The Mind of the Artist

A Two-Day Conference jointly sponsored by the Scientific Program Committee and The Pfeffer Center for Neuropsychoanalysis:

“The Mind of the Artist”

Friday, October 26, 2018             &            Saturday, October 27, 2018

8:00 pm – 10:00 pm                                             10:00 am – 3:30 pm

Speaking from a theoretical perspective, Friday evening’s panelists will consider the relation between artistic creativity and psychoanalytic treatment, the significance (if any) of the high incidence of affective disorders among literary and visual artists, the paradigm of art as reparation of early object relations, and the like. The relevance of Freud’s notion of sublimation to more recent explanations of the intra- and inter-psychic valuations of imaginative expression and the relationship of imagination to the self, to mechanisms of defense and agency, will be explored. Saturday morning’s session will be devoted to a discussion with literary and visual artists on the notion of art as play, the neurobiological aims of that instinct in the making of meaning, the relation of id and ego function to unconscious fantasy and its expression in art, and how artistic expression bears upon our neuroscientific understanding of pleasure and reward. A plenary session by Nobel Laureate Eric Kandel will be offered in the afternoon to be followed by a wrap-up Q & A with all participants.

Conference Program

Friday, October 26 , 2018

Evening Session (8:00 – 10:00 PM):

“Psychoanalysis and Creativity”
Danielle Knafo, PhD; Jean-Michel Rabaté, PhD; Peter Rudnytsky, PhD, LCSW; Joel Whitebook, PhD; with Lois Oppenheim, PhD (moderator)

2 CME/CE credits offered for evening session.

 

Saturday, October 27, 2018

Morning Session (10:00 AM – 12:00 PM):

“What’s Neuroscience Got To Do With It?”
Mark Solms, PhD in conversation with Sue Gosin, MFA; Siri Hustvedt, PhD; and Eliza Kentridge

2 CME/CE credits offered for morning session.

Break for Lunch ( 12:00 PM – 1:30 PM)

 

Plenary Session (1:30 PM – 2:30 PM):

“The Beholder’s Share:  Looking at the Brain Looking at Art”
Eric Kandel, MD, Nobel Laureate

1 CME/CE credit offered for plenary session.

Q & A with all participants (2:30 PM – 3:30 PM)

 

5 CME/CE credits offered for the two-day program in its entirety.

Plenary Speaker:

Eric R. Kandel, MD, is University Professor at Columbia University; Kavli Professor and Director, Kavli Institute for Brain Science; Co-Director, Mortimer B. Zuckerman Mind Brain Behavior Institute; and a Senior Investigator at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute.  Dr. Kandel is an editor of Principles of Neural Science, the standard textbook in the field of neuroscience now in its 5^th edition.  In 2006, Dr. Kandel wrote a book on the brain for the general public entitled In Search of Memory: The Emergence of a New Science of Mind, which won both the L.A. Times and U.S. National Academy of Science Awards for best book in Science and Technology in 2008.  A documentary film based on that book is also entitled In Search of Memory.  In 2012 he wrote The Age of Insight: The Quest to Understand the Unconscious in Art, Mind, and Brain, from Vienna 1900 to the Present, which won the Bruno-Kreisky Award in Literature, Austria’s highest literary award.  His newest book, published by Columbia University Press, is entitled Reductionism in Art and Brain Science: Bridging the Two Cultures.  Dr. Kandel has received twenty-four honorary degrees, is a member of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences as well as being a Foreign Member of the Royal Society of London and a member of the National Science Academies of Austria, France, Germany and Greece.  He has been recognized with the Albert Lasker Award, the Heineken Award of the Netherlands, the Gairdner Award of Canada, the Harvey Prize and the Wolf Prize of Israel, the National Medal of Science USA and he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine in 2000.

 

Friday Evening Panelists:

Dr. Danielle Knafo is a clinical psychologist and psychoanalyst. She is a professor at Long Island University’s clinical psychology doctoral program and faculty and supervisor at NYU’s Postdoctoral Program in Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis. She is also an art critic who has written museum essays as well as books on Egon Schiele and women’s self representation in twentieth century art.  A few of her recent books are Dancing with the Unconscious: The Art of Psychoanalysis and the Psychoanalysis of Art; The Age of Perversion: Desire and Technology in Psychoanalysis and Culture; and Sex, Drugs, and Creativity: Searching for Magic in a Disenchanted World. Dr. Knafo maintains a private practice in Manhattan and Great Neck, NY.

