Freud Museum London

Consultant Child Psychotherapist Dr Graham Music and critic Dr Maria Walsh, author of 'Art and Psychoanalysis',  in conversation with the artist Rebecca Fortnum. The event is is part of our current exhibition 'Self Contained' by Rebecca Fortnum.

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In Repulsion (1965), Rosemary’s Baby (1968) and The Tenant (1976), Polish filmmaker Roman Polanski portrays a series of fragmented psyches confined in claustrophobic spaces. Fear objects move progressively from sexual intercourse (Carol), via pregnancy/childbirth (Rosemary), culminating in the blurring of gender identities (Trelkovsky). In her Projections lecture, Mary Wild offers a Freudian psychoanalytic interpretation of Polanski’s ‘apartment trilogy’, a genre-defining set of films with an influence as far-reaching as 2010’s Black Swan.

PROJECTIONS is psychoanalysis for film interpretation. PROJECTIONS empowers film spectators to express subjective associations they consider to be meaningful. Expertise in psychoanalytic theory is not necessary - the only prerequisite is the desire to enter and inhabit the imaginary world of film, which is itself a psychoanalytic act. Please watch Roman Polanski’s ‘Repulsion’, ‘Rosemary’s Baby’ and ‘The Tenant’ before attending the lecture as there may be spoilers! MARY WILD, a Freudian cinephile from Montreal, is the creator of PROJECTIONS.

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Author's Talk - Gohar Homayounpour introduced by M Fakhry Davids

Is psychoanalysis possible in the Islamic Republic of Iran? This is the question that Gohar Homayounpour poses to herself, and to us, at the beginning of this memoir of displacement, nostalgia, love, and pain. Twenty years after leaving her country, Homayounpour, an Iranian, Western-trained psychoanalyst, returns to Tehran to establish a psychoanalytic practice. When an American colleague exclaims, "I do not think that Iranians can free-associate!" Homayounpour responds that in her opinion Iranians do nothing but. Iranian culture, she says, revolves around stories. Why wouldn't Freud's methods work, given Iranians' need to talk?

Thus begins a fascinating narrative of interlocking stories that resembles--more than a little--a psychoanalytic session. Homayounpour recounts the pleasure and pain of returning to her motherland, her passion for the work of Milan Kundera, her complex relationship with Kundera's Iranian translator (her father), and her own and other Iranians' anxieties of influence and disobedience. Woven throughout the narrative are glimpses of her sometimes frustrating, always candid, sessions with patients. Ms. N, a famous artist, dreams of abandonment and sits in the analyst's chair rather than on the analysand's couch; a young chador-clad woman expresses shame because she has lost her virginity; an eloquently suicidal young man cannot kill himself. As a psychoanalyst, Homayounpour knows that behind every story told is another story that remains untold. 'Doing Psychoanalysis in Tehran' connects the stories, spoken and unspoken, that ordinary Iranians tell about their lives before their hour is up.

The foreword was written by Abbas Kiorastami who is an internationally acclaimed Iranian filmmaker. His most recent film is 'Certified Copy', starring Juliette Binoche, and 'Like Someone In Love'.

Gohar Homayounpour is a practicing psychoanalyst in Tehran. She trains and supervises the psychoanalysts of the Freudian Group of Tehran and is Professor of Psychology at Shahid Besheti University Tehran.

M Fakhry Davids MSc (Clin Psych) F Inst Psychoanal, is a psychoanalyst and adult psychotherapist in full-time clinical practice in London. He is a Fellow of the British Psychoanalytic Society, a Member of the Tavistock Society of Psychotherapists, and a founding Board Member of PCCA (Partners in Confronting Collective Atrocities). He has held academic and clinical positions in South Africa and the UK, and is a Visiting Lecturer at the Tavistock Clinic. He has written on a number of psychoanalytic topics, and has a long-standing interest in whether psychoanalysis is able to journey beyond its Western bourgeois birthplace across boundaries of race, class and culture. His book, Internal Racism: A Psychoanalytic Approach to Race and Difference, was published by Palgrave Macmillan in 2011.

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Filmed at the Anna Freud Centre on 7 March 2013

How should we read Anna Freud's work today? At one point her classic work, 'The Ego and the Mechanisms of Defence', was described as 'perhaps the single most widely read book in our professional literature', but today a great deal of her work is out of print and her prominence in psychoanalytic thinking (at least in the UK) has been eclipsed by the work of Klein, Bowlby, Bion, Winnicott and others. In this lecture Nick Midgley considers some ways in which Anna Freud's work can be read today, and suggest that her work is still of value for the way it uses psychoanalytic thinking - both within and beyond the clinical setting - to help us make a difference to the well-being of children and young people.

Nick Midgley is a Child and Adolescent Psychotherapist at the Anna Freud Centre, London, and Course Director for the MSc in Developmental Psychology and Clinical Practice at UCL. He is the author of 'Reading Anna Freud', published by Routledge / the New Library of Psychoanalysis in 2013.

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Join Freud Museum Curator Sophie Leighton as she talks to Rebecca Fortnum about her exhibition "Self Contained" which is running at the Freud Museum London from 6 March 2013 - 26 May 2013.

“.. only where I find a face do I encounter an exteriority and does an outside happen to me.” G. Agamben, Means without End, Notes on Politics (2000)

Rebecca Fortnum’s exhibition at the Freud Museum, 'Self Contained', develops several strands of her recent work on the formation of identity, dreams and the power of the gaze.

The series 'Dream' depicts children with their eyes closed in paired pencil portraits. In these small, intimate works we can look at the subjects very closely but they never look back. No blinking, no flinching; we are struck by their interiority. They shut out the intrusive viewer. The imagery responds directly to notions of the power relations of the subject’s gaze, introducing on a suggestive level the ideal of the child’s dreams and imaginings that are inaccessible to the viewer. The portraits are completed in pairs in a process developed to question the authenticity of the single image. These works will be displayed in Anna Freud’s room at the Freud Museum, along with works in silverpoint, to draw out connections with Anna Freud’s writings on the child’s relationship with the adult world.

The series 'Wide Shut' includes three large paired portraits, each with a veil of colour over the image. These are of older girls, one image of each pair with open eyes. They act out the duality of proper and improper, of communication and communicability, of potentiality and action.

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A sold out event filmed at the Freud Museum London on 20 February 2013 and was a discussion following the film screening.

This evening included  the screening of three short films which explore the complex and chaotic world of inner experience from a psychoanalytic perspective which was followed by a discussion between the director, Em Cooper and Andrea Sabbadini. For clips of the films and more information please go to: http://www.emcooper.com/

Em Cooper is a British director and animator specializing in combining oil-painted animation with live-action footage to produce short films based around psychoanalytic themes. She is interested in experimenting with film form and especially use of subjective perspectives. Her recent films have explored subjects such as infancy, obsessive compulsive behaviour and child abuse.

Em's films have been screened internationally, including at this year's Sundance Film Festival. Her work has also shown at Turner Contemporary, Margate and discussed at various psychoanalytic conferences including the European Psychoanalytic Film Festival in London and the International Ferenczi Conference in Budapest. Her film Confusion of Tongues was nominated for the 2012 British Animation Awards, Best Student Film.

Em is currently working on a feature documentary for the BBC.

