(Gli organizzatori hanno gentilmente offerto al Centro Psicoanalitico di Pavia un numero limitato di link gratuiti. Rimangono ancora 3 link per chiunque voglia inviare il proprio nome a Gill Jervis all'indirizzo: gillianjrvs@gmail.com che lo inoltrerà agli organizzatori stessi). ___________________________________________________________________
Saturday 3 July, 10am for a 10.30 start, ending at 1.00pm
Robert Snell, author of
Cézanne and the post-Bionian field: an exploration and a meditation
Routledge, 2021
in conversation with Richard Morgan-Jones
Cézanne, Mont Sainte-Victoire, c. 1902-06. Oil on canvas, 57.2 x 97.2 cm. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
Robert Snell’s book is an invitation to a conversation between painting and psychoanalysis. The book offers an introduction both to Cézanne – the ‘father of modern art’ – and to one of the most interesting developments in contemporary psychoanalysis: the post-Bionian theory of the field, as it has been evolving in Italy in the hands of Antonino Ferro, Giuseppe Civitarese, and others.
Cézanne and Bion pioneered new directions in painting and in psychoanalysis. Both point us towards a fundamental insight: far from being isolated, self-contained ‘subjects’, we fundamentally exist only within a larger ‘field’. Cézanne’s painting can give us a direct experience of this. The Italian field analysts build on Bion’s work, as well as on Kurt Lewin and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, on group theory and narrative theory, and on theatre, film, literature and visual art. For them, the particular, interpersonal field of the analytic encounter is accessed through reverie, metaphor and dream, and this has profound implications for technique. It allows primitive ‘proto-emotions’ that link us all to be transformed – just as Cézanne transformed his ‘sensations’ – into aesthetic form, into feelings-linked-to-thoughts which in turn enrich and expand the field and its participants.
The book suggests how far art and contemporary psychoanalysis are mutually generative, and Robert and Richard will use it as the basis for a wider discussion of the far-reaching theoretical and practical implications of psychoanalytic field theory and its ‘aesthetic’ dimensions.
Robert Snell, a BPF member and psychoanalytic psychotherapist in private practice, is the author of Uncertainties, Mysteries, Doubts. Romanticism and the Analytic Attitude (Routledge, 2012), and Portraits of the Insane. Théodore Géricault and the Subject of Psychotherapy (Karnac, 2016).
Richard Morgan-Jones is a psychoanalytic psychotherapist whose work and supervision are profoundly informed by field thinking. He teaches at the BPF and also internationally in India, USA, Italy and Russia. He is an organisational and group relations consultant, who practises internationally, and the author of The Body of the Organisation and its Health (Karnac, 2010).
To register to for this online event visit www.britishpsychotherapyfoundation.org.uk/events
A 20% discount is available on Robert Snell’s book ‘Cézanne and the post-Bionian field : an exploration and a meditation’ if ordered online directly from Taylor & Francis using the promotional code FLR40
‘In Cézanne and the post-Bionian field: an exploration and a meditation, the author succeeds in conveying the idea of a living, “multiversal” field by bringing together elements pertinent to the field concept in painting, philosophy and literature, and by providing them with a space where they can breathe together. The fascination of the book lies in the way it constructs novel pathways and tools for exploring a temporal space in perpetual expansion. The structure of the field can be expressed in different languages, each bound by its own stockade that someone, like our author, has dared to break down, resulting not in chaos but in the suggestion of new concepts. Whilst reading Robert Snell’s work, I was struck over and over again by his extraordinary capacity to juxtapose Cézanne’s visual concepts with Bion’s oneiric models and field theory. I cannot overstate the value of this extraordinarily fecund meeting between art and psychoanalysis.’
Antonino Ferro, President of the Italian Psychoanalytic Society, training and supervising analyst in the Italian Psychoanalytic Society, the American Psychoanalytic Association, and the International Psychoanalytical Association
‘The reading of this book absorbed me. I really admired Robert Snell’s writing style and the skill of the composition – the transitions from one perspective to the other, so as to always keep the reader’s attention. The book shows a deep understanding of the Italian theory of the analytical field, and creates a perfect interplay of reflections and resonances between this theory, Cézanne and Merleau-Ponty. All three come out of it enriched, because each one is reflected in the other two (not to mention Bergson, Ogden and many others). It is a beautiful book.’
Giuseppe Civitarese, psychiatrist and training and supervising analyst of the Italian Psychoanalytic Society, member of the of the American Psychoanalytic Association, editor of the Rivista di Psicoanalis and author of Sublime Subjects, Aesthetic Experience and Intersubjectivity in Psychoanalysis, Routledge, 2017
