The Psychoanalytical Society of Serbia is organizing the second panel discussion of the cycle “Sigmund Freud and Leonardo da Vinci: a Meeting of Psychoanalysis and Art” entitled:
“The Semicircle of Mental Health: Modern Man between Fantasy and Reality”
Fantasy in health, creativity and sickness is a borderline area of human spirit spanning between the inner and outer world. A man spends most of his awakened life in daydreaming, fantasizing and other kinds of absences. An integrated functioning of mental life necessitates a phantasmatic life, which flexibly stimulates, but does not damage creative relationship towards external reality. Fantasy is actually a connective tissue, a base, a scene where conscious, visible life takes place. Behind the scenes of the visible, essential questions “how did I come to life” and “who am I?” are hidden, opening the door to the unconscious phantasmatic world of the primal scene, body perception and the area of one’s own identity, that develops in the early relations with the significant others.
The primal scene phantasms are a reflection of an individual model of a family relationship including the phantasms of parents. The primal scene could best be explained as a mixed autobiographical myth that is based on phantasm and upgraded by later experience and fantasy of the real event, and derivatives of the primal scene phantasm and its importance for the development of human psyche are present in mythology, history and great works of art.
Beauty and aesthetics have undergone transformation over different periods, including the time of modern man, entailing the questions of what unconscious fantasies trigger the endless search for “ideal and beautiful”, and which of them are hidden behind the need for body modification in cosmetic surgery. Body modification as a psychological shelter from reality and the feeling of being dependent on another, by creating an illusion and omnipotent perception “that we can create ourselves”, thus negating our own dependence on the other and a parental couple as a creative entity.
Moderator: Sandra Simić, a psychoanalyst of the Psychoanalytical Society of Serbia
Lecturers: Jasmina Vrbaški, the PSS psychoanalyst, Olga Savostianova, the PSS psychoanalyst, Srđa Zlopaša, the PSS candidate
The lecture will take place in the Large Hal – Reading Room of the Arts Department of the Belgrade City Library, on Friday, February 19, 2016, at 7 p.m.
Free admission.
