Laura Gonzalez

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Charcot and the Salpetrière

In the Nineteenth Century, Doctor Charcot worked at the Salpetrière in Paris, a hospital dedicated to treat hysteric women through hypnosis and other like treatments. Charcot’s Tuesday lectures were very famous and well attended and Brouillet’s painting shows what was then named ‘La Grande Hysterique’ (believed to be a patient called Blanche Wittmann). Watch her [...]

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Sensuous objects

The conference was an outstanding success. It all started early on, as I walked through a warm September Copenhagen towards the stunning Medical Museion. The two day workshop took place in the apt and rather elegant medical theatre, a comfortable learning space with a great colour palette. Everything looked beautifully put together to me, from [...]

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The hysteric’s question and her knowledge

The hysteric asks a question to the Other: Che vuoi? (What do you want from me?). And even though hysteria seems to be a condition impairing the mind’s judgment, the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan placed knowledge within the hysteric in his theory of the Four Discourses, developed in his seventeenth seminar of 1969–1970. The hysteric knows [...]

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About Me

Laura Gonzalez is an artist and writer. Her recent practice encompasses film, dance, photography and text, and her work has been exhibited and published in the UK, Spain and Portugal. She has spoken at numerous conferences and events, including the Museum for the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York, the Medical Museum in Copenhagen, College Arts Association and the Association for the Psychoanalysis of Culture and Society. When she is not following Freud, Lacan and Marx’s footsteps with her camera, she lectures postgraduate students at the Glasgow School of Art.

Her doctoral project, completed in 2010, investigated psychoanalytic approaches to making and understanding objects of seduction, including an examination of parallels between artistic and analytic practices, a study of Manolo Blahnik’s shoes as objects of desire, a disturbing encounter with Marcel Duchamp’s last work, and the creation of a psychoanalytically inspired Discourse of the Artefact, a framework enabling the circulation of questions and answers through a relational approach to artworks.

She is currently immersed in an interdisciplinary project exploring knowledge and the body of the hysteric.