On the 100th Anniversary of Freud in America! ! *
On the 300th Birthday of Étienne de Silhouette! **
There are no adequate words for most feelings. Or vice versa: one always has only those feelings for which one has words, which one defines or interprets. We are thereby constrained to speak in jargon, in the language available to us. Ultimately, then, what is felt seems to correspond to what is formulated. Thus, narrative templates create feelings, assisted by a burgeoning market of consultation and counseling with its therapeutic language terrorism that penetrates into every public and private sphere.
Observe your verbal strategies of self-ascertainment and emotional self-enchantment at the showplace of intimacy! The new installation of the Mobile Academy presents current scientific and poetic attempts to formulate excitement, affect, and feeling in dialog.Speech and counter-speech and phantasmagoric word added value at a fair populated by 100 silhouettes!
* In September 1909, Freud traveled to America. His five lectures at Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts made him famous overnight and ignited the international career of psychoanalysis.
** Étienne de Silhouette (born 1709), a protégé of Madame Pompadour, was briefly the French Finance Minister. He was a terrible miser, introducing property tax for the wealthy, reducing pensions, and even attempting to abolish excessive material in clothing. It was said that no paintings hung in his house; instead, he had only money-saving paper cutouts, which were then named for him (he was very gifted at producing these portraits himself). “Á la silhouette” meant stinginess, scantiness, and cheap art.