Paper presentation with audio-visual slide presentation 

      of drawings and artwork  

       By Judith Vida, M. D.   © 2000, 2001, 2002

Judith E. Vida, M.D. is one of 12 founders of the Institute of Contemporary Psychoanalysis in Los Angeles. For many years she has written and lectured extensively about the life and work of Sándor Ferenczi, about the relevance of the history of psychoanalysis for contemporary practice, and about contemporary art. This lecture in part led to the development of her seminar with Gershon J. Molad of Israel, “Introducing the Autobiographical Dialogue in the Dialogue Between Analysts,” inaugurated in Hungary and due in Los Angeles in November.

Some 5000 works, paintings, drawings, manuscripts, objects, and collages made in the late 1800s and early 1900s by patients of European psychiatric institutions have been collected into what is known as the Prinzhorn Collection. As a participant in a public program developed by the UCLA/Hammer Museum to honor an exhibition of drawings from this collection, Dr. Vida presents herself as a psychoanalyst who “has been taught by art”. She talks about how this encounter with other people’s art has intensified and changed her life. She encourages opening-up ourselves to life, to oneself, to another, and to art, and discusses how this can allow us the possibility of reaching a deeper self-understanding, and of making self/other/life more real.

The project of the Academy considers ideas such as these important to the study and practice of the psychoanalytic arts.