Dr. Lois Oppenheim 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 both literature and applied psychoanalysis.  She is Scholar Associate Member of the New York Psychoanalytic Society and Institute and Honorary Member of the William Alanson White Society.  Dr. Oppenheim has published over 100 papers and authored or edited fourteen books, the most recent being For Want of Ambiguity: Order and Chaos in Art, Psychoanalysis, and Neuroscience (co-authored with Dr. Ludovica Lumer and currently in press) and Imagination from Fantasy to Delusion, awarded the 2013 Courage to Dream Prize from the American Psychoanalytic Association.  Other recent books include A Curious Intimacy: Art and Neuro-Psychoanalysis and The Painted Word: Samuel Beckett’s Dialogue With Art.

Jean-Michel Rabaté, Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of Pennsylvania, has taught in Dijon, Paris, Montréal and Princeton. A managing editor of the Journal of Modern Literature, he chairs the Forum for Philosophy and Literature at the MLA. One of the founders of Slought Foundation, where he curates shows, lectures and conversations, he has been since 2008 a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He has authored 40 books and collections of essays. Recent titles include Crimes of the Future (Bloomsbury, 2014), The Cambridge Introduction to Literature and Psychoanalysis (Cambridge UP, 2014),The Pathos of Distance, (Bloomsbury, 2016), Think, Pig! (Fordham UP, 2016), Les Guerres de Jacques Derrrida, (Presses de l’Université de Montréal, 2016), Rust, (Bloomsbury, 2018), After Derrida, (Cambridge UP, 2018), and Kafka L.O.L. (Quodlibet, 2018). Forthcoming are The New Beckett (Cambridge UP), Understanding Derrida/Understanding Modernism (Bloomsbury) and Jouissance de la littérature (ERES).

Peter L. Rudnytsky, PhD, LCSW,  is Professor of English at the University of Florida and Head of the Department of Academic and Professional Affairs of the American Psychoanalytic Association.  From 2001-2011, he was the editor of American Imago, and he currently coedits the Psychoanalytic Horizons series with Bloomsbury and the History of Psychoanalysis series with Routledge.  He is the author and editor of numerous books, including Freud and Oedipus (1987) and Rescuing Psychoanalysis from Freud and Other Essays in Re-Vision (2011), and he is currently completing Formulated Experiences: Hidden Realities and Emergent Meanings from Shakespeare to Fromm.  He is a candidate at the Chicago Psychoanalytic Institute and maintains a private practice in psychoanalysis and psychotherapy in Gainesville.

Joel Whitebook, PhD is a philosopher and psychoanalyst.  He is on the faculty of the Columbia University Center for Psychoanalytic Training and Research and is the former Director of Columbia’s Psychoanalytic Studies Program.  Dr. Whitebook’s theoretical project consists in the attempt to integrate psychoanalysis and critical theory.  In addition to numerous articles and a book entitled Perversion and Utopia, he is the author of the critically acclaimed Freud: An Intellectual Biography.

 

Saturday Morning Panelists:

Susan Gosin received her MFA from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.  In 1976, she co-founded Dieu Donne Press and Paper, Inc. in New York City.  For more than 40 years, she has collaborated with artists and writers on two- and three-dimensional art.  As a publisher and designer, her artist books have been exhibited and collected by institutions such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art, MoMA, and the Library of Congress.  As an educator, she has developed curriculum and designed studio programs for The New School, NY; Rutgers University, NJ; Phumani Archival Mill, Johannesburg, South Africa; and The Bibliotheca Alexandrina, Alexandria, Egypt.  In 2018, she co-curated a major exhibition surveying the last 50 years in the field of paper art collaboration for IPCNY Gallery in NYC.  She has written numerous catalogues and has contributed articles about the paper arts for ART ON PAPER and Hand Papermaking Magazine.  She has received awards from The National Endowment and The Tiffany Foundation and was awarded the Printmaker Emeritus Award from the Southern Graphics Council.  Currently, she is president of Dieu Donne Press and serves as Co-Chair on the Board of Directors of Dieu Donne Papermill.

