Youtube Description:
Analysing subjectivity is unlike analysing anything else. The way we conceptualise ourselves alters our own nature. The process of self-interpretation is also a process of self-constitution. Conscious awareness is the flaw in the great diamond of the world. It is an irreducible gap in what might otherwise have been a satisfying objectivist naturalised picture of the universe. In this lecture, Professor Louis Sass explores, through the analysis of literary and artistic works of the Renaissance, the historical origins of the confrontation with subjectivity in the modern West and then considers some contemporary psychological perspectives. Psychologists and psychiatrists should ask themselves if their field does justice to the forms of subjectivity and selfhood that began to come into focus and into being in the Renaissance.
This is the second lecture in the London Lecture Series 2023/24, which this year is on the subject of Madness and Mental Health.