In standard academic practice, courses on psychoanalysis and art usually begin with an introduction to psychoanalytic theory, which is then followed by an “application” of that theory to art, in order to “explain” the art. This course rejects the idea that psychoanalysis is a master key that can be used to uncover the “truth” of what it analyzes, as much as it rejects the idea that art needs to be “explained.” Rather, the course is based on the hypothesis that both art and psychoanalysis (in the form articulated by Sigmund Freud and Jacques Lacan) are co-equal explorers of psychic processes. Neither is superior to the other in terms of what it discovers, although the realms that they operate within may be subtly different. In this respect, the course will search for the ways in which art and psychoanalysis illuminate each other, each at work in the gaps that the other leaves empty. 

One of the key issues we will investigate concerns the relation of images to the domain of the unconscious. As we will discover, many of the operations of the unconscious as described by Freud are also characteristic features of images. This structural homology between the two allows us to pose a series of questions for further consideration: are there specific characteristics within images that make them particularly suited to the unconscious? Equally, do all images contain traces of the unconscious, and is this what we should be looking for when we “read” images?

About the Professor

Rico Franses is Chair of the Critical Analysis of Art at BICAR. He was for many years Founding Director of the University Art Galleries and Collections at the American University of Beirut. He has also held teaching positions at The Australian National University (Canberra), Pratt Institute (New York), and a fellowship at Harvard University. He has a BA in Philosophy (McGill University, Montreal), an MA in Art History (McGill) and a PhD in Art History (Courtauld Institute of Art, London). Among his publications are a book, Donor Portraits in Byzantine Art. On the Vicissitudes of Contact between Human and Divine (Cambridge University Press, 2018), and several articles including ‘Lacan and Byzantium. In the Beginning was the Image’, ‘The Deleuzian Spatiality of Byzantine Art’, and 'Untime in the Unconscious.  On the Dislocations of Time in Freud, Lacan, Laurie Anderson and Walid Sadek’.

Certificate

Students will receive a Certificate of Completion upon successful attendance of a course or a Certificate of Completion and Letter of Evaluation if they successfully attend and complete the final assignment. Those who complete three courses (attendance and writing) in the Critical Analysis of Art over two calendar years are eligible for a BICAR Diploma in Critical Analysis of Art.

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