Episodes
Friday Oct 31, 2014
Freud and Eros: Love, Lust and Longing - Curator's talk: Dr Janine Burke
Friday Oct 31, 2014
Friday Oct 31, 2014
The god of love is one of the best represented deities in Freud's impressive collection of antiquities. Join Dr Burke, the exhibition's curator, as she discusses the profound connections between classical Greek culture, the artworks collected by Freud and the development of psychoanalysis. Freud understood the god well: Eros could spark the civilizing force of love that resulted in fulfilling relationships as well as unleashing turbulent, unbridled and destructive emotions. Dr Burke will also draw on Freud's personal experience of Eros in his passionate courtship of his future wife Martha Bernays.
Dr Janine Burke is the author of The Gods of Freud: Sigmund Freud's Art Collection (2006). She is Adjunct Lecturer, School of Languages, Literatures, Cultures and Linguistics, Monash University, Melbourne.
Part of a season of talks and events accompanying the exhibition 'Freud and Eros: Love, Lust and Longing' 22 October 2014 - 22 February 2015.
Friday Oct 31, 2014
Friday Oct 31, 2014
David Welch will discuss how one of the most striking means by which different propaganda media have influenced social and political attitudes, changing or reinforcing them has been through the use of stereotypes - conventional figures that have come to be regarded as representative of particular classes, races, nations, etc. Drawing largely from the experience of war or conflict, the talk will use propaganda artefacts such as pamphlets, postcards, cartoons, film and TV.
David Welch is Professor of Modern History & Director of the Centre for the Study of War, Propaganda & Society at the University of Kent. His publications include The Third Reich: Politics, and Propaganda (Routledge, 2002), Hitler: Profile of a Dictator (Routledge, 2001), Propaganda and the German Cinema, 1933-1945 (OUP, 1983 revised edition I.B.Tauris, 2001), Propaganda and Mass Persuasion: A Historical Encyclopedia from 1500 to the Present [with D. Culbert and N. Cull] (ABC Clio, 2003), Justifying War: Propaganda, Politics and the Modern Age [with Jo Fox] (Palgrave, 2012) and he edited contributed two chapters to a festschrift for Philip Taylor, Propaganda. From World War 1 to WikiLeaks (I.B.Tauris, 2013). In 2013, he co-curated the successful British Library exhibition, ‘Propaganda: Power and Persuasion’ and authored the accompanying book of the same name (British Library, 2013) His latest book published in August is, Germany and Propaganda in World War I. Pacifism, Mobilization and Total War (I.B. Tauris, 2014). He is currently writing a history of propaganda in the Second World War, World War II Propaganda. Documents Decoded (ABC-Clio, 2015) and he has contributed to the Oxford Illustrated History of World War II (OUP, 2015).
This talk is part of a series of events accompanying the exhibition 'Why War', 6 August - 19 October 2014.
Friday Oct 31, 2014
Friday Oct 31, 2014
As part of the Museum's Why War? exhibition Gabrielle Rifkind and Giandomenico Picco the recent authors of The Fog of Peace: The Human Face of Conflict Resolution will be in conversation with journalist, writer and broadcaster, John McCarthy.
In their thought provoking and important book, the authors of The Fog of Peace stress the importance of getting into the mind of the other, however difficult that is.
In 1991 former UN official Giandomenico Picco negotiated the release of John McCarthy and others held hostage by Hezbollah in Lebanon, allowing himself to be abducted from the streets of Beirut to meet with the leadership of the kidnappers in the process. In these encounters he had a deep commitment to understanding the human mind and what motivates it, and to asking questions as to why people behave in particular ways. He understood that behind every face there was a human story, indeed more than one, there was a life and there were hopes and aspirations, fears and anger, hatred and pain.
John McCarthy says of The Fog of Peace '"This remarkable and refreshing book offers an extremely practical new approach to finding a path through the fogs of war and peace. The authors argue that using the tool of empathy and getting into the mind of the enemy is not appeasement. This book is anything but soft and cuddly, it is based on a deep understanding of politics in its most brutal forms".
The conversation will offer the opportunity to explore the difficulties and opportunities for making peace. In today’s fractured world.
Gabrielle Rifkind is the director of the Middle East programme at Oxford Research Group. She is a group analyst and specialist in conflict resolution immersed in the politics of the Middle East. Rifkind combines in-depth political and psychological expertise with many years’ experience in promoting serious analysis and discreet dialogues with groups behind the scenes.
Giandomenico Picco served as under-secretary general of the United Nations and was personal representative of the secretary general for the United Nation year of dialogue amongst civilisations. He led the task force negotiations to end the Iran-Iraq war and the freedom of Western hostages from Lebanon. Over decades he helped securing the freedom of over 100 individuals unjustly detained from 4 different countries.
John Patrick McCarthy CBE is a British journalist, writer and broadcaster, and one of the hostages in the Lebanon hostage crisis. McCarthy was Britain's longest-held hostage in Lebanon, being held for more than five years.
