Seminar announcement

Centre for Psychoanalytic Studies

Friday 26 November 2010

Open Seminar (Southend Campus)

Found objects and mirroring forms (Dr. Ken Wright)

Abstract: I use some comments of Henry Moore about his method of working to consider the relation between outer form and inner experience in the creation of a work of art. Moore valued his ‘found objects’ because they held the seeds of his sculptural ‘ideas’ and although he made no connection between such forms and the ‘forms of feeling’ (Langer), he still described his sculptures in living terms, as though they had an inner life. The idea that physical objects are able to contain ‘forms of feeling’ leads to Winnicott’s work on transitional objects, and a view of the baby’s bit of blanket as a first ‘found object’. I follow this theme through Winnicott’s later work on the mother’s face as the child’s first mirror, and Stern’s work on maternal attunement, and I use their ideas to throw light on aesthetic activity and the process of artistic creation.

Dr. Ken Wright is a member of the British Psychoanalytic Society, Tavistock Society of Psychotherapists and Society of Couple Psychoanalytic Psychotherapists. He is also Patron of the Squiggle Foundation. At different times a general psychiatrist and GP, he now works exclusively as psychoanalyst/psychoanalytic psychotherapist in private practice. He has published many papers and articles from a Winnicottian perspective but is best known for his book Vision and Separation - Between Mother and Baby which was published by Free Association Books, 1991 and awarded the Margaret Mahler Literature prize in 1992. His second book, Mirroring and Attunement: Self-realization in Psychoanalysis and Art, was published last year by Routledge.

The Open Seminars all take place in Southend Lecture Room 5 at 5:30pm.

All Welcome

T 01206 873640 E cpsadmin@essex.ac.uk www.essex.ac.uk/centres/psycho