SCREENING CHILDHOOD
Chair: Heather Nunn
Speakers: Karen Cross & Lesley Caldwell
Cinema has long been fascinated with the figure of the child as an emblem of human nature. Like psychoanalysis, film opens up enchanting, sometimes haunting, spaces for self-exploration, and childhood is a common trope of cinematic narrative. Focusing on examples from the popular Toy Story cycle of films and from Italian neo-realism, this salon invites reflection on the multifarious ways that cinema screens childhood. Dr Karen Cross will discuss the importance of play and the inner world of the child in Toy Story, exploring the dynamics of fear, guilt and loss on show. Prof Lesley Caldwell will show how Bicycle Thieves and The Stolen Children reveal the power of cultural representations of children in shaping webs of meaning for adults who seek both to know and not know themselves. The cinema as a profoundly psychological space of experience will also be revealed through selected clips from films that explore the theme of childhood to prompt audience discussion.
Please find below an open access list of selected papers about psychoanalysis and film.
Meet the Speakers
She is a Training analyst for the Independent Child and Adolescent Psychotherapy Trainings (IPCAPA) and a member of its Training Analysts’ committee. She is a London rep for COWAP, the IPA committee dedicated to women and psychoanalysis.
She teaches and supervises on the MSc in Theoretical Psychoanalytic Studies and the MPhil/PhD in Psychoanalytic Studies in the Psychoanalysis Unit. With Angela Joyce she coordinated and taught the Master’s unit on Winnicott for eight years and she now contributes to teaching Freud. She coordinated the Psychoanalysis Unit’s Interdisciplinary Programme from 2010 to 2016 to explore interfaculty links between the Psychoanalysis Unit and other disciplines and schools. She has a long standing interest in psychoanalysis and the arts and is a member of the organising committee for the Psychoanalysis and Film festival (EPF) and has contributed papers on Italian cinema there. She has been external examiner for the Tavistock. Observational Studies MA and the MA in Infant Mental Health.
She contributes to the Anglo China programme for which she has coordinated a new three year module on the British Independents (2018-2020) and, with DIeter Burgen of Switzerland she is offering a continuing clinical seminar there. An Introduction to the British Independents is published in Beijing in April 2018.
She was an Editor and Trustee for the Winnicott Trust from 2002 to 2016 and its Chair of Trustees from 2008 to 2012. With Helen Taylor Robinson she is Joint General Editor of the Collected Works of Donald Winnicott (OUP, 2016) which won The American Board & Academy of Psychoanalysis book prize (History section) in 2017. She is currently working on themes of analytic communication and of being as central to clinical practice. Articles associated with these issues appear in ‘Dalla psicoanalisi alll’essere e al fare’ in Winnicott e la psicoanalisi del futuro ( C Busano Barbaglio, A Macchia, A Nicolò Roma, 2017), the Rivista di psicoanalisi, ‘Dalla parte del terapeuta nella relazione col paziente’( 2018) and in the BJP (2018). She has recently resumed an earlier interest in sexuality, gender and the body.
As Director of the Squiggle Foundation ( 2000 – 2003) and editor of its Winnicott Studies monograph series (Karnac & Squiggle Foundation, 2000-2008) she published Art, Creativity, Living (2000), The Elusive Child (2003), Sex and Sexuality: Winnicottian Perspectives (2005) and Winnicott and the Psychoanalytic Tradition (2007). With Angela Joyce she published Reading Winnicott for the New Library teaching series( 2011).
Professor Caldwell is also Honorary Senior Research Associate in the Italian department at UCL where she continues to co-organize the lecture series, On Rome, held termly. With Dorigen Caldwell she is co-editor of Rome: Encounters between Past and Present (Ashgate, 2011). She was Co-Investigator with Fabio Camilletti (Warwick) of the AHRC network Roman Modernities, and co-editor with Camilletti of Rome : Modernity, Post Modernity and Beyond ( Legenda, 2018). She has written extensively on the Italian family, the topic of her book, Italian Family Matters (Macmillan,1991), on Italian cinema, and on the city of Rome. She contributed to the New Library Collection Reading Italian Psychoanalysis ( 2017).
Her research is situated broadly within the field of media and cultural studies but takes a particular interest in theorizations of memory and ‘the everyday’ from feminist, psychoanalytic and philosophical standpoints.
Over time she has written particularly on the topic of amateur forms of photography, including shifts in education and training practices for the amateur, cultural appropriations of amateur forms, especially family snapshots, as well as ‘found photography’ and other artistic methods of appropriation. She has also written on more broadly on the role of the amateur within the emergence of new digital participatory cultures focusing especially on ‘citizen witnessing’ and the remediation of community and everyday life within the frame of Instagram. This aspect of her work is currently culminating in the production of a monograph entitled Social Photography: Memory, Materiality and the Everyday.
Alongside this, her research has taken a newer direction exploring more directly the value of psychoanalytic perspectives in theorizing play and creativity within digital culture. This represents an area of new and emerging research that focuses on the children’s animation Toy Story and she currently has another monograph under contract to Karnac Press exploring this topic.
Qualifications
PhD Cultural Studies (The University of East London, fully funded university scholarship)
MSc Research Methods with Distinction (The Open University, fully funded university scholarship)
MA(Econ) Women’s Studies and Feminist Research (The University of Manchester)
Research interests
She is interested in supervising projects relating to her research and she is happy to take informal enquiries.
Current PhD Supervision
Elif Grant, Shifting spaces of activism and social media in protest.
Jo-Ann Cruwagen, The capacity to be alone in the presence of media screens.
Vasiliki-Ioanna Alexopoulou, A digital home for the Greek diaspora (practice).
Completed PhDs
(2017) Theodora Thomadakis, On the Couch with Makeover TV: Psychoanalytic approaches to reality television, gender and audience.
Peer review
She has reviewed articles for various journals, including: Photographies, Visual Studies, Information, Communication and Society (iCS) and Free Associations for which she was Reviews Editor. She has also reviewed monograph proposals for Palgrave Macmillan and Bloomsbury on topics relating to her teaching and research.
Professional affiliations
Member of the Media, Communications and Cultural Studies Association (MeCCSA)
Fellow of the Higher Education Academy