Andrea Sabbadini, C. Psychol. is a Fellow of the British Psychoanalytical Society, its former Honorary Secretary and its current Director of Publications. He works in private practice in London, is a Senior Lecturer at UCL, a trustee of the Freud Museum, a member of the IPA Committee on Psychoanalysis and Culture, the director of the European Psychoanalytic Film Festival, and the chairman of a programme of films and discussions at the Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA).

The Nest (2010) dir. Em Cooper 12mins

It is seemingly just another school morning for Laura and her mother, Alice. But the differences between their two points of view leave us haunted by questions about Laura’s father. When memory and reality become confused, is it possible to understand what really happened?  The Nest is a film about the transmission of trauma through the generations of a family. It is a film snapped in two, both in narrative and in technique, using oil painted animation to bring out the unconscious motives which drive a difficult family dynamic.

Confusion of Tongues (2010) dir. Em Cooper 6mins

Inspired by the 1932 paper by psychoanalyst Sándor Ferenczi, Confusion of Tongues takes us into the world of a woman suffering a sleepless night. Haunted by a recurring childhood memory and gripped by her fear of a window left open, she begins to recall a much deeper trauma.  Combining film with oil-painted animation Confusion of Tongues vividly conjures up the tragic confusion of desire which can be a devastating effect of child abuse

Laid Down (2007) dir. Em Cooper 15 mins

Shot from the point of view of a newborn baby, Laid Downexplores the chaotic world of a developing infant. Set over the first few months of life, dipping in and out of animated dream sequences, we encounter the turbulent relationship between the baby's parents from the raw, emotional and preverbal perspective of the baby.

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Part 7: Glenn Adamson - More Than a Feeling: The Museum as Research Institution.

This one-day symposium recorded at the Anna Freud Centre on 26 January 2013 was timed to accompany the exhibition DreamWork by artist and researcher Christie Brown. It considered the relationship between ceramic art practice and museum collections within the broader context of contemporary visual culture. The symposium address key areas of inspiration for artists within this context, by focussing on the dialogue between the concept, the collection and the specific nature of the site. Papers will feature a subjective response to Freud’s archaic figurative collection, the uncanny notion of the inner life in inanimate objects and the private house as museum, broadening out to raise curatorial and theoretical questions around the nature of this art practice within post modern culture and ideology.

The symposium forms part of the research project Ceramics in the Expanded Field (www.ceramics-in-the-expanded-field.com) funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council through the University of Westminster in London. Researchers Christie Brown, Julian Stair and Clare Twomey and PhD student Laura Breen form the team for this project and the exhibition DreamWork is a key element in the dissemination of the outcomes. The major objective of the project is to investigate the ways in which contemporary ceramic artists have used ceramic practice to initiate new ways of working and new dialogues within the context of museums.

Speaker Biographies & Abstracts

Glenn Adamson is Head of Research at the Victoria and Albert Museum. Dr. Adamson is co-editor of the triannual Journal of ModernCraft, and the author of Thinking Through Craft (Berg Publishers/V&APublications), an anthology entitled The Craft Reader (Berg, 2010), and theforthcoming book The Invention of Craft (Berg, 2013). His other publications include the co-edited volume GlobalDesign History (Routledge, 2011). He was the co-curator for the exhibitionPostmodernism: Style and Subversion, 1970 to 1990, which was on view at theV&A from September 2011 to January 2012.

Abstract: Museums are many things: spaces of entertainment, places to meet friends, repositories of objects. But of course they are also structures built on expertise. In this talk, Glenn Adamson will speak from his experience as Head of Research at the V&A. After a brief description of the way that research operates at this museum, he will address strategic priorities and opportunities for object-led research in the 21st century. Among the topics covered will be research in a digital space; issues of intellectual property; the relationship between academic and commercial content; and transformations in the nature of curatorial work and expertise.

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Part 6: Andrew Renton - Deposits and withdrawals at the ‘collective memory bank’: ceramic artists and the National Museum of Wales.

This one-day symposium recorded at the Anna Freud Centre on 26 January 2013 was timed to accompany the exhibition DreamWork by artist and researcher Christie Brown. It considered the relationship between ceramic art practice and museum collections within the broader context of contemporary visual culture. The symposium address key areas of inspiration for artists within this context, by focussing on the dialogue between the concept, the collection and the specific nature of the site. Papers will feature a subjective response to Freud’s archaic figurative collection, the uncanny notion of the inner life in inanimate objects and the private house as museum, broadening out to raise curatorial and theoretical questions around the nature of this art practice within post modern culture and ideology.

The symposium forms part of the research project Ceramics in the Expanded Field (www.ceramics-in-the-expanded-field.com) funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council through the University of Westminster in London. Researchers Christie Brown, Julian Stair and Clare Twomey and PhD student Laura Breen form the team for this project and the exhibition DreamWork is a key element in the dissemination of the outcomes. The major objective of the project is to investigate the ways in which contemporary ceramic artists have used ceramic practice to initiate new ways of working and new dialogues within the context of museums.

Speaker Biographies & Abstracts

Andrew Renton is Head of Applied Art at Amgueddfa Cymru – National Museum Wales. Since joining the Museum in 1999, he has emphasised the development of the Museum’s collection of contemporary applied art, seeking to work with artists and to use collections creatively as part of an active and ambitious acquisition strategy. He has curated exhibitions at the National Museum in Cardiff in collaboration with Edmund de Waal (Arcanum: mapping European porcelain, 2005) and Elizabeth Fritsch (Dynamic Structures: Painted Vessels by Elizabeth Fritsch, 2010). His other priorities have included research into and acquisitions for the full range of post-mediaeval applied art collections, in particular Welsh ceramics and historic silver. Prior to moving to Cardiff, he worked for six years at National Museums Liverpool as a curator of applied art, including three years at the Lady Lever Art Gallery.

Abstract: The first ‘intervention’ by a contemporary ceramic artist at the National Museum of Wales took place a century ago, thanks to Bernard Leach’s close relationship with his uncle who also happened to be the Museum’s founding director. However, it is only in the last two decades that the National Museum has engaged with ceramic artists in a sustained and strategic way. This survey of the Museum’s experience of this engagement will reflect on the interaction between curatorial and artistic practices, on the inspirational role of the Museum and its collections, and on the implications for the profile of contemporary ceramics within the Museum’s multidisciplinary context.

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Part 5: Calum Storrie - Turning Around/Going Back.

This one-day symposium recorded at the Anna Freud Centre on 26 January 2013 was timed to accompany the exhibition DreamWork by artist and researcher Christie Brown. It considered the relationship between ceramic art practice and museum collections within the broader context of contemporary visual culture. The symposium address key areas of inspiration for artists within this context, by focussing on the dialogue between the concept, the collection and the specific nature of the site. Papers will feature a subjective response to Freud’s archaic figurative collection, the uncanny notion of the inner life in inanimate objects and the private house as museum, broadening out to raise curatorial and theoretical questions around the nature of this art practice within post modern culture and ideology.

The symposium forms part of the research project Ceramics in the Expanded Field (www.ceramics-in-the-expanded-field.com) funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council through the University of Westminster in London. Researchers Christie Brown, Julian Stair and Clare Twomey and PhD student Laura Breen form the team for this project and the exhibition DreamWork is a key element in the dissemination of the outcomes. The major objective of the project is to investigate the ways in which contemporary ceramic artists have used ceramic practice to initiate new ways of working and new dialogues within the context of museums.

