Christopher Bollas: Mini-Course and Residency at the Townsend Center Fall 2016
The seminar and residency will explore the work of the most influential psychoanalyst writing in English today, Christopher Bollas, who will be scholar-in-residence at the Townsend Center in the first week of November 2016. Bollas is widely known for his pioneering, polymathic, and maverick investigations of unconscious perception of objects and the object world, including human beings—work that has been highly suggestive for many domains of the humanities and social sciences—and more recently for his exploration of fractured unconsciousness (anxiety, hysteria, breakdown, and schizophrenia). Prior to Bollas’s visit, we will discuss his published works (including The Freudian Moment, The Shadow of the Object, Being a Character, and When the Sun Bursts: The Enigma of Schizophrenia) as well as forthcoming and in-progress work that he will provide. Students will present their own projects to the group, and will develop questions to be discussed in seminars with Bollas himself and for one-on-one meetings with him during his residency.
Three seminar sessions will be convened by Professor Whitney Davis (History of Art) and will meet on three Wednesdays (September 21 and October 5 and 18) from 5:15 – 7 pm, at the Townsend Center. Participants must attend these seminars; the events of Bollas’s residency, which will take place in the afternoons/early evenings of October 31 and November 1, 2 and 3; and one-on-one meetings with Bollas.
The seminar is open to graduate students in any program, for 1-unit credit. Students can register for the course by enrolling in Rhetoric 244A, History of Art 298, or Comparative Literature 298. Advance communication with and permission of the instructor required (wmdavis@berkeley.edu). You may also contact the Townsend Center at tansmana@berkeley.edu.
