Women, Gender & Psychoanalysis

Spring Meeting  on April 16, 2011 in New York City

Join us for our Conversation Hour from 5pm to 6pm.

Danielle Knafo, Ph.D. will be giving a Presentation entitled

Women’s Self-Representation: A Dialogue between Psychoanalysis and Art

Excerpt from Presentation to be given in New York in April…..

I will examine the lives and works of ten pioneering female artists
over the last century whose self-representational art challenged the
cultural presuppositions and gender stereotypes of their time, while
opening up a vista on the feminine experience. Additionally, each of
the artists – Käthe Kollwitz, Claude Cahun, Charlotte Salomon, Frida
Kahlo, Carolee Schneemann, Hannah Wilke, Ana Mendieta, Adrian
Piper, Cindy Sherman, and Orlan – used her art to overcome
personal tragedy and trauma, so her work is in simultaneous and
dramatic dialogue with both her social world and her personal
history.

These women created in solitude and present themselves alone in
their art. Artistic creation is in essence a solitary vocation. Nearly
anyone who consciously retreats from the many to commune with
the one is practicing a disengagement that can have many benefits.
I explore some of the creative and transformative aspects of
solitude and specifically address the uniqueness of women’s
solitude and its relationship to creativity. I argue that solitude
cannot be isolated from gendered, cultural and historico-political
contexts. Anthony Storr’s popular book on Solitude (1988) never
once mentions gender differences and nearly all of his examples are
taken from men. Many women artists who break free of the group
subvert social stereotypes and cultural expectations and challenge
the social constraints of engagement and the construction of
women as chiefly familial and relational beings who are primarily
other-oriented.

I analyze the work and life of women artists and show how their art
illuminates and advances the way women relate to their bodies – to
beauty, sexuality, motherhood, relationships, race, aging, sickness,
loss and death. Their art reflects profound changes in woman’s
evolving self-awareness while it explores the transcendent
possibilities of the female psyche and its creative potential for
healing.

Danielle Knafo, Ph.D. is a Professor in the Clinical Psychology
Doctoral Program at Long Island University’s C.W. Post Campus. She
is Associate Clinical Professor and supervisor at New York
University’s Postdoctoral Program in Psychoanalysis. She has
written and lectured extensively on the subjects of creativity,
gender, psychoanalysis and trauma. Dr. Knafo’s books include: Egon
Schiele: A Self in Creation, Unconscious Fantasies and the Relational
World, Living with Terror, Working with Trauma: A Clinician’s
Handbook, and In Her Own Image: Women’s Self-Representation in
Twentieth-Century Art. Dr. Knafo is a clinical psychologist and
psychoanalyst and she maintains a private practice in Great Neck, NY and NYC.