"Working through psychoanalysis: Freud's legacy in art, cinema, literature and popular culture" to be held at the University of Leeds on 15-17th April 2011 (360G-Wellcome-096163_Z_11_Z)

As a part of the University of Leeds' ongoing 'Medicine and the Everyday' project, this conference aims to bring together clinicians, creative practitioners, and scholars from various disciplines to explore the cultural legacy of one of the most significant and widely contested developments in the history of modern medicine: Freud's invention of psychoanalysis. Our concern is not primarily with the therapeutic validity of psychoanalysis today, nor with the application of psychoanalytic theory to the cultural world. Our goal is to facilitate a discussion between academics, psychotherapists and artists on the ways in which Freud's specifically clinical invention has impacted the cultural world at large. As such, the conference will be dedicated to examining how the psychoanalytic discovery has altered our very frames of cultural reference and creative possibility, and to interrogating the myriad interpretations, disseminations and (mis)representations of psychoanalysis attempted within the cultural sphere during the last century - from major aesthetic movements to popular culture. 'Working Through Psychoanalysis' will thus create the conditions for a truly multidisciplinary exchange between academic, creative and clinical perspectives on the cultural transformations effected by the so-called 'Freudian revolution'.