Towards a visual-poetic perspective on psychoanalysis: a study inspired by Herrmanns Notes on China

• Grant number: 15/19769-8
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships abroad - Research Internship - Post-doctor
• Start date: January 15, 2016
• End date: May 14, 2016
• Field of knowledge: Humanities - Psychology - Social Psychology
• Principal Investigator: Joao Augusto Frayze-Pereira
• Grantee: Fernanda Sofio Woolcott
• Supervisor: Benjamin H. Ogden
• Host Institution: Instituto de Psicologia (IP). Universidade de São Paulo (USP). São Paulo , SP, Brazil
• Institution abroad: Columbia University in the City of New York, United States
• Associated to the scholarship: 14/50534-4 - Towards a visual poetic perspective on psychoanalysis: a study inspired by Hermann's 'Notes on China', BP.PD

Abstract

Notes on China (A Psychoanalytic Voyage to the East) is an unpublished work by Brazilian psychoanalyst Fabio Herrmann, composed of words (dense, poetic texts) and images (photographs, more or less digitally modified, as well as graphically developed designs). The work cannot be reduced to ones or the others: it is the dialogue that occurs between them. As a receptor of this work, my objective is to interpret its visual poetic. I maintain one foot inside and the other outside of the projetc of the Multiple Fields Theory, the theoretical work developed by Herrmann. My research possesses an endopoietic dimension-in the sense discussed by Green (1997, 97)-as it considers Herrmann's conceptions of reality (1985/2001a), of the psychoanalytic method (1979/1991) and of representation (1992), in addition to the expression he uses Freudian fiction (2002), which I elevate to the category of a concept unexplicitly present throughout his work. The four are interpretants of Notes on China. In the conception of representation, I find a clue towards a description of the author's visual poetic, which pertains, however, to a new form of the concept that I am calling "meta-representation". In its exopoietic (Green, 1997, 97) dimension, my research converses with Sontag's (1973/1977 & 2003) essays on photography, with Flusser's (1983/2011) proposal of the relationship between text and image, and with Frayze-Pereira (1984, 1995, 2005/2010), in his perspective of considering the poetic of any artist "impliedly", contextually and diachronically. I also am inspired by Iser (1972) and his theory of reception and by Deleuze and Guattari (1991/2007) in the way they distinguish Art from Philosophy. (AU)