About this event

Writing Inner Space - Dr Adrian Chapman with Amy Lineham

Adrian Chapman will explore the encounter between British countercultural psychiatry and the unconscious through the writings of the Scottish psychiatrist R. D. Laing (1927–1989), alongside work by other members of the Laing network, including Mary Barnes—a celebrated artist and mental health activist. Drawing out parallels and tensions between psychoanalytic, existential, and spiritual approaches to psychic life, Chapman will consider Laing’s notion of ‘inner space’, in counterpoint to the Freudian unconscious, as a way of rendering interiority. Adrian will be joined by Amy Lineham, whose current doctoral work draws upon the Mary Barnes archive, recently acquired by The Wellcome Collection, to situate Barnes’s visionary art and writing within the shifting social and political construction of mental illness in the late twentieth century.

Adrian Chapman is a London-based writer and academic specialising in mental health, literature, and 1960s–1970s history. He has lectured internationally and held fellowships at University College London and the University of Glasgow. He now teaches English Literature for Florida State University’s London Centre. His work has been supported by the Wellcome Trust and he has contributed to Wellcome Collection events and publications, alongside articles in journals, blogs, and magazines. He is currently writing a book on 1960s–1970s psychiatry and counterculture, centred on R. D. Laing, arguing his cultural impact not only helps reinterpret that era but also helps us better understand the present-day mental health crisis and the widespread desire to live more meaningful lives.

Amy Lineham is a researcher trained at the University of Strathclyde, where her Wellcome-funded Master’s examined the role of Mary Barnes' paintings in her own and others' experience of Kingsley Hall. Her PhD project at the University of Surrey draws more broadly from Barnes' archive at the Wellcome collection, tracing her identities as an artist, writer and mental health activist within and beyond the Hall. Alongside her PhD, Amy is a medical doctor, currently working as a Core Psychiatry Trainee at South London and Maudsley NHS Foundation Trust. Her clinical work informs the questions she brings to the archive and she is interested in how such research can shape mental health histories and futures.

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This lecture will be recorded and available for 7 days after the lecture takes place

© Image: Matthew Kolakowski: Storm Inside

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