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Presented by Liz Allison

The series will commence with a presentation by Liz Allison of a paper she will give for the Maudsley Lectures in Psychoanalysis series later in the month. The working title is ‘A heap of broken images’: Sterility, catastrophic change and growth in T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land:

The paper will link T. S. Eliot’s poem ‘The Waste Land’ with Bion’s ideas about catastrophic change, and also memory and desire. Eliot’s poem interests me because of the way it both demands and resists interpretation, and evokes an emotional experience which the reader then has to transform. We’re tricked into believing that we can make sense of it by studying Eliot’s intimidatingly scholarly footnotes and following up the references, but ultimately this pursuit has to be abandoned as a wild goose chase and we have to surrender to the emotional impact. I am also interested in the fact that while it can be read as a poem of despair, its disruptive impact on the literary canon was immensely creative.