Ellen Handler Spitz
Biographic Data
| ID | 1050104 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Ellen Handler Spitz |
| GIVEN NAMES | Ellen Handler |
| FAMILY NAME | Spitz |
| SIGNATURE | SPITZ E H |
| AFFILIATIONS | Stanford University |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-5897-6482 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 26 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 1 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 26 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1987 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2024 |
| H-INDEX | 1 |
A Blue Guitar, Reflections on Disclosure and Reticence (Inspired by Jeffrey Berman on Norman Holland, 2021)
On Dangerous Ground
Reviewed by: On Dangerous Ground: Freud's Visual Cultures of the Unconscious by Diane O'Donoghue Ellen Handler Spitz (bio) On Dangerous Ground: Freud's Visual Cultures of the Unconscious. Diane O'Donoghue. New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2019. 405 pages. Originality and Peril Originality has long seemed mysterious to its beholders, and hypotheses about its genesis have issued forth since antiquity in the form of general suppositions and postulates…
Reflections on the Smile of Dionysus
Psychoanalysis and the academy
This article addresses both the rewards and the daunting complexities of teaching psychoanalysis to undergraduates in the USA, where the idea of a university as a site for the cultivation of the life of the mind is under siege. The essay recommends a close critical reading of key Freudian texts, the establishment of a classroom atmosphere of trust, genuine respect for expectable student skepticism, and the capacity to wait as dystonic ideas gradu…
On not introducing psychoanalysis and literature
Anna, Gregor, and Ajax
The Analyst’s Ear and The Critic’s Eye
Leo Steinberg in Memoria Mea —Fragments
With immense gratitude and a measure of unembarrassed sadness, I dedicate this, my final Apropos the Arts column, to Dr. Peter Rudnytsky, who is now stepping down after having served American Imago as its editor for a decade. As maestro, he has conducted its medley of authors with brio. He has combined the precision of a Leinsdorf (chastening and exhorting us) with the adventurousness of a Boulez (spurring us to heights of intellectual and aesthe…
Human Wildlife
Lucian Freud
To Teach and to Treat
To Teach and to TreatMeditations on The Miracle Worker Ellen Handler Spitz "It's less trouble to feel sorry for her than it is to teach her anything better." William Gibson, The Miracle Worker When Dr. Gerard Fromm asked me to speak on The Miracle Worker at the Austen Riggs annual Creativity Conference in honor of playwright William Gibson, who passed away in November 2008, at the age of ninety-four, and who was a great friend to psychoanalysis, …
Gyrations of Influence
The Mother-Artist
The Mother-Artist Ellen Handler Spitz "Oh, Mama, just look at me one minute as though you really saw me." —Emily, in Our Town, by Thornton Wilder Theoretical constructs occasionally spring to life in unexpected venues. Take Winnicott's notion of True and False Self . . . The intense, much loved, and widely celebrated New York painter, Elizabeth Murray (1940–2007), was once welcomed onstage at a conference. Upon arriving at the podium, Murray told…
Picturing Children Loved and Lost
Picturing Children Loved and Lost Ellen Handler Spitz " . . . and the dead / Are but as pictures" —Lady Macbeth In a basement room, discreetly lit, in the Memorial du Martyr juif inconnu (Memorial to the Unknown Jewish Martyr) in Paris, I am surrounded by photographs of children.1 Most of them were born in the decade of the 1930s. All were French. All were Jewish. All were seized in the infamous Vel' d'Hiv' roundup by the Nazis in mid-July of 194…
Art as Play
Art as Play?:The Digital and the Surreal Ellen Handler Spitz "Who are you today?" I respond, mock-seriously, gazing down affectionately at a tousled blond three-year-old who had greeted me at the door in answer to my ring, "And who am I?" Direct links between children's play and art have been presumed by philosophers, praised by poets, and promulgated by psychologists, not least among them Freud (1908), who asks rhetorically: "Might we not say th…
When Art Takes Hold
When Art Takes Hold Ellen Handler Spitz Every now and then an exhibition of art works in a museum or a gallery manages to offer images so rich and potent, so highly charged with affect, that they stimulate an upsurge of memories and feelings in their beholders. While never precisely the same as those that inspired the creation of the original works, such memories and perceptions relate to the works in a variety of ways as they stimulate fantasy a…
