Ecritique Volume 10

Litura

Madeline Andrews

During a recent Q & A session held at the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, Melbourne2 with the Swedish artist, Natalie Djurberg, Djurberg posed the questions: ‘why not just enjoy, why not just be joyful? - why do art?’. She surmised that: ‘if it wasn’t for fear, I think we would just be joyful’.

Drifting the Street with Dickens – Making an Art of Becoming Mad

Peter Gun

Why write? More to the point, and certainly more to the point tonight, why speak? I don’t know about you, but I tend to find that in writing, and particularly in writing psychoanalytically, I do not always know where I am going – I might find this out later, in the course of the writing, but sometimes not even then.

Tales Dead Men Tell

Rodney Kleiman

‘Après moi, le deluge’. These words are attributed to King Louis XV of France; so the story goes. He is gently asked to consider reining in the profligate spending that the treasury cannot afford; ‘perhaps a little for the populace your majesty. . . some monarchical concern for the future of the nation’. His reply: ‘après moi, le deluge’ – ‘after me, the deluge’.

The Ages of the Child

Michael Plastow

Our modern notion of the child emerged in the decline of the Middle Ages, and the privileged place that the child occupies in the family is quite recent. My thesis here is that the modern “sentiment of childhood” 2 described by the historian Philippe Ariès, has come about through the repression of both infantile sexuality and mortality...

Intransitive Demand and Free Association

Jonathan Kettle

It is intriguing that this encounter in 1888 or 18893 between Freud and his patient, Frau Emmy von N., whom he attended morning and evening as she remained in a sanatorium4 , should contain such a juxtaposition of silence with speech...

The Unpredictability of the Pounce

Kate Foord

One of the orienting questions for the 2015 Method and Technique seminar was: ‘What is the nature of poiesis which psychoanalysis moves towards if it is not the production of a poet or poetry?’ The theme of the 2015 seminar, convened by Linda Clifton and David Pereira, Analysts of the Freudian School of Melbourne, was ‘The Aftermath of Love and the Poetics of Interpretation’...

‘Forget about Pink’ – An Interview with Ben McGill Concerning Art and Psychoanalysis

Ben McGill

Bellmer was initially associated with the early surrealists, with Breton etc. He was accepted for his photographs of the doll. Which Breton saw as the ultimate receptacle of love or passion. Bellmer is perhaps less well known for his etchings which he took up after being asked to illustrate Bataille’s Story of the Eye. These in their explicitly erotic nature did not sit so well with Breton...