Olga Cox Cameron says: This promises to be an odd undertaking; an attempt via David Lynch’s great film to read the ur–text of psychoanalysis The Interpretation of Dreams with the help (or hindrance!) of some of Lacan’s later theoretical formulations. While I am not convinced of the radical newness of very late Lacan, there is certainly a valuable re-calibration there, a bringing into focus of elements which had been undervalued in earlier seminars, some of these present in shadowy form and almost in spite of himself in Freud’s first writings. Mulholland Drive brilliantly bodies forth the opening and closing of the unconscious in non-sense, the manner in which the cut intervenes as signifier of repression, the various interplays of condensation and displacement (of course), and most interestingly of all a way into Freud’s most challenging definition of the unconscious as ‘relation’. Neither manifest nor latent, neither screen memory nor original event, but the relation between them. I would like to ask you if it is pertinent to note that Lacan too ends his teaching with a focus on ‘relation’. As we know, in the final seminars the poor long-standing phallus volatilises into the ‘relation’ between the parlêtre and enjoyment! We will need to watch the entire movie together to be able to do this work.
Dr.Olga Cox Cameron is a psychoanalyst in private practice in Dublin for the past twenty seven years. She lectured in Psychoanalytic Theory and also in Psychoanalysis and Literature at St. Vincent’s University Hospital and Trinity College from 1991 to 2013 and has published numerous articles on these topics in national and international journals. She is the founder of the annual Psychoanalysis and Cinema Festival, now in its seventh year.
09.30 Registration and Welcome
09.45 Opening comments and guiding remarks by Olga Cox Cameron
10.00 Screening of Mulholland Drive (dir: David Lynch)
12.10 Coffee Break
12.30-13.30 Lecture by Olga Cox Cameron followed by discussion
Location: American College Dublin, 1 Merrion Square, Dublin 2.
Price: Members: €20, Non-members: €25, Students/unwaged: €10. CPD points available.
Enquiries: Carol Owens | cowens@connect.ie
