Conversations Between Bloomsbury & Psychoanalysis:
Mutual Influence or Incomprehension?
UCL Health Humanities Centre, 12 September, 2015, 11.30am-5.30pm
In histories of modernist literature and psychoanalysis in Britain, few
topics have been as much discussed and mythologised as the relations
between Bloomsbury and Psychoanalysis. This conference reexamines the
meeting point between psychoanalysis and the Bloomsbury group, and the
tensions and contradictions that occur when such large appellations are
linked. The topic has been approached from an array of perspectives,
ranging from gender studies, discourses of modernism to literary
history. However, the first hand testimony of figures, such as James
Strachey and Virginia Woolf, is often as odds with the considered views
of subsequent critics and theorists. Literary scholars and historians
will bring to bear new research and fresh perspectives on this
intersection and discuss the possibilities of a new understanding of the
relations between Bloomsbury and Psychoanalysis. There will be
contributions from those studying Bloomsbury writers, the critics of
Bloomsbury and British psychoanalysts in the pre-World War Two period.
Speakers
Professor Sally Alexander, Goldsmiths College London – “Winnicott’s Women
Analysts.”
Professor Fuhito Endo, Seikei University Tokyo – “Joan Riviere in
Masquerade, or Her Implicitly Kleinian Criticism of Freud.”
Dee McQuillan, University College London – “Documentation versus
Interpretation: James Strachey as a Link between Psychoanalysis and
Bloomsbury.”
Professor Kunio Shin, Tsuda College Tokyo – “Some Versions of
Anti-psychoanalysis: Lewis, Richards, and Auden in the 1930s.”
Helen Tyson, Queen Mary University London – “On ‘Freudian Fiction’
–Virginia Woolf, Modernist Readers and Psychoanalysis.”
Cost: £35; Registered students (with proof): £25; UCL staff and UCL
students: free
Financially supported by the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science
Location: Room 103, 51 Gordon Square, London WC1H 0PN
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