Siri Hustvedt is the author of a book of poems, four collections of essays, six novels, and a work of nonfiction, The Shaking Woman or A History of My Nerves. Her most recent collection of essays, A Woman Looking at Men Looking at Women (2016), includes a 200-page essay on the mind-problem body, “The Delusions of Certainty.”   In 2012, she was awarded the International Gabarron Prize for Thought and Humanities. Her most recent novel The Blazing World was long listed for the Man Booker Prize and won the Los Angeles Book Prize for Fiction 2014. Hustvedt has a PhD in English from Columbia University and is a Lecturer in Psychiatry at the Dewitt Wallace Institute for the History of Psychiatry in the Psychiatry Department of Weill Medical College of Cornell University. Her work has been translated into over thirty languages.

Eliza Kentridge is a South-African-born visual artist and poet based in Wivenhoe, England. Her work has been shown individually at the Goodman Gallery (Johannesburg and Cape Town), the Highgate Gallery (London), the Art Exchange Gallery (University of Essex), BoxoHouse (New York and Joshua Tree) and the Sentinel Gallery (Wivenhoe), and at many group exhibitions elsewhere. She has read and discussed her poetry at the Freud Museum (London), Barnard College (New York), Jewish Literary Festivals (London and Cape Town), Exeter Book Festival, Poetry Wivenhoe, the Franschhoek Literary Festival among others. Her first poetry collection Signs for an Exhibition won the University of Johannesburg’s Debut Prize for Literature. She has worked closely with Susan Gosin – who is also participating at this event — at Dieu Donné (New York) over several years.

Professor Mark Solms is Director of Neuropsychology at the University of Cape Town. He is Director of Training of the South African Psychoanalytical Association, Member of the British Psychoanalytical Society, and Honorary Member of the New York Psychoanalytic Society.  Dr. Solms is Research Chair of the International Psychoanalytical Association, Science Director of the American Psychoanalytic Association, and Co-Chair of the International Neuropsychoanalysis Society.  He has been the recipient of numerous awards, including the Sigourney Prize, which he received in 2012.  He has published more than 350 papers in both neuroscientific and psychoanalytic journals, and eight books, including The Brain and the Inner World (2002), translated into 12 languages, and The Feeling Brain (2015), a compilation of his selected papers.  Dr. Solms is the editor of the forthcoming (2018) Revised Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud (24 vols) and the Complete Neuroscientific Works of Sigmund Freud (4 vols).

 

 

Educational Objectives: Upon completion of this activity, participants will be able to:
1) Explain the potential effects of psychoanalysis on artistic creativity, such as its long-feared inhibition of imagination vs. the freeing of the mind
2) Describe the ego-psychological, Kleinian, relational, and other perspectives on meaning- making in art
3) Explain why, from a neuroscientific perspective, a person makes art
4) Describe how neuropsychoanalytic methods contribute to the understanding of art and artists

Psychologists: New York Psychoanalytic Society & Institute is approved by the American Psychological Association (APA) to sponsor continuing education programs for psychologists. New York Psychoanalytic Society & Institute maintains responsibility for this program and its content.

Social Workers: New York Psychoanalytic Society & Institute SW CPE is recognized by the New York State Education Department’s State Board for Social Work as an approved provider of continuing education for licensed social workers #0317.

Physicians: This activity has been planned and implemented in accordance with the accreditation requirements and policies of the Accreditation Council for Continuing Medical Education (ACCME) through the joint providership of American Psychoanalytic Association and New York Psychoanalytic Society & Institute. The American Psychoanalytic Association is accredited by the ACCME to provide continuing medical education for physicians. The American Psychoanalytic Association designates this Live Activity for a maximum of (5) AMA PRA Category 1 Credit(s)™. Physicians should claim only the credit commensurate with the extent of their participation in the activity.

Important disclosure information for all learners: None of the planners and presenters of this CME program has any relevant financial relationships to disclose.

Persons with disabilities
The building is wheelchair accessible and has an elevator. Please notify the registrar in advance if you require accommodations.