Lisą Appignanesi, a multi-awarded British-Canadian writer and film producer will be a guest at this year’s edition of Conrad Festival.
Recent global crises – especially in the guise of the current pandemic – have made us fully aware of how extremely fragile mental health is and how numerous factors have a destructive impact on our lives and shape our emotions. We know perfectly well that the latter are in constant flux. What is less obvious is the fact that the ways in which we understand mental illness are also changing, sometimes even radically so. How were mental illnesses treated in the 19th century when psychological sciences first began to flourish? And how did they evolve in the 20th century? What fate awaits mental illness in the future? We will be talking to the British writer Lisa Appignanesi about psychology, which she sees as a battlefield on which war is being waged not only for our mental health but also for our freedom, which sometimes has – as was the case with women hospitalized in the 19th and 20th centuries – been severely curtailed over purported concern for the plight of individuals and society as a whole.
Lisa Appignanesi – English writer of Polish descent, university lecturer, film producer, Vice-President of the British PEN Club. She was born in 1946 in Łódź and grew up in Paris and Montreal. The complicated story of Appignanesi’s family, which survived the occupation in Poland during World War II and later emigrated to Canada, is told in her book Losing The Dead: A Family Memoir (nomination for the Charles Taylor Award for the best novel in the non-fiction category). She is a Vice-Director in the London Institute of Contemporary Arts and a doctor of comparative literature, recognised as an expert in the field of contemporary cultural phenomena. The author of treatises: Femininity and the Creative Imagination and The Language of Trust. She wrote a biography of Simon de Beauvoire (award of the French Ministry of Culture). Her two other books: The Cabaret, which describes the history of that genre in Europe, and Freud’s Women (with John Forrester) are also well-known in Poland. The latter refers to Freud’s relations with the most important women in his life, is a synthesis of his views of the question of gender, sex and the essence of womanhood in the psychoanalysis process. She is known for her radical, strongly leftist views of the freedom of speech. At the 2nd Conrad Festival, she took part in a meeting entitled: Atlas kobiet (The Atlas of Women) in the Pod Jaszczurami Club.
Host: Mira Marcinów
More information: http://en.conradfestival.pl/event/the-future-of-madness-appignanesi-marcinow
British Council is partner of Conrad Festival 2021.