Acting Out: An Intimate Encounter Between Louise Bourgeois and Melanie Klein

Many affective psychic processes take place within the consulting room – for instance, transference, counter-transference, working-through, and acting out. Can these processes be aligned with the forms of affect that we experience when engaging with a work of art or encountering a contemporary art exhibition? Are these processes that we experience within the consulting room or within the gallery analogous in any way? How much does the affective experience of being in analysis become embodied in artworks that deal with one’s psychoanalytic treatment? What happens if we encounter art within a context that is psychoanalytic? What can psychoanalysis offer us in our engagement with a work of art, and what can an artwork teach us about what takes place in the consulting room. By considering a single photograph from the Freud Museum London archive, and one of their contemporary art exhibitions dedicated to Louise Bourgeois, this talk will engage with these questions.