Speaker Biographies & Abstracts

Calum Storrie has designed exhibitions for many of London’s major public galleries including the Royal Academy, the National Portrait Gallery, the Wellcome Collection and the National Gallery. He has worked in the museum sector since 1986 and has worked as part of an exhibition design office, been an in-house designer at the British Museum and now runs his own micro-studio (i.e. he works alone in a basement). As well as teaching on interior design and museum studies courses he has written the book The Delirious Museum; A Journey from the Louvre to Las Vegas - published in 2007.  www.calumstorrie.com

Abstract: In this talk I would like to examine the allure of immersion as exemplified by the visit to the museum/shrine/home of the famous. To what extent does this ‘immersion’ depend on the illusion of an unmediated environment? What are the dangers of travelling in time and space? How can artists or designers find room to operate within these hermetic spaces? The pilgrim’s reading of the shrine can be disrupted in a number of ways…by intervention in the form of adding content (artwork, labels, vitrines and any number of museological knick-knacks) or by the displacement and removal of treasured objects. My usual rôle as an exhibition designer is to conspire in the removal of objects from one context (the collection) into another (the exhibition). So I would also like to look at the process of migration of objects between spaces and discuss what this does to them.

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Part 4: Janice West - Serious Toys.

This one-day symposium recorded at the Anna Freud Centre on 26 January 2013 was timed to accompany the exhibition DreamWork by artist and researcher Christie Brown. It considered the relationship between ceramic art practice and museum collections within the broader context of contemporary visual culture. The symposium address key areas of inspiration for artists within this context, by focussing on the dialogue between the concept, the collection and the specific nature of the site. Papers will feature a subjective response to Freud’s archaic figurative collection, the uncanny notion of the inner life in inanimate objects and the private house as museum, broadening out to raise curatorial and theoretical questions around the nature of this art practice within post modern culture and ideology.

The symposium forms part of the research project Ceramics in the Expanded Field (www.ceramics-in-the-expanded-field.com) funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council through the University of Westminster in London. Researchers Christie Brown, Julian Stair and Clare Twomey and PhD student Laura Breen form the team for this project and the exhibition DreamWork is a key element in the dissemination of the outcomes. The major objective of the project is to investigate the ways in which contemporary ceramic artists have used ceramic practice to initiate new ways of working and new dialogues within the context of museums.

Speaker Biographies & Abstracts

Janice West is a London-based independent researcher and curator. With Tessa Peters she has created a number of exhibitions: The Uncanny Room,( 2002) at Pizthanger Manor, Ealing and re-staged at the Bowes Museum, County Durham;, The Secret Life of the Office (2008) Arts and Business, London, The House of Words (2009) Dr Johnson House, London and Memoranda, 2011 Crafts Study Centre, University of the Creative Arts, Farnham. Each exhibition was accompanied by a publication edited by the curators. She has curated and organized other exhibitions: Made to wear: Creativity in Contemporary Jewellery (1998) Central Saint Martin’s College of Art and Design, London and wrote the accompanying book; and The Era: A hundred years of London Theatre (2008) for the City of Westminster Archives Centre. She has written essays for exhibition catalogues and books, notably Christie Brown: The cast of characters (1995) University of Westminster; Maud Cotter : Mute displacement(1995) Galerie Schlossgoart, Luxembourg, and Footnotes: On shoes Rutgers University Press,(2001).

Abstract: Freud’s 1919 essay The Uncanny he notes the uncanny effect produced by “...waxwork figures, ingeniously constructed dolls and automata”. and discusses the paradoxical feelings that they produce in the viewer. The contradictions of an object that appears to be alive and autonomous but is created and controlled by man and often built for human enjoyment are acutely pertinent in a world where AI departments are working on ideal cyberhumans. The conflicted desire these creations brings are freighted with fear and anxiety as well as pleasure and will be discussed in this paper with examples from John Joseph Merlin to Hiroshi Ishiguro via Burne-Jones and Bladerunner.

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Part 3: Esther Leslie - Houses of the Future Perfect: Freud, Benjamin and Schwitters’ Domestic Collections.

This one-day symposium recorded at the Anna Freud Centre on 26 January 2013 was timed to accompany the exhibition DreamWork by artist and researcher Christie Brown. It considered the relationship between ceramic art practice and museum collections within the broader context of contemporary visual culture. The symposium address key areas of inspiration for artists within this context, by focussing on the dialogue between the concept, the collection and the specific nature of the site. Papers will feature a subjective response to Freud’s archaic figurative collection, the uncanny notion of the inner life in inanimate objects and the private house as museum, broadening out to raise curatorial and theoretical questions around the nature of this art practice within post modern culture and ideology.

The symposium forms part of the research project Ceramics in the Expanded Field (www.ceramics-in-the-expanded-field.com) funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council through the University of Westminster in London. Researchers Christie Brown, Julian Stair and Clare Twomey and PhD student Laura Breen form the team for this project and the exhibition DreamWork is a key element in the dissemination of the outcomes. The major objective of the project is to investigate the ways in which contemporary ceramic artists have used ceramic practice to initiate new ways of working and new dialogues within the context of museums.

Speaker Biographies & Abstracts

Esther Leslie is Professor of Political Aesthetics at Birkbeck, University of London. Her first book was Walter Benjamin: Overpowering Conformism (Pluto, 2000). She has also authored a biography of Benjamin (Reaktion, 2007). In 2002 she published Hollywood Flatlands: Animation, Critical Theory, and the Avant Garde (Verso). It excavated the historical relationships between critical theory, European intellectuals and animation, in its avant garde and commercial varieties. Since then she has published and lectured extensively on all types of animation. A subsequent book, Synthetic Worlds: Art, Nature and the Chemical Industry (Reaktion, 2005), investigated the industrial manufacture of colour and its impact on conceptions of nature and aesthetics. She runs a website together with Ben Watson, www.militantesthetix.co.uk

Abstract: This talk considers the notion of the home-museum through three figures - Freud, Walter Benjamin and Kurt Schwitters. These three inhabitants prove to lodge in various ways with each other. For one, under the influence of Freud's dream analysis, Benjamin writes down a dream about Goethe's house, which he has visited before and in whose visitor's book he finds his name 'already entered in big, unruly, childish scrawl’ and at whose dinner table he finds places set for his relatives, ancestors and descendants. This will lead him to exclaim: when the ‘house of our life…is under assault and enemy bombs are taking their toll, what enervated, perverse antiquities do they not lay bare in the foundations!’. Benjamin's other homes, his exile homes, real and those imaged - such as the cave-like arcades - are considered as repositories of 'perverse antiquities'. These homes are set alongside those of a fellow exile, Kurt Schwitters, who built for himself three 'Merzbau' home-museums, each one as incomplete as Benjamin's Arcades Project, each one wrecked by war, like that project too. Freud lodges now and again in these houses, and his own house-museum is considered as a practical instantiation of the project of realising memories objectively.

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Part 2: Christie Brown Dreaming and Working.

This one-day symposium recorded at the Anna Freud Centre on 26 January 2013 was timed to accompany the exhibition DreamWork by artist and researcher Christie Brown. It considered the relationship between ceramic art practice and museum collections within the broader context of contemporary visual culture. The symposium address key areas of inspiration for artists within this context, by focussing on the dialogue between the concept, the collection and the specific nature of the site. Papers will feature a subjective response to Freud’s archaic figurative collection, the uncanny notion of the inner life in inanimate objects and the private house as museum, broadening out to raise curatorial and theoretical questions around the nature of this art practice within post modern culture and ideology.

