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Surface Illusions: Reading the Manifest and Latent in Asian Painting

  • Cleveland Museum of Art 11150 East Boulevard Cleveland, OH, 44106 United States (map)

Guided Tour at the Cleveland Museum of Art
Presented by Diane O’Donoghue

Event Price: Event is free. No CEs offered.

Attendance: This is an in-person only event. Limited to 25 attendees.

Audience: This is a program for CPC members. Public is also welcome.

NOTE: Pre-registration is required. The coffee reception will be at 10 - 11 a.m. with guided tour to follow from 11a.m. - 12 p.m.

Event Description:

Sigmund Freud’s widely read The Interpretation of Dreams (1900) made a number of bold claims about the meaning and mechanics of a phenomenon—dreaming— that was at that time widely dismissed in Eurocentric traditions. One of the best-known of his insights involved the notions of the manifest and latent, with the imagery we recall from sleep (“manifest content”) as masking less accessible “latent meaning.” This latter aspect of psychical functioning often defied conventions of representation, of “picturing,” as Freud would have known it. This gallery presentation will consider Chinese and Japanese painting as offering ways to consider different notions of surface and depth, as both visual and psychological experiences.

Diane O'Donoghue is a visual and cultural historian who directs the Program for Public Humanities at the Jonathan M. Tisch College for Civic Life at Tufts University, USA, where she is also the Senior Fellow for the Humanities and has served as chair of the University’s Department of Visual and Critical Studies. She is a scholar member on the faculty of the Boston Psychoanalytic Society and Institute and on the editorial board of American Imago. She has received the CORST Prize from the American Psychoanalytic Association, the Sigmund Freud/Fulbright Scholar for Psychoanalysis award at the University of Vienna and the Freud Museum, and an Erikson Scholar fellowship.

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March 28

The Analytic Museum: Freud’s Curatorial Phantasm

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April 25

Oedipus and Anti-Oedipus: On the Circularity of a Myth