Reality by Enchantment
Reality by Enchantment Ellen Handler Spitz "They also serve who only stand and wait." —John Milton, "On His Blindness" What makes us real? Or, better perhaps, what makes us feel real? These questions (are they the same?) surfaced incongruously as I watched the performance of a pure fantasy. It was a gossamer dramatic production by the Enchantment Theatre of Philadelphia.1 Replete with allusions to Commedia dell'arte, Bunraku puppetry, ancient Gre…
Empathy, Sympathy, Aesthetics, and Childhood
Homage to a Grande Dame
Homage to a Grande Dame Ellen Handler Spitz April 12, 2006 Peter L. Rudnytsky, Editor American Imago Dear Peter, A cherished friend and colleague recently telephoned me from Paris to let me know, in case I had not yet heard, that Janine Chasseguet-Smirgel has passed away. In Paris she received many beautiful tributes, sad, eloquent, and deeply felt. After the death of her distinguished husband Béla Grunberger last year, the loss now of Janine (or…
Loss as Vanished Form
We are so much better at forgetting than at remembering. How seductively the present lays its pungent, voluptuous hand on us, tempting us with narcissistic pleasures, and, as Nietzsche and Freud have warned, weaning us away from the frailer touch of ghosts. What do we do with the dead? What do we do with the past? Our own and that of the world around us? * * * In Memory, Countermemory, scholar James Young (2002) sympathetically describes the cont…
Lost and Found
American Imago - Volume 57, Number 2, Summer 2000
Tattoos and Teddy Bears
This essay narrates the responses of its author to an exhibition on fetishism during the summer of 1998 in Paris. She critiques the strategies underlying this show and, in so doing, describes and comments extensively on a number of particularly striking pieces, each of which, she claims, challenges, contributes to, and complicates its viewers' notions of “fetish.” The essay raises such questions as: What is the efficacy of visual material when us…
Necessary Illusion
Between Image and Child
American Imago - Volume 53, Number 2, Summer 1996
Trauma and Mastery in Life and Art
Tattoos and Teddy Bears
This essay narrates the responses of its author to an exhibition on fetishism during the summer of 1998 in Paris. She critiques the strategies underlying this show and, in so doing, describes and comments extensively on a number of particularly striking pieces, each of which, she claims, challenges, contributes to, and complicates its viewers' notions of “fetish.” The essay raises such questions as: What is the efficacy of visual material when us…
Art and Psyche
Trauma and Mastery in Life and Art
Between Image and Child
American Imago - Volume 53, Number 2, Summer 1996
Necessary Illusion
Lost and Found
American Imago - Volume 57, Number 2, Summer 2000
Tattoos and Teddy Bears
This essay narrates the responses of its author to an exhibition on fetishism during the summer of 1998 in Paris. She critiques the strategies underlying this show and, in so doing, describes and comments extensively on a number of particularly striking pieces, each of which, she claims, challenges, contributes to, and complicates its viewers' notions of “fetish.” The essay raises such questions as: What is the efficacy of visual material when us…
Loss as Vanished Form
We are so much better at forgetting than at remembering. How seductively the present lays its pungent, voluptuous hand on us, tempting us with narcissistic pleasures, and, as Nietzsche and Freud have warned, weaning us away from the frailer touch of ghosts. What do we do with the dead? What do we do with the past? Our own and that of the world around us? * * * In Memory, Countermemory, scholar James Young (2002) sympathetically describes the cont…
Homage to a Grande Dame
Homage to a Grande Dame Ellen Handler Spitz April 12, 2006 Peter L. Rudnytsky, Editor American Imago Dear Peter, A cherished friend and colleague recently telephoned me from Paris to let me know, in case I had not yet heard, that Janine Chasseguet-Smirgel has passed away. In Paris she received many beautiful tributes, sad, eloquent, and deeply felt. After the death of her distinguished husband Béla Grunberger last year, the loss now of Janine (or…
Empathy, Sympathy, Aesthetics, and Childhood
When Art Takes Hold