The symposium forms part of the research project Ceramics in the Expanded Field (www.ceramics-in-the-expanded-field.com) funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council through the University of Westminster in London. Researchers Christie Brown, Julian Stair and Clare Twomey and PhD student Laura Breen form the team for this project and the exhibition DreamWork is a key element in the dissemination of the outcomes. The major objective of the project is to investigate the ways in which contemporary ceramic artists have used ceramic practice to initiate new ways of working and new dialogues within the context of museums.

Speaker Biographies & Abstracts

Christie Brown is a practising artist based in north London and Professor of Ceramics at the University of Westminster. She graduated from Harrow School of Art in 1982 and her work is featured in several private and public collections in Europe and the USA.

Abstract: The parallel disciplines of archaeology and psychoanalysis have inspired my art practice over many years and the ceramic medium is a key presence in museum collections, offering insights into the lives of human beings over time. As a figurative artist I am drawn to Freud’s collection of antiquities which inspired his use of the archaeology metaphor. The figure is especially powerful as a recipient for human emotion and projection giving rise to a rich cultural history of myths of origin and animated beings. In this talk I will present the ideas behind of my exhibition DreamWork and illustrate the development of my practice through figuration, narrative and installation.

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Part 1: Clare Twomey introduction to Ceramics in the Expanded Field

This one-day symposium recorded at the Anna Freud Centre on 26 January 2013 was timed to accompany the exhibition DreamWork by artist and researcher Christie Brown. It considered the relationship between ceramic art practice and museum collections within the broader context of contemporary visual culture. The symposium address key areas of inspiration for artists within this context, by focussing on the dialogue between the concept, the collection and the specific nature of the site. Papers will feature a subjective response to Freud’s archaic figurative collection, the uncanny notion of the inner life in inanimate objects and the private house as museum, broadening out to raise curatorial and theoretical questions around the nature of this art practice within post modern culture and ideology.

The symposium forms part of the research project Ceramics in the Expanded Field (www.ceramics-in-the-expanded-field.com) funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council through the University of Westminster in London. Researchers Christie Brown, Julian Stair and Clare Twomey and PhD student Laura Breen form the team for this project and the exhibition DreamWork is a key element in the dissemination of the outcomes. The major objective of the project is to investigate the ways in which contemporary ceramic artists have used ceramic practice to initiate new ways of working and new dialogues within the context of museums.

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A sold out event filmed at the Anna Freud Centre Library on 30 January 2013.  The Relational School (of psychoanalysis and psychotherapy) and the Freud Museum are holding a series of intimate evening forums addressing the subject of memoir from the perspective of how writing and publishing has come to affect the individual’s experience of their own story. Conveying a life illuminates profound aspects of our human story and our struggles to situate ourselves and to belong. As organisations concerned with the meaning and impact of reflection, we are delighted to welcome these esteemed memoirists to join us in conversation and reflection upon what it means to have shared their history in this way.

As her mother slipped into the darkness of old age, authorLisa Appignanesi began to realise how little she knew of the reality behind the tales she had heard from her Jewish parents of wartime Poland. With vivid intelligence and without piety, 'Losing the Dead' brings to life what she discovered. At the same time the memoir considers the workings of individual and collective memory and charts the legacy of war and immigration as these rumble through the generations of a family.

Novelist and poet, Blake Morrison's, moving memoir 'When Did You Last See Your Father?' was made into a film (with Jim Broadbent and Juliet Stevenson) and takes us into the heart of a family as a father lies dying. It plumbs father- son relations and family secrets: in the process understanding grows.

With Psychotherapist Jane Haberlin, the two writers explore the possible links between memoir writing and couch memories.

Jane Haberlin trained with Arbours as a Psychoanalytic Psychotherapist. She has worked at The Arbours Crisis Centre and The Women’s Therapy Centre. She is a founder member of The Relational School in London. She currently works as a therapist and supervisor in private practice and provides consultancy to organisations.

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The Formative Influence of Shakespeare on Freud and the Development of Psychoanalysis. A sold out event recorded at the Anna Freud Centre Library on 16 January 2013.

Behind Sigmund Freud’s desk chair in the Freud Museum London sits the central section of his library, his volumes of Shakespeare and Goethe. Shakespeare’s plays occupied a significant place on Sigmund Freud’s bookshelf for most of his life. He began reading Shakespeare when he was eight years old and quoted from the plays in letters to his friends, his colleagues and his beloved. He used lines from the plays to help him grasp difficult issues in his life such as failure and death. Most significantly, Shakespeare’s plays are part of the raw material from which Freud constructed psychoanalysis. Themes, images, plots, and lines from the plays are woven throughout the foundational texts of psychoanalysis in a way that suggests their formative influence. Freud’s intertextual relationship with Shakespeare took many forms including quotation, allusion and literary interpretation. Some of the allusions are deeply embedded in Freud’s texts in a manner that even Freud may not have been aware of.  This talk will explore the influence of Shakespeare on Freud and on the development of psychoanalysis.

Christian Smith has recently completed his doctoral studies at the University of Warwick in the Department of English and Comparative Literary Studies. His thesis explores the formative influence of Shakespeare on Marxism, psychoanalysis and Frankfurt School Critical Theory.

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Daniel Smyth (Brent Centre for Young People).  Recorded at the Freud Museum London on 6 December 2012.

A discussion about the use of football as a means of working with adolescent boys expressing emotional and behavioural difficulties. Daniel Smyth (Brent Centre for Young People) will talk about his project “Sport and Thought”, which was designed to enable adolescent boys to think about themselves as emotional beings and bring about behavioural change through the use of self-reflection and therapeutic interventions during coaching sessions. The project is inspired by the idea that an individual’s reaction within a sporting context will mirror his reactions at school, home and on the streets. The talk will centre on a year-long project in Harlesden, north west London, the work that was undertaken, and the remarkable outcomes achieved by those who took part.

Daniel Smyth has worked at the Brent Adolescent Centre for the past 7 years. He is a Psychodynamic Counsellor. Daniel started off working as a youth worker in the Sommers town area of Kings Cross with young homeless adolescents, before working on the Caledonian Road area of Islington with young people removed from school due to severe emotional and behavioural difficulties.

His work at the Brent Adolescent centre is very much out-reach based, working in a number of schools across the borough, working with young people at risk of school exclusion due to behavioural difficulties. Daniel created the Sport and Thought project as a response to the need to work with adolescent boys in a therapeutic way, boys who would never agree to enter the consulting room.

Daniel’s work with hard to reach adolescents has been recognised at governmental level on two occasions via awards from the Home Office.

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A sold out event recorded at the Anna Freud Centre on 28 November 2012

The Relational School (of psychoanalysis and psychotherapy) and the Freud Museum are holding a series of intimate evening forums addressing the subject of memoir from the perspective of how writing and publishing has come to affect the individual’s experience of their own story. Conveying a life illuminates profound aspects of our human story and our struggles to situate ourselves and to belong. As organisations concerned with the meaning and impact of reflection, we are delighted to welcome these esteemed memoirists to join us in conversation and reflection upon what it means to have shared their history in this way.

