Maudsley Arts and Psychoanalysis | Dickens's Monsters - John Mullan

Maudsley Lectures in Psychoanalysis | Arts and Psychoanalysis

Dickens's Monsters

John Mullan

17th June 2024

7:30pm - 9:00pm (BST)

Hybrid

In-person at 10 Windsor Walk and online via Zoom.

Recording available for 1 week.

The speakers will be in dialogue with Psychoanalyst Dr Anne Patterson.

John Mullan is Lord Northcliffe Professor of Modern English Literature at University College London. His books include What Matters in Jane Austen? (2012) and, most recently, The Artful Dickens (2020). He is also a broadcaster and journalist, writing on contemporary fiction for the Guardian. He is the author of How Novels Work and in 2009 was one of the judges for the Man Booker Prize.

Summary

Scrooge, Gradgrind, Pecksniff, Uriah Heep. It is no accident that Dickens supplies the OED with more words derived from the names of his characters than any other novelist. Some have complained that those characters are grotesque or superficial or ‘monstrous’. Yet, whether frightening or ridiculous, they have served as brilliant embodiments of real human inclinations. This talk will show how his monsters do indeed live inside our heads.

From Freud’s thinking on the sublimation of libido and his later theorisation of the Life and Death Drives, to Klein’s work on reparation and the recovery of the good object and Winnicott’s ideas of creative living, psychoanalysis has always been interested in creativity. 

In the fourth Maudsley summer series on arts and psychoanalysis, we continue to explore this theme of creativity between internal and external worlds in dialogue with artists from a range of different perspectives: from the natural to the built world and ceramics to literature and theatre.

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Concession tickets are available, for students, BPAS candidates and NHS trainees and nurses. Please email outreach@iopa.org.uk if you are unsure if you qualify for a concession ticket.

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