For Want of Ambiguity: Order and Chaos in Art, Psychoanalysis, and Neuroscience

The Arnold Pfeffer Center for Neuropsychoanalysis:

“For Want of Ambiguity: Order and Chaos in Art, Psychoanalysis, and Neuroscience”

Saturday, November 2, 2019

10:00 am – 12:00 pm

Co-Presenters: Ludovica Lumer, Ph.D. and Lois Oppenheim, Ph.D.

Everything changes, moves, varies, appears and disappears in the environment around us and within our selves. This continual change has modelled our nervous system to extract a sort of stability out of what is not stable. The stability, as sole consolation, rescues us from the inevitability of our fate. Indeed, we adopt patterns in order to survive, we relate to people according to established behaviors that even become patterns, and we adopt defensive mechanisms that we tend to repeat over and over. But keeping possibilities alive is the matter of every creative process and of psychoanalysis itself. Art and psychoanalysis help us to overcome these constancies; they give us the freedom to choose among different possibilities of being, relating, perceiving, and interacting. We will address in this presentation the ways in which the dialogue between psychoanalysis and neuroscience sheds light on the transformational capacity of contemporary art. New questions arise in the context of such a dialogue as to the uniquely transgressive and often provocative arena in which meaning is made in art and patterns of making sense are revealed. From a neuroscientific and psychoanalytic exchange on the work of several visual artists, we will seek to uncover new ways of thinking about how insight is achieved outside the arena of certainty.

2 CME/CE credits offered. 

Ludovica Lumer, Ph.D. is a neuroscientist who earned her Ph.D. from University College London where she worked in the Department of Anatomy and Developmental Biology conducting seminal research on the relationship between visual perception and artistic representation. She coauthored (with Lois Oppenheim) For Want of Ambiguity: Order and Chaos in Art, Psychoanalysis and Neuroscience (Bloomsbury, 2019), and (with Marta Dell’Angelo) C’è daperderci la testa: scoprire il cervello giocando con l’arte (Laterza, 2009), the first introductory book on neuroscience for children and (with Semir Zeki) La bella e la Bestia (Laterza, 2011), a book on neuroscience and contemporary art. Additionally, she has lectured for many years in the Psychology Department of Milano-Bicocca University. Dr. Lumer currently lives in New York where she is a psychoanalyst in private practice.

Lois Oppenheim, Ph.D. is University Distinguished Scholar, Professor of French, and Chair of the Department of Modern Languages and Literatures at Montclair State University where she teaches courses in literature, medical humanities, and applied psychoanalysis. She is also Scholar Associate Member of the New York Psychoanalytic Society & Institute and Honorary Member of the William Alanson White Society. Dr. Oppenheim has authored or edited fourteen books, the most recent being For Want of Ambiguity: Order and Chaos in Art, Psychoanalysis and Neuroscience (co-authored with Ludovica Lumer, Bloomsbury), Psychoanalysis and the Artistic Endeavor: Conversations with Literary and Visual Artists (Routledge), and Imagination from Fantasy to Delusion (Routledge, awarded the 2013 Courage to Dream Prize from the American Psychoanalytic Association). She is the co-creator of two documentary films on mental heath: How to Touch A Hot Stove: Thought and Behavioral Differences in a Society of Norms and Daniel, Debra, Leslie (and You?).

Educational Objectives: Upon completion of this activity, participants should be able to:

1. Compare the need for stability in contrast with the need to transcend it
2. Demonstrate ways in which metaphors and symbols reveal the imperative of experiencing new ways of being in the world
3. Revise the definition of order and chaos from a psychoanalytic perspective

Psychologists