Jackie Kay is a Scottish poet and novelist. She was adopted into a white Glaswegian family where her father and mother were also communists and full time political activists. In 2010 she published ‘Red Dust Road’, an account of her search for her birth parents, a white Scottish woman and a Nigerian man.

Gillian Slovo is a playwright, novelist and memoirist. ‘Every Secret Thing’ is an account of her childhood in South Africa where her communist parents were significant figures in forbidden anti-apartheid politics.

Both of these memoirs are poignant accounts of the way in which the personal is woven in with great social movements of our time. Robert Downes is a psychotherapist, supervisor and teacher of body psychotherapy. He is a member of the Relational School executive committee

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A  special performance and presentation by Leif Elggren, followed by a discussion between the artist and curator Lucia Farinati, chaired by Freud Museum deputy director, Ivan Ward.  A sold out event recorded at the Freud Museum London on 26 November 2012.

Freud’s iconic psychoanalytic couch; an object which besides being a museological symbol that epitomizes the life and work of the father of psychoanalysis, is also a poignant listening device for recording the unheard and the unseen.

It was on this couch, which inhabited the consulting rooms of both 20 Maresfield Gardens in Hampstead and Berggasse 19 in Vienna, that patients were listened to; a liminal space where free association and dreams were gathered and, in a certain way, a key listening point for the development of Freud’s analytical work. In this constructed space, a new form of listening was made palpable through the discovery of the unconscious and the birth of psychoanalysis.

Using the microphone as a kind of third ear, Elggren’s recording under the couch brings to the forefront the potential to understand musical listening almost like a psychoanalytic treatment.

'Under the Couch' is a new CD release by Leif Elggren on Firework Edition Records with a critical text by Lucia Farinati.

Leif Elggren is a writer, visual artist, book publisher, stage performer, and composer based in Stockholm. His varied and prolific output routinely involves dreams, subtle absurdities, and social hierarchies turned upside-down. His audio work, mostly conceptually based, but also often created as the soundtrack to an installation or performance, has been released on labels such as Ash International, Touch, Radium and his own Firework Edition.

Lucia Farinati is an independent curator and researcher based in London. She is the Director of Sound Threshold, a long-term research project which explores the relationships between site, sound and text.

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A talk by Anthony Clavane recorded on 8 November 2012.

Jews don’t do football. This, at any rate, is the myth. They are people of the book not people of the penalty kick. Yet in the 1930s the Austrian 'Wunderteam', with many Jewish players and coached by the brilliant Hugo Meisl, was the best in the world.

Anthony Clavane argues that football would not be the global entertainment industry it is without the Jewish influence - and neither would it be the ‘beautiful game’ played by Ajax, Hungary, Benfica or Brazil. This talk unravels the secret history of Jewish football in the UK, Europe and beyond, showing that the game’s transformation would not have been possible without such Jewish Sports Legends as Louis Bookman, Harry Morris, Leslie Goldberg, Mark Lazarus and Morris Keston. Their untold stories – as well as the more familiar rags-to-riches tales of the likes of David Dein, David Pleat and Roman Abramovich – are emblematic of an immigrant community’s successful integration into, and enrichment of, English society. But many of these big names have "kept schtum" about their Jewishness. Anthony Clavane examines their influence - and their silence.

Anthony Clavane went to Sussex University and taught History in various schools for six years. He then became a journalist, first writing for the East Anglian Daily Times as a news and feature writer and then The Independent as an arts and culture writer. His book ‘Promised Land: A Northern Love Story’ was described as “glorious” by The Guardian and named both Football Book Of The Year and Sports Book Of The Year by the National Sporting Club – as well as sports book of the year by The Radio 2 Book Club. A stage adaptation is being shown in Leeds in June 2012. His new book 'Does Your Rabbi Know You're Here' examines Jewish involvement in English football and is published by Quercus in October 2012.

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'Missing Out'

Author's Talk: Adam Phillips with Lisa Appignanesi

A sold old event filmed at the Freud Museum on 24 October 2012.

In his latest book, 'Missing Out' (Hamish Hamilton), acclaimed psychoanalyst and writer Adam Phillips probes another intriguing feature of the human condition: the 'unlived life'. So much of our mental life is about the lives we are not living, the lives we are missing out on', he notes. But is frustration a necessary part of the good life? He discusses missing out, frustration, satisfaction and the many wishes and wants inbetween with Lisa Appignanesi, author of 'All About Love' (Virago) and Chair of the Freud Museum.

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Author's Talk: Alison Bancroft

A sold out event recorded live at the Freud Museum London on 24 September 2012.

There is an increasing trend within both the study of visual culture and fashion itself to restore fashion to an aesthetic role - one that moves beyond its commercial success as a global industry and places fashion within a nexus of art, the body, and femininity. This emphasis aims to separate fashion from mere clothing, and illustrate its cultural power as an integral aspect of modern life.

In this innovative new book, Alison Bancroft re-examines significant moments in twentieth century fashion history through the focal lens of psychoanalytic theory. Her discussion centres on studies of fashion photography, haute couture, queer dressing, and fashion/art in an attempt to shed new light on these key issues.

According to Bancroft, problems of subjectivity are played out through fashion, in the public arena, and not just in the dark, unknowable unconscious mind. The question of what can be said, and what can only be experienced, and how these two issues may be reconciled, become questions that fashion addresses on an almost daily basis.

By interpreting fashion within a psychoanalytic frame, Bancroft illustrates how fashion articulates some of the essential, and sometimes frightening, truths about the body, femininity and the self.

Alison Bancroft is a writer and cultural critic. She specialises in interdisciplinary approaches to modern and contemporary art and visual culture, and is committed to working across all media and contexts. Her research interests include visual culture and theory, psychoanalytic thought, and sexualities. She was awarded her PhD by the University of London in 2010.

FASHION AND PSYCHOANALYSIS: Styling the Self is published by I.B Tauris

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A live event filmed at the Freud Museum on 19 September 2012.

The Relational School (of psychoanalysis and psychotherapy) and the Freud Museum are holding a series of intimate evening forums addressing the subject of memoir from the perspective of how writing and publishing has come to affect the individual’s experience of their own story. Conveying a life illuminates profound aspects of our human story and our struggles to situate ourselves and to belong. As organisations concerned with the meaning and impact of reflection, we are delighted to welcome these esteemed memoirists to join us in conversation and reflection upon what it means to have shared their history in this way.

Eva Hoffman Lost in Translation: Life in a New Language

Sathnam Sanghera The Boy with the Topknot: A Memoir of Love, Secrets and Lies in Wolverhampton

Eva Hoffman is a writer and academic. She has been a professor of literature and creative writing at several high profile American universities as well as editor for The New York Times Book Review.

Sathnam Sanghera is a feature writer and columnist for The Times. ‘Boy with the Topknot' is an acclaimed best seller and won 'The Mind Book of the Year' in 2009.

Both have written powerful memoirs of living in and between two very different cultures and of the impact of this experience on their identity and psyche.

Sue Cowan-Jenssen is a founder member of the Relational School. She is an integrative psychotherapist and EMDR Consultant.

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Architecture, Art and Psychoanalysis.  A  four part podcast recorded by Paul Mitchell at the Anna Freud Centre on Saturday 14th July 2012.

