Friday evening March
2,2001
7:45-930 pm
Public Lecture
FinnegansWake & joys VICE:
INTERPRETATION play &
anxiety
Thomas
M Brod, M.D.
Sharen Westin, M.D., discussant
This two-hour event is intended for the general public as well as
psychoanalysts and. other practicing psychotherapists interested in discovering
the pleasure of James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake.
After Dr. Brod provides a context for study of this "modern"
masterwork, participants will have the opportunity to experience close study of
the text. In group discussion, we
will examine a particular fragment of the work in which Joyce compares
interpretation to erotic reverie (Book I, chapter, 5, page 109
).
As we will collectively peck at this delicious scrap, we will consider
how Joyce’s great literary work was influenced by psychoanalytic thought
of its time, and what it, in turn, has to teach psychoanalysts of our time.
Particular emphasis will be on Joyce’s evident conflict between wanting to
be taken seriously and wanting to remain obscure; we will explore how this
conflict mirrors that of the analytic client with resistance to emotional
closeness.
Multimedia presentation will be utilized, including a professional
audiotaped reading of the text by Irish actor James Norton (courtesy of Naxos Audiobooks).
Professionals who wish to continue this study will have the
opportunityto sign up for a credit-bearing LAPSI Extension Course to be
continues on three subsequent Monday evenings. [seminar]
Thomas M. Brod, MD is a
psychoanalyst on the LAPSI faculty and is an Assistant Clinical Professor of
Psychiatry at UCLA. He is in
private practice in west Los Angeles.
This is an expansion of a lecture given last September in London at the
Creativity& Madness Conference.
Dr. Brod will be joined in the discussion by Sharen Westin, M.D. Dr. Westin is a psychoanalyst on the LAPSI faculty and is an Assistant Clinical Professor Of Psychiatry at UCLA. She is in private practice in Beverly Hills.
Bibliography
James Joyce, Finnegans Wake,
Penguin Books, 1976.First published, 1939. Pages
104-125.
For supplemental reading,
- Joseph Campbell & JM Robinson, A Skeleton Key to Finnegans Wake, Buccaneer Books, 1976 (first published 1944)
- Roland McHugh, Annotations to Finnegans Wake, Johns Hopkins University Press, revised 1991
- Richard Ellmann, James Joyce, Oxford University Press, 1959
- Edna O’Brien, James Joyce, Viking Penguin, 1999
- The James Joyce Portal: http://www.robotwisdom.com/jaj/portal.html