Research Catalogue

Though psychoanalysis has been very intimate with “interpreting” dreams since the beginning, it is not helpful to "see our own dreams". Dreams, because of the clinical experience, may well be caught up in the analyst’s own "dreams", within the framework of traumdeutung (leading to the unconscious), of the expression of "personal depths" and surely the "unconscious". It is easier to find “your reality" caught in the “dreams of others”.

Why shouldn’t dreaming and fantasy be a production, an active artistic "happening", a creative process of liberation? Why should dreams be understood as the distortion of unconscious contents within the symbolization process of the "dream thoughts"?

Virginia Woolf on the Streets

• "Fiction is like a spider's web, attached ever so lightly perhaps, but still attached to life at all four corners. Often the attachment is scarcely perceptible; Shakespeare's plays, for instance, seem to hang there complete by themselves. But when the web is pulled askew, hooked up at the edge, torn in the middle, one remembers that these webs are not spun in midair by incorporeal creatures, but are the work of suffering human beings, and are attached to the grossly material things, like health and money and the houses we live in." Virginia Woolf, A Room of One's Own (1929)
  
  Before driven into suicide by the accelerated depression, Virginia Woolf thought of "A Room of One's Own" as the possibility of a temporary literary comfort. More like an atmosphere "not yet obtained", that is, to be cultivated. Her place is rather the streets and a dog's feelings roaming in the streets. The flow of ideas and images, prodding each other, strengthening or diminishing their power. Virginia Woolf could show how the very "personal" world of a woman could vibrate with all the loci of the city, the metropolis, and the capitals of the world. 

• In her critique of "The Cinema" (1926), Virginia Woolf conceives cinema like a rough band that exploits literature, jumping on it and tearing it to pieces. A "bricolage". While evoking the "roughness" of cinema, Woolf links this to a rather complex "lingual" framework: would there be a moment of anger on the screen? In that case, someone would smash a glass on the ground. Love to be shown? Then a passionate kiss. All of this seems to defend Woolf's protest: Lev Tolstoy's great Anna Karenina could never be reduced to a simple language and gestural features. There was a "depth" of love, and perhaps the theatrical world could have carried this to the audiovisual level, as in Anton Chekhov. Film, however, would remain a mechanical device of reproduction that exploited this "depth." Woolf also speaks of an inherent destiny contained in cinema and the possibility of an artistic expansion caught in a very interesting point: the coincidential, sudden blackout of the screen while watching The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, that is, a "malfunction" of the cinematographic device (in this case, the projection device or the film). Cinema, in her opinion, did not have to "show", that is, work with the "visibles" or images, make theatre with "abstracting images". Woolf would claim that this is where cinema needed to reveal the artistic possibilities, instead of the hieroglyphization of images for theatrical narrative purposes, using the screen like a painting, as a "cerebral effect" was the undiscovered kernel of cinema. This would be one of the beginnings of the "video theory".

• "The extraordinary woman depends on the ordinary woman. It is only when we know what were the conditions of the average woman's life... it is only when we can measure the way of life and the experience of life made possible to the ordinary woman that we can account for the success or failure of the extraordinary woman as a writer." Virginia Woolf, Granite and Rainbow (1958)