This conference brought together practitioners and theorists from different fields to think about the emotional experience of architecture and architectural spaces. In home, theatre, church, museum, or transformations of space in contemporary art, architecture and mental space interact in ways that indicate the role of  unconscious process in the built environment.

Part 4: The Homes of Childhood : Spaces of Love, Dread, and Play Salman Akhtar

ABSTRACT The emotional biography of our childhood homes goes beyond the architectural envelopes they provide for our mentalized and un-mentalized erotic, hostile, tender, civic, and spiritual aspirations. Internalized, their corridors, closets, and cloisters function as life-long psychic retreats and springboards for mental rejuvenation. Driven by naive hope, we visit them in actuality and come back wounded. But then the plump nursemaid of nostalgia leads us back to those very streets and lampposts and we return with a poem in our hands. As we grow old, life's intoxication gradually changes into tipsy indifference, but arriving at our eternal resting place we are unexpectedly clear-eyed. We see that we have ended up where we started from. Our childhood homes might have been lost but childhood itself has turned out to be our home. Loyally and forever.

Salman Akhtar was born in India and completed his medical and psychiatric education there. Upon arriving in the USA in 1973, he repeated his psychiatric training at the University of Virginia School of Medicine, and then obtained psychoanalytic training from the Philadelphia Psychoanalytic Institute. Currently, he is Professor of Psychiatry at Jefferson Medical College and a training and supervising analyst at the Psychoanalytic Center of Philadelphia. His more than 300 publications include nine books: Broken Structures; Quest for Answers; Inner Torment; Immigration and Identity; New Clinical Realms; Objects of Our Desire; Regarding Others; Turning Points in Dynamic Psychotherapy; and The Damaged Core, as well as twenty-six edited or co-edited volumes in psychiatry, psychoanalysis and cultural psychology. He is also a Scholar-in-Residence at the Inter-Act Theatre Company in Philadelphia. An accomplished poet himself, his latest publication is Between Hours (Karnac 2012), a collection of poems by fellow-psychoanalysts. He says of this project: “While accommodating playfulness and even a bit of audacity, both psychoanalysis and poetry deeply respect formality of structure, nuance of affect, and the multifaceted resonance of the spoken word.... To put it bluntly, psychoanalysis is two-person poetry and poetry one-person psychoanalysis.”

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Architecture, Art and Psychoanalysis.  A  four part podcast recorded by Paul Mitchell at the Anna Freud Centre on Saturday 14th July 2012.

This conference brought together practitioners and theorists from different fields to think about the emotional experience of architecture and architectural spaces. In home, theatre, church, museum, or transformations of space in contemporary art, architecture and mental space interact in ways that indicate the role of  unconscious process in the built environment.

Part 3: In Space Between: Photography, Memory and Construction Yamini Nayar

ABSTRACT Yamini Nayar's photographs stem from a deep interest in architectural space, lived experience and memory. Her large scale images are made by documenting sculptural installations built in her studio on tabletops from raw and found building materials and collected image fragments. Drawing on historical photos and personal narrative, her images explore the tensions between sculpture and photography, as the image develops over time and accumulates its own narrative logic, physicality and traces of construction and erasure. Once recorded, the sculpture is disassembled and discarded. Only the photograph remains, as a document, object and entry point into a moment held together for the lens.

Yamini Nayar is an internationally recognised artist living in New York. She is currently a Workspace Artist-in-Residence with the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council and a Visiting Artist Scholar at New York University's Steinhardt School of Art. Prior to these appointments she was resident in 2010 at the Center for Photography at Woodstock and was the Lightborne artist-in-residence at the Art Academy of Cincinnati. She has participated in exhibitions and publications internationally, including the Saatchi Museum in London, Indian Art Summit, Art Basel in Switzerland, Sharjah Biennial and Unfixed: Postcolonial Perspectives in Photography and Contemporary Art, Amsterdam. She has had recent solo exhibitions with Thomas Erben, NY and Amrita Jhaveri, Mumbai. Reviews include Artforum, Art in America, ArtPapers, Art India, Vogue India and the New Yorker. Nayar's upcoming exhibitions include the DeCordova Sculpture Museum, Massachusetts and the Queensland Art Gallery in Australia. Collections include the Saatchi Museum, US Arts in Embassies, Cincinnati Art Museum, Queens Museum, Queensland Art Gallery in Brisbane and the Hiscox Collection. Nayar received an MFA from the School of Visual Arts and a BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design. www.yamininayar.com

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Architecture, Art and Psychoanalysis.  A  four part podcast recorded by Paul Mitchell at the Anna Freud Centre on Saturday 14th July 2012.

This conference brought together practitioners and theorists from different fields to think about the emotional experience of architecture and architectural spaces. In home, theatre, church, museum, or transformations of space in contemporary art, architecture and mental space interact in ways that indicate the role of  unconscious process in the built environment.

Part 2: Dramatic Architecture: The design of Hampstead and Royal Shakespeare Theatres Rab Bennetts

ABSTRACT Rab Bennetts’ examined the lengthy gestation of the Hampstead Theatre project and the way in which the architect’s role extended from urban planning to detailed design, resulting in a compact theatre that has been praised by audiences and actors alike. Rab will then describe how this led to the Royal Shakespeare Theatre in Stratford Upon Avon, working on a brief to transform a listed but flawed existing building. In particular, the acclaimed 1000-seat auditorium was to be “something that Shakespeare might recognise”. Whilst the two theatres are very different, they emerged from the same craft-like, collaborative design process. The paper highlights the conflict between iconic (ie; dramatic) architecture and the architecture of theatres that accentuates the drama – before, during and after the performance.

Rab Bennetts is the Director of Bennetts Associates Architects which he founded with his wife Denise in 1987. The firm, based in London and Edinburgh, has been responsible for many pioneering projects such as the PowerGen Headquarters, Wessex Water Operations Centre, Hampstead Theatre, Edinburgh University’s Informatics Forum, Jubilee Library in Brighton and the New Street Square development in the City of London. Recent notable commissions include the £100 million transformation of the Royal Shakespeare Theatre, the Humanities Faculties and Library for Oxford University and hotels in London and Amsterdam. The firm is also particularly well known for its work on environmental sustainability. The practice has won more than 120 awards and has been shortlisted for the Stirling Prize several times. The firm won the UK Architect of the Year award in 2006 and 2011.

Rab leads the design direction of Bennetts Associates and is personally involved in many of the firm’s projects. He is also extensively involved in outside bodies and is a Board member of the UK Green Building Council, a Director of Sadler’s Wells Theatre and a Trustee of the Design Council. He has in the past chaired the RIBA’s Competitions Committee, advised the Government on sustainability policy and sat on Islington’s Planning Committee as an expert adviser. He has lectured extensively and has contributed to numerous publications and conferences. Rab was awarded the OBE for services to architecture in 2003 and Sustainability Leader of the Year in 2009 at the Building/UK-GBC Sustainability Awards.

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Architecture, Art and Psychoanalysis.  A  four part podcast recorded by Paul Mitchell at the Anna Freud Centre on Saturday 14th July 2012.

This conference brought together practitioners and theorists from different fields to think about the emotional experience of architecture and architectural spaces. In home, theatre, church, museum, or transformations of space in contemporary art, architecture and mental space interact in ways that indicate the role of  unconscious process in the built environment.

