Psychoanalysis is a key approach to the study of art and visual culture. This course will consider the work of the founder of psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud and three of the main streams of contemporary psychoanalysis his work has spawned: object relations, Kleinian and French Freudianism (Lacan, Kristeva). It will also examine an emerging area of research: affect theory. The course will examine the key concepts from psychoanalysis that have been applied to the analysis of art, such as: dreams and primary processes, sublimation, the uncanny, the fetish and abjection. Each week we will read a key psychoanalytic text and then consider what it illuminates about the nature of art in general, or specific works of art. The aims of this course are to examine how psychoanalysis is used to interpret: the function of art, the origins of vision and creativity, and the unconscious processes that works of art deploy or activate.