Psychoanalysis is a key approach to the study of art and visual culture. In this course you will consider the work of the founder of psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud and three of the main streams of contemporary psychoanalysis his work has spawned, namely object relations, Kleinian and French Freudianism (Lacan, Kristeva). You will also examine affect theory, which is an emerging area of research. Key concepts from psychoanalysis will be discussed, as applied to the analysis of art including dreams and primary processes, sublimation, the uncanny, the fetish and abjection. Each week we will read a key psychoanalytic text and then consider what it illuminates about the nature of art in general, or specific works of art. The aim is to examine how psychoanalysis is used to interpret the function of art, as well as the origins of vision and creativity, and the unconscious processes that works of art deploy or activate.