Part 1: Projection, Space and Architecture Mark Cousins

ABSTRACT Architecture, at least in its western form since the Renaissance, has been thought of as an art of projection. That is why drawing is thought to be central to architecture as the mediation between an 'idea' and an object in space. This is where psychoanalysis and its repetoire of concepts of projection and of introjection are particularly relevant. This paper seeks to outline the way in which psychoanalysis can understand space and spatial projection.

Mark Cousins is a British cultural critic and architectural theorist. He is the Director of General Studies and Head of the Graduate Program in Histories and Theories at the Architectural Association, London. He is also Visiting Professor of Architecture at Columbia University, New York. He co-founded the London Consortium along with Paul Hirst, Colin MacCabe, and Richard Humphreys. He is the author of, among other things, a book on Michel Foucault, co-written with Athar Hussain (London: Macmillan, 1984).

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Part of the launch of Granta 120: Medicine

How do writers make sense of the mind in fact and fiction? Join Granta at the Freud Museum for an evening of readings and conversation that probe the wild and unpredictable landscapes of the mind. Suzanne Rivecca (Death Is Not an Option) examines addiction, lost girls and the families they split from in a tender story that explores two opposing perspectives and that connect in a startling way. Chloe Aridjis (Book of Clouds) reports on the mental health care of Soviet astronauts when they return from space.

This event was part of the launch of Granta 120: Medicine, the latest edition of the magazine of new writing.

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A sold out 90-minute lecture followed by 30-minute group discussion filmed at the Freud Museum London on 29 August 2012.

Moving beyond the 'blurred identity trilogy', the second of the PROJECTIONS lectures examines the artistic implications of David Lynch's inimitable style, which marks the shared space between the investigative 'desire to know' in psychoanalysis, and the provocative 'knowledge subversion' in surrealism. This anarchic process emerges from the unconscious, a mysterious psychic terrain that Lynch accesses via the practice of transcendental meditation. Special consideration will be given to Lacanian concepts of mirror stage and linguistic alienation in the exploration of Lynchian technique, comprised of dream-logic that is turbulent and seductive in equal measure.

PROJECTIONS is psychoanalysis for film interpretation.PROJECTIONS empowers film spectators to express subjective associations they consider to be meaningful. Expertise in psychoanalytic theory is not necessary - the only prerequisite is the desire to enter and inhabit the imaginary world of film, which is itself a psychoanalytic act. Please watch 'Lost Highway', 'Mulholland Drive' and 'Inland Empire' before attending sessions as there may be spoilers! MARY WILD, a Freudian cinephile from Montreal, is the creator of PROJECTIONS.

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A sold out 90-minute lecture followed by 30-minute group discussion filmed at the Freud Museum London on 22 August 2012.

Making sense of 'Lost Highway',' Mulholland Drive' and 'Inland Empire' can be a daunting task! These films by David Lynch have captivated and mystified audiences around the world; Freudian psychoanalysis offers a chance to decipher the American director's luxurious cinematic dreamscapes. In the first of the PROJECTIONS lectures, these titles will be considered as forming a 'trilogy of blurred identity', where the central character in each installment experiences a psychogenic fugue following the trauma of unrequited love within marriage and/or Hollywood. Special focus will be placed on Freud's hydraulic model of desire in the search for meaning in these enigmatic films.

PROJECTIONS is psychoanalysis for film interpretation.PROJECTIONS empowers film spectators to express subjective associations they consider to be meaningful. Expertise in psychoanalytic theory is not necessary - the only prerequisite is the desire to enter and inhabit the imaginary world of film, which is itself a psychoanalytic act. Please watch 'Lost Highway', 'Mulholland Drive' and 'Inland Empire' before attending sessions as there may be spoilers! MARY WILD, a Freudian cinephile from Montreal, is the creator of PROJECTIONS.

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Austrian Cultural Forum present Mark the Music: Jews, Music and Viennese Modernity.

Recorded live at the Freud Museum London on Wednesday 4th July 2012.

The role music plays in the cultural life of 19th and 20th century Vienna cannot be overemphasized. This lecture will look at this world from the perspectives of Jews from Herzl to Freud to Mahler and ask why Jews were both welcomed into the musical world and yet were never quite at home in it. 'Mark the Music' is a means of understanding modern Jewish cultural sensibilities in a hostile cultural environment.

The final lecture in the series Jews, Politics & Austria, organised by the ACF London together with the Leo Baeck Institute London, is given by Sander L. Gilman, a distinguished professor of the Liberal Arts and Sciences and Professor of Psychiatry at Emory University. He is the author or editor of over eighty books including his most recent edited volume Wagner and Cinema (with Jeongwon Joe, 2010).

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Media and the Inner World.  'Sick' Panel Discussion

A sold out event recorded at the Freud Museum London on12 June 2012.  This video podcast was recorded immediately after the showing of the film and involves a panel discussion.

Media and the Inner World present a special screening of a short film, ‘Sick’, at the Freud Museum in collaboration with Patchwork Productions and Mosaic Networking. Following the screening, there will be a discussion with the film’s writer/director, Mike Rymer, its producer, Christine Hartland, and psychotherapist, Carol Leader.

‘Sick’ is a fractured psychological drama that positions the story of a father in the present, his daughter in the past, and sets them on a collision course to define their future.

Screened at Mental Health events from Bosnia and Sarajevo to Nova Scotia, and used for education across the UK and Europe, the film has won 20 International Awards. It was represented by The British High Commission when receiving Malta's prestigious Golden Knight, and was selected by 65 Film Festivals across 25 countries in 2008/9. Available in an educational version from BFI Filmstore, and as part of the Film 4 Forgotten Classics Collection, world sales are by Dazzle Films.

Media and the Inner World is a research network funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council. It aims to bring together psychotherapists, academics, media professionals and members of the public to think about the role of emotion in contemporary popular culture. The network is directed byDr Caroline Bainbridge (University of Roehampton) and Dr Candida Yates (University of East London).

Speaker Biographies

Carol Leader is a psychoanalytic psychotherapist and a member of the London Centre for Psychotherapy (BPC). She is also a member, Training Therapist and Supervisor for The Association for Group and Individual Psychotherapy (UKCP) where she teaches. Formerly an actor, writer and presenter, Carol worked extensively in theatre, TV and radio before re-training as a therapist. She was a member of the National Theatre, played leading roles in a number of TV series and also was one of the regular presenters of BBC’s Play School for ten years. She has been in full time private practice as a psychotherapist for fifteen years, works as a consultant for business and projects in the arts and lectures and leads seminars in a number of educational and business settings. She supervises both supervisors and psychotherapists in training at the Westminster Pastoral Foundation and is ‘psychotherapist at large’ for the newly launched Free Associations, now available as a journal on the web.

‘Sick’ is the first film from new writer/director Mike Rymer, and sees him build on grass roots industry experience. Former Assistant Director to Peter Greenaway, and postgraduate of Newport Film School, he recently graduated in Script Development from the National Film and TV School, and received a scholarship to observe classes in Screen Acting at NYU.

