Tragedy and Psychoanalysis
Lecture
Amanda Holmes, Assistant Professor in Philosophy at University of Applied Arts (Angewandte) Vienna, brings her class to KUNSTVEREIN GARTENHAUS, to respond to Özgür Kar’s MACABRE exhibition and reflect on Tragedy.
There is an interesting footnote in Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams in which Freud discusses the lesson of Hamlet.
He writes: “Another of the great creations of tragic poetry, Shakespeare’s Hamlet, has its roots in the same soil as Oedipus Rex. But the changed treatment of the same material reveals the whole difference in the mental life of these two widely separated epochs of civilization: the secular advance of repression in the emotional life of mankind.”
The course takes its point of departure from this passage and the idea that tragedy illustrates something essential about the structure of repression. This idea sets the ground for our exploration of the place of the specifically modern tragedy of Hamlet within psychoanalytic theory.
For more information about the course: click here
The lecture is free and open to the public.
