This interdisciplinary panel discussion will consider approaches to the visualisation of homeless experience and ask: how can a psychoanalytic framework for thinking about this material help us understand produce new understandings?
The idea of being at home and having a home are ideas embedded in psychoanalytic theory and practice. However, while Freud’s paper on the uncanny or ‘unhomely’ has provided insights into depictions of the home in critical studies of cinema, race and art, this field has rarely been included in discussions of homeless experience. More often, homelessness is considered as synonymous with life ‘on the street’. Such a framework tends to disregard more dialectical questions about what ‘the home’ means and precludes our understanding of homelessness in these terms. In this discussion the work of the consulting room and the work of art are explored as one way towards this understanding when considering visual material made from the perspective of those experiencing being without a home.
Speakers include Sarah Johnsen (professorial fellow, Housing Policy, Heriot-Watt University), Anthony Luvera (artist, lecturer Coventry University), Mark Stuart-Smith (art tutor, The Connection at St Martin’s in the Fields) and Elizabeth Greenway (psychotherapist). Discussant: Lesley Caldwell (psychoanalyst, UCL Psychoanalysis Unit)
Under the aegis of the Institute of Advanced Studies, the Psychoanalysis Unit, the Slade School of Fine Art and the Barlett Faculty of the Built Environment, this is the first part of a series on ‘leaving home’.
This event is free.