Pritzker Pucker Lecture on the Self and Possession

Dear Friends: In the coming weeks I will be telling you more about NU/SOC's Pritzker Pucker Studio Lab for the Promotion of Mental Health via Cinematic Arts, which I'm directing. Briefly, we're encouraging screenwriters/filmmakers to think more deeply about their depictions of mental health/illness by looking at all from a variety of angles - religion, medicine, history, anthropology, psychiatry, gender, race, media studies, etc. 

One aspect of the Lab is public programming (lectures, screenings, performances) on Thursday evenings. The first event is next Thursday Jan 6 at 7 p.m. CST. It's virtual (NU is virtual until Jan 18) so come one, come all. You just have to RSVP at the link below and you will be sent zoom info . Please join us. Best, Dave Tolchinsky

Lecture: 

Do you really have a self? A story about possession

By Michelle Molina, Associate Professor, Religious Studies/History/Gender Studies, Northwestern University 

Thursday, Jan 6 | 7:00 p.m.

Virtual, RSVP

The past provides a playground of images, texts, and ideas that can both inform and trouble contemporary storytelling about mental health and mental illness. This lecture will people your mind with images and ideas from the religious history of possession in the western world to show how its questions about the permeability of bodies and selves were key to the emergence of the medicalized sense of “self” we have today. We will look at images from the past, but also film clips (the melancholy Jesus in Jesus Christ Superstar, or the spider god in Bergman’s Through a Glass Darkly) to think about how “religion” on screen points toward the problem of selves that are largely formed by others, sometimes other-worldly “others.” Despite our contemporary discourse that emphasizes “bounded” selves, we have to ask, are the boundaries of “self” firm for anyone?

Prof. Molina’s lecture will be followed by a Q&A, moderated by Studio Lab director Dave Tolchinsky.

RSVP required:

https://forms.office.com/Pages/DesignPage.aspx...

Info at studiolab@northwestern.edu