitzler’s play Paracelsus, which the author interprets as a satirical critique of Freud’s Studies of Hysteria. Contextualizing Freud’s early theorizing within the threat of censorship and prosecution that was only heightened by challenges to its legitimacy encourages the conjecture that the topographical mode derived from a proto-model, in which the mind was conceptualized as an erotic “manuscript” that must undergo “censorship” before it can become a published “text”: a typographical model of the mind.

Adele Tutter, M.D., Ph.D. is Assistant Clinical Professor of Psychiatry at Columbia University and faculty, Columbia University Center for Psychoanalytic Training and Research and the New York Psychoanalytic Institute.  Her interdisciplinary scholarship, which has focused largely on creativity and its connections to grief, loss, and oppression, has been honored by the CORST, Menninger, and Ticho Prizes, among many other awards. Dr. Tutter is the author of Dream House: An Intimate Portrait of the Philip Johnson Glass House (University of Virginia Press, 2015), co-editor, with Léon Wurmser, of Grief and its Transcendence: Memory, Identity, Creativity (Routledge, 2016), and editor of The Muse: Psychoanalytic Explorations of Creative Inspiration (Routledge, 2017). She is currently completing a second monograph, Mourning and Metamorphosis: Ovid, Poussin, and the Aesthetics of Loss. She currently sits on the editorial board of The International Journal of Psychoanalysis, Psychoanalytic Quarterly, Psychoanalytic Inquiry and American Imago. The chair of the APsaA Artist and Scholar-in-Residence Committee, she lectures throughout the United States and is a regular contributor of art criticism to the Brooklyn Rail. She is in private practice in Manhattan.
 
2 CME/CE credits offered.
Educational Objectives: After completion of this activity, participants should be able to:

1) Trace the development of Freud’s construct of the “censor” of the topograpical theory and its derivation from institutionalized censorship.

2) Outline societal attitudes toward the  dangers of the text and the state of institutionalized censorship in fin de siècle Europe

3) Describe the critique of suggestion in Arthur Schnitzler’s Paracelsus and its relevance to Freud’s theorizing 

Venue:  

Description:

Second Floor, 247 East 82nd Street | New York, NY 10028

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