Christine Hartland produced her first feature film, the political thriller WMD by David Holroyd (nominated Best Debut UK Feature at the East End Film Festival in 2009) which had simultaneous independent UK theatrical and iTunes releases in October 2009. WMD was described as ‘gripping’ by both The Guardian and Channel 4. She has produced many award winning short films including ‘SICK’ available at the BFI and on the Film 4 Forgotten Classics DVD Collection. She is also Executive Producer of debut feature films Life Just Is by Alex Barrett (selected at a major UK International Film Festival and in talks with a UK distributor) and Verity’s Summer by Palme d’Or Nominee Ben Crowe. She founded Patchwork Productions, which has feature projects at various stages of development; and was part of the 2009-10 Guiding Light Mentoring scheme with producer mentor Damian Jones (Oscar winning The Iron Lady).

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All About Love - what can psychoanalysis tell us?

Lisa Appignanesi in conversation with Susie Orbach.  A sold out event recorded at the Freud Museum London on Thursday 21 June 2012.

What can psychoanalysis tell us about love? In her recent book, All About Love: Anatomy of an Unruly Emotion, author and Chair of the Freud Museum, Lisa Appignanesi grapples with this mysterious and oft-ungovernable emotion in its many manifestations from passion, to parenting, to friendship. With psychoanalyst Susie Orbach, author of the ground-breaking What Do Women Want and The Impossibility of Sex, she teases out some of the muddles and meanings of love in our lives and times - in this special conversation for the Freud Museum.

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Freud Memorial Lecture.  A sold out event, filmed at the Anna Freud Centre on 22 May 2012.

Marina Warner is a writer whose works include novels and short stories as well as studies in cultural history, art, myths, symbols, and fairytales. She is a Professor in the Department of Literature at the University of Essex. Her most recent book, Stranger Magic: Charmed States & the Arabian Nights, was recently published by Chatto & Windus.

This year’s Freud Memorial Lecture will connect with the two major London exhibitions for 2012 which are running concurrently: Louise Bourgeois: The Return of the Repressed, at the Freud Museum, and Lucian Freud Portraits, at the National Portrait Gallery.

Images © Louise Bourgeois Trust

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A live performance.  Filmed at the Freud Museum on 30th April 2012.

Ghost Track is very beautiful because Claire quite clearly gets into a dialogue with her own biographies so it circles around her as a person but it expands into her field, it has a clear context and expands into space’ Serge von Arx theatre architect and scenographer Berlin

A solo performance by Claire Hind, written in collaboration with Gary Winters of Lone Twin, co-directed with Alexander Kelly of Third Angel.

Ghost Track is a performance that weaves autobiography with King Lear, and the perennial difficulties of the father-daughter relationship. Claire Hind tells stories about the thoughts and terrors one has when waking up in the middle of the night, about her petrol pump neurosis and her 7 dads, one of whom is her ‘ghost dad’. It is a work that carefully braids humour with the power that fear and anxiety has over us as we lead very busy lives and juggle many roles.

This work draws upon the ‘Father’ of psychoanalysis Sigmund Freud and thinks about the different ways in which his writing inscribes himself into his work, including his moving paper ‘The theme of the three caskets’ (1913) that takes King Lear and his three daughters as his prime example. Psychoanalysis is used as a compositional strategy to write a space for the performer – and also as a zone in which the playfulness of the performer as storyteller can be explored.

Ghost Track demonstrates the slippages that occur in story-telling and uses the Nano pad (a sound sampler) as a symbol of the unconscious mind that disrupts our sense of cohesion, functioning as a buffer zone between play and fear. The material is developed from a series of performance writing workshops that Claire experienced with artist Gary Winters of the international renowned performance duo Lone Twin. They became interested in the repetition of language that occurs in act one scene one of King Lear, Nothing. Nothing will come of nothing and the repetition of the ritual in this act – each daughter coming forward to repeat a similar speech act to their father - and relate this to the death drive and the Electra complex.

Kong Lear Super 8mm film

Kong Lear is a humorous and touching film referencing King Lear’s madness upon some heath and re-imagining King Kong inside Lear’s psyche as woman. It is an Ubu for the 21st Century – Andrew Head, Hull University.

The images of Kong Lear on the screen are beautiful and evocative. One minute she (as Kong Lear) appears playful, the next vulnerable and melancholic, absorbed in a world where nature once stood. Arrested Motion.

Kong Lear is a play on words of the two male characters of King Kong and King Lear. We like the idea that Kong is inside King Lear’s psyche and we like the idea that the character of Kong Lear is played by a woman – imagine that… Freud would have a field day! This short film is the B track – the flip side to the live show. We decided to write a piece for super 8mm film to act as if the live show’s material had an unconscious, or a psyche. We are playing with the idea that the id, in Freudian psychoanalysis is silent and we became fascinated about the position of writing on silent film’s intertitles – for us they have the possibility to reveal what is hidden inside the character’s and performer’s psyche. Our playful merging of these two icons produced a string of images, texts and activities that included the filming of the character looking down upon the city of York from the Lord Mayors’ apartment roof, running feral along Fifth Avenue in New York and ascending a climbing wall inside a Go Outdoors store on Foss Island retail park (not Skull island).

Lone Twin are currently working on a project for the Cultural Olympiad entitled the Boat Project.

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The Lost Objects of Childhood

Author's talk: Deborah Levy.  Filmed at the Freud Museum London on 26 April 2012

'When I read biographies of famous people, I only get interested when they escape from their family and spend the rest of their life getting over them.' (extract from Swimming Home)

Deborah Levy's new novel, Swimming Home, is a subversive thriller about the footprints the past leaves on the everyday of a sun-drenched family holiday. Its witty and beguiling exploration of the complexities and mysteries of family life have enthralled readers and critics in equal measure. Levy will read from her book and discuss its connecting conversation with Louise Bourgeois’s life-long artistic preoccupation with the strange drama of being a wife, mother and daughter.

Deborah Levy is a playwright and novelist. She recently dramatised two of Freud's case histories, The Wolfman andDora for BBC Radio 4. She was AHRC Fellow in Creative and Performing Arts at The Royal College of Art from 2006-9. A new fiction exploring the ways in which everyday objects might conceal and reveal our anxieties, Weeping Machines is published in Issue 4 of The White Review. An interview with Levy about her writing can be found here.

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Lucian Freud My Father

Artist's Talk: Jane McAdam Freud

On the 22nd February 2012 Jane McAdam Freud joined us to discuss her exhibition Lucian Freud My Father - A personal portrayal.  This is a video excerpt from that event.

Artist Jane McAdam Freud presented a large scale sculpture portraying her father Lucian Freud. It was unveiled and exhibited for the first time in the Freud Museum – once home to her great grandfather, Sigmund Freud. Jane spent many hours with her father in the months before his death in July 2011 making sketches for this new work. It was shown at the Freud Museum alongside other smaller scale work and preparatory sketches. The show ran from 25 January 2012 - 4 March 2012

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'Hysteria, heredity and anti-Semitism: Freud's challenge to the Jewish stereotype'

A Talk by Estelle Roith

Recorded at the Freud Museum London on 28 February 2012.

Estelle Roith is a psychoanalytic psychotherapist and trained at the London Centre for psychotherapy. She is the author of the of The Riddle of Freud: Jewish influences on his theory of female sexuality published in 1987, in the New Library of Psychoanalysis. Her recent work includes:Ishmael and Isaac: An Enduring Conflict, in Sibling Relationships'by Coles, 2006,

Dr. Roith is currently working on a study that proposes that significant events in Freud's time, overlooked until now, have been an important influence in his life and in the development of psychoanalysis.

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Trauma and Aesthetic Transformation

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Trauma and Aesthetic Transformation

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