When Art Takes Hold Ellen Handler Spitz Every now and then an exhibition of art works in a museum or a gallery manages to offer images so rich and potent, so highly charged with affect, that they stimulate an upsurge of memories and feelings in their beholders. While never precisely the same as those that inspired the creation of the original works, such memories and perceptions relate to the works in a variety of ways as they stimulate fantasy a…
Reality by Enchantment
Reality by Enchantment Ellen Handler Spitz "They also serve who only stand and wait." —John Milton, "On His Blindness" What makes us real? Or, better perhaps, what makes us feel real? These questions (are they the same?) surfaced incongruously as I watched the performance of a pure fantasy. It was a gossamer dramatic production by the Enchantment Theatre of Philadelphia.1 Replete with allusions to Commedia dell'arte, Bunraku puppetry, ancient Gre…
The Mother-Artist
The Mother-Artist Ellen Handler Spitz "Oh, Mama, just look at me one minute as though you really saw me." —Emily, in Our Town, by Thornton Wilder Theoretical constructs occasionally spring to life in unexpected venues. Take Winnicott's notion of True and False Self . . . The intense, much loved, and widely celebrated New York painter, Elizabeth Murray (1940–2007), was once welcomed onstage at a conference. Upon arriving at the podium, Murray told…
Picturing Children Loved and Lost
Picturing Children Loved and Lost Ellen Handler Spitz " . . . and the dead / Are but as pictures" —Lady Macbeth In a basement room, discreetly lit, in the Memorial du Martyr juif inconnu (Memorial to the Unknown Jewish Martyr) in Paris, I am surrounded by photographs of children.1 Most of them were born in the decade of the 1930s. All were French. All were Jewish. All were seized in the infamous Vel' d'Hiv' roundup by the Nazis in mid-July of 194…
Art as Play
Art as Play?:The Digital and the Surreal Ellen Handler Spitz "Who are you today?" I respond, mock-seriously, gazing down affectionately at a tousled blond three-year-old who had greeted me at the door in answer to my ring, "And who am I?" Direct links between children's play and art have been presumed by philosophers, praised by poets, and promulgated by psychologists, not least among them Freud (1908), who asks rhetorically: "Might we not say th…
Human Wildlife
Lucian Freud
To Teach and to Treat
To Teach and to TreatMeditations on The Miracle Worker Ellen Handler Spitz "It's less trouble to feel sorry for her than it is to teach her anything better." William Gibson, The Miracle Worker When Dr. Gerard Fromm asked me to speak on The Miracle Worker at the Austen Riggs annual Creativity Conference in honor of playwright William Gibson, who passed away in November 2008, at the age of ninety-four, and who was a great friend to psychoanalysis, …
Gyrations of Influence
Leo Steinberg in Memoria Mea —Fragments
With immense gratitude and a measure of unembarrassed sadness, I dedicate this, my final Apropos the Arts column, to Dr. Peter Rudnytsky, who is now stepping down after having served American Imago as its editor for a decade. As maestro, he has conducted its medley of authors with brio. He has combined the precision of a Leinsdorf (chastening and exhorting us) with the adventurousness of a Boulez (spurring us to heights of intellectual and aesthe…
The Analyst’s Ear and The Critic’s Eye
Anna, Gregor, and Ajax
On not introducing psychoanalysis and literature
Reflections on the Smile of Dionysus
Psychoanalysis and the academy
This article addresses both the rewards and the daunting complexities of teaching psychoanalysis to undergraduates in the USA, where the idea of a university as a site for the cultivation of the life of the mind is under siege. The essay recommends a close critical reading of key Freudian texts, the establishment of a classroom atmosphere of trust, genuine respect for expectable student skepticism, and the capacity to wait as dystonic ideas gradu…
On Dangerous Ground
Reviewed by: On Dangerous Ground: Freud's Visual Cultures of the Unconscious by Diane O'Donoghue Ellen Handler Spitz (bio) On Dangerous Ground: Freud's Visual Cultures of the Unconscious. Diane O'Donoghue. New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2019. 405 pages. Originality and Peril Originality has long seemed mysterious to its beholders, and hypotheses about its genesis have issued forth since antiquity in the form of general suppositions and postulates…
Psychology (23 works) · Psychoanalysis (20 works) · Art (17 works) · Philosophy (17 works) · Aesthetics (8 works) · Literature (8 works) · Sociology (8 works) · History (7 works) · Art history (6 works) · Art, Politics, and Modernism (5 works)