Bloomsbury and Psychoanalysis Workshop in London

Continuing Conversations between Bloomsbury and Psychoanalysis: Drawings and Borrowings

A Workshop, 24th June 2017. 12.30-4.00pm

The topic of the relationship between the Bloomsbury Group and psychoanalysis in Britain - or vice-versa - continues to be of interest to critics and academic writers. An element of the fascination is the examination not just of what use Bloomsbury made of Freud’s work but also how psychoanalysis in turn may have used and associated itself with Bloomsbury individuals and their work, or with the idea of the Bloomsbury Group. Bloomsbury began to be aware of psychoanalysis from 1914 and during the 1920s its interactions with Freud and with psychoanalysts were critical, teasing and ambivalent. British psychoanalysis’s attention to its Bloomsbury connections arguably came decades after Bloomsbury’s first engagement with it and therefore bears comparison to a conversation with gaps and time lapses. We are meeting in this workshop to consider what one side drew from the other; the session follows on from the conference ‘Conversations between Bloomsbury & Psychoanalysis: Mutual Influence or Incomprehension’ held in September 2015 at UCL.

Speakers/Presentations

Professor Fuhito Endo, Seikei University Tokyo, ‘Freud’s Leonardo da Vinci and a Memory of his Childhood ’ in Lytton Strachey’s Elizabeth and Essex’

Dr Helen Tyson, Sussex University, ‘Monsters Inside – Marion Milner and Virginia Woolf’

Dr Ben Poore, Queen Mary's London, Masud Khan and Mr. Luis: Race, Identification, Modernism

Deirdre McQuillan, UCL, ‘Later Psychoanalytic Examinations of the Strachey Brothers’