MSPP Monthly Meeting Schedule for 2008

 

APRIL 27, 2008

 

Sunday, April 27,  2008  ~  11:30 a.m. to 1:30 p.m. (Coffee & Conversation 11:00 - 11:30 a.m)

Providence Hospital,  Fisher Auditorium, 16001 West Nine Mile Rd., Southfield Michigan

 

Escaping the Phantom’s Ghostly Grasp:

  On Psychoanalysis as a Performance Art in the Spirit World       
 

 Paper presentation by Patrick B. Kavanaugh, Ph.D.

 

ABSTRACT: Described as a madman-philosopher, a poet-dramatist, and a theorist-playwright, Antonin Artaud (1895-1948) wrote a collection of essays on the theatre during his nine years in various mental asylums in France in the 1930’s. Published in 1938, Le Theatre et son double  (The Theatre and Its Double) presented a revolutionary theory in which his metaphysical theatre replaces the psychological theatre of the West. In so doing, Artaud broke with the Aristotelean tradition of theatre and, influenced by an Oriental philosophy, introduced his metaphysical theatre as embodied in his Theatre of Cruelty.  His theatre enters a more dangerous kind of reality that looks beneath the mask of the civilized and demands that the audience viscerally see and speak with the more barbaric, primitive, and real aspects of self and other.

Escaping the Phantom’s Ghostly Grasp ... enters the Theatre of Cruelty as found on the in-patient unit of an inner city state hospital to consider the beginnings of a conversation with The Man From Venus. In so doing, this essay hopes to contribute to a more radical poetics of psychic theatre in which the stage of Artaud’s theatre presents us with another reality and space – a spiritual reality and space- from which we might speak with the ghosts of the spirit realm.

 

ABOUT THE PRESENTER: Dr. Kavanaugh is in the private practice of psychoanalysis in Farmington Hills, Michigan.