A “consistent other” (un autre consistant), is one of the ways Jacques Lacan defined the analyst. Someone who would maintain a particular standard and repeat a task with minimal variation. Maybe a repetition yielding enough trust to facilitate a restorative life experience. A fruitful dependency in the face of shattered hopes and pains viciously inflicted. [...]
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I am in Brooklyn for a week, as part of my work with the Transart Institute. I arrived on Sunday and will stay for a week. So far, I have conducted 12 student critiques (we have 6 per day), but being in this city makes me want to fill in every little gap in time [...]
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Looking online for updates on my PhD examiner (I’d like to hear her speak again), I came across the Rigorous Holes website. I was not aware that this lovely conference I participated in back in 2007 had put all the videos online. Timely finding too, for I am to travel to New York on Sunday [...]
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Photo-essay of my trip to Berggasse 19, Vienna, on the 8 November 2012.
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So, writing with E worked, and performing with her at the Madness conference did so even better. You cannot see or hear us from where you are, but you can access our text. Soon, it will appear in the conference ebook publication. Also soon, we will be expanding on this work for a hard copy [...]
I have begun a collaborative writing practice with an artist whom I consider a dear friend. I am engaged in long term letter writing with two people who were unknown to me when we began the process but now are as much part of me as childhood friends. But writing with E— is different.
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I want to start by writing that this is not exactly a film review of David Cronenberg’s A Dangerous Method but, rather, a collection of thoughts stemming from my viewings of the movie, my knowledge of the story it recounts – albeit from Freud’s perspective –, and my amateur interest in cinema. My thoughts are a little unconnected, piling up on my brain every time I hear the advert for the film, or watch the Film 4 programme on the its making, which seems to be aired every time I turn on the T.V. set.
Being embodied is a mixed fate for the hysteric, who does not want to be excluded by anyone from anything, and yet, given the shocking secrets of sexuality – revealed by the self’s won developing body knowledge experiences this body and what it knows as a depraved epistemology. This fact is a vital constituent in [...]
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Here is a little more of my current jumbled thinking on hysteria and perversion, influenced by what I have been reading. Sharon Kivland’s work A Case of Hysteria is a feminine detective story telling of a dependence to Freud’s case history (which I also suffer from, and I have been trying to avoid speaking of [...]
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In the Nineteenth Century, Doctor Charcot worked at the Salpetrière in Paris, a hospital dedicated to treat hysteric women through hypnosis and other like treatments. Charcot’s Tuesday lectures were very famous and well attended and Brouillet’s painting shows what was then named ‘La Grande Hysterique’ (believed to be a patient called Blanche Wittmann). Watch her [...]
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Laura Gonzalez is an artist and writer. Her recent practice encompasses film, dance, photography and text, and her work has been exhibited and published in the UK, Spain and Portugal. She has spoken at numerous conferences and events, including the Museum for the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York, the Medical Museum in Copenhagen, College Arts Association and the Association for the Psychoanalysis of Culture and Society. When she is not following Freud, Lacan and Marx’s footsteps with her camera, she lectures postgraduate students at the Glasgow School of Art.
Her doctoral project, completed in 2010, investigated psychoanalytic approaches to making and understanding objects of seduction, including an examination of parallels between artistic and analytic practices, a study of Manolo Blahnik’s shoes as objects of desire, a disturbing encounter with Marcel Duchamp’s last work, and the creation of a psychoanalytically inspired Discourse of the Artefact, a framework enabling the circulation of questions and answers through a relational approach to artworks.She is currently immersed in an interdisciplinary project exploring knowledge and the body of the hysteric.