Tuesday Oct 28, 2014
Tuesday Oct 28, 2014
Dr Jessica Meyer
Dorothy L. Sayers's 1928 novel 'The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club' is, as the title hints, a novel about war. At its centre are two brothers, George, who was gassed in the First World War and sufferers from shell shock in its aftermath, and Robert, a Regular army officer who was 'a jolly fine soldier'. Although presented as two individuals, these two characters represent two sides of the same coin, namely inverse psychological responses to the experience of war. George's shell shock is a classic flight into illness, while Robert's emotional resilience that borders on callousness. In this lecture, Dr Meyer will explore Sayers's representation of these two characters in detail, locating them in both developing understandings of war trauma and British cultural memory of the First World War. In doing so, she hopes to shed new light on how shell shock has become the dominant symbolic wound of the war in British culture, shaping both our historical understanding of the war and our current commemorative practices.
This talk is part of a series of events accompanying the exhibition 'Why War', 6 August - 19 October 2014.
Tuesday Oct 28, 2014
Michelangelo's Moses-Idol: "Renaissance" as Return of the Repressed
Tuesday Oct 28, 2014
Tuesday Oct 28, 2014
Nathanael Price
“Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image, or any likeness of any thing [...] Thou shalt not bow down thyself to them, nor serve them: for I the lord thy God am a jealous God.” Exodus, 20:4-5
“And well may the Jews go, as they do each Sabbath […] to visit and adore [the Moses of Michelangelo], since it is not something human, but divine that they adore.”
Giorgio Vasari, Vita di Michelangelo Buonarroti, 1550
“No piece of statuary has ever made a stronger impression on me than this.”
Sigmund Freud, The Moses of Michelangelo, 1914
In Vasari’s account of Michelangelo’s famous Moses, he describes how the contemporary Roman Jews abandoned their religious observances to “visit and adore” the statue of their own iconoclastic lawgiver on the tomb of Pope Julius II. The circumstances of this (imaginary) conversion – wherein the Jews establish their own image-cult of Moses – seems to epitomise the Freudian concept of the return of the repressed; the “inexorable” rule by which repressed psychic or cultural material (in this case idolatrous worship) re-emerges through the very agent of repression; here, the forbidding figure of Moses, destroyer of the Golden Calf.
Vasari’s story might be a fiction, but he recognised something inherent in Michelangelo’s statue; something that Freud himself would not admit when, four centuries later, he retraced the steps of the imaginary Jewish pilgrims. The idea of this talk – a centenary response to Freud’s essay, “The Moses of Michelangelo” – is that his concept of repression has unexploited potential as a tool for understanding not only the Moses, but Renaissance art and culture in more general terms. There is evidence, moreover, that Michelangelo and his contemporaries were as conscious of the cultural mechanisms of repression and recurrence as was Freud himself.
Nathanael Price is an academic art historian, now working on an AHRC-funded doctoral research project at University College London. His general research interest is in the historical interpretation and cultural legacy of the Mosaic image prohibition, and in particular the intersection between Jewish and Christian visual cultures in Renaissance Italy; areas in which he finds Freudian psychoanalytic theory has unexploited potential.
Tuesday Oct 28, 2014
Psychoanalytic Poetry Festival 2015: Memory and Memorialisation
Tuesday Oct 28, 2014
Tuesday Oct 28, 2014
Sam Willetts
'Time Present and Time Past'*
In conversation with Ellie Roberts, discussing poetry and transgenerational transmission of trauma, nameless dread, and the presence of an absent object.
*TS Eliot, Burnt Norton
Tuesday Oct 28, 2014
Psychoanalytic Poetry Festival 2015: Memory and Memorialisation
Tuesday Oct 28, 2014
Tuesday Oct 28, 2014
Five distinguished poets explore themes of memory and memorialisation in their work through talks, readings and conversations with psychoanalysts and psychotherapists.
Denise Riley
'Stopped Time and Rhyme'
I will say something, and read a couple of poems, about rhyme’s relation to temporality, and how this links to that feeling of ‘time stopped’ that you might inhabit after someone’s unexpected death.
John Glenday
The Lost Boy
The history of the First World War has been a subject of ongoing fascination for Glenday. He will offer personal perspectives on how poetry can redeem people from history, and perform new poems inspired by the conflict, including ‘The Big Push’, and ‘The Lost Boy’ which tells the true story of his Uncle Alexander, who departed for war aged only 15, and who died in the Battle of the Sambre on November 4th 1918, the same battle as Wilfred Owen.
Tuesday Oct 28, 2014
Psychoanalytic Poetry Festival 2015: Memory and Memorialisation
Tuesday Oct 28, 2014
Tuesday Oct 28, 2014
Five distinguished poets explore themes of memory and memorialisation in their work through talks, readings and conversations with psychoanalysts and psychotherapists.
David Constantine
'So many without memento...'*
in conversation Gerry Byrne
*David Jones from In Parenthesis
Tuesday Oct 28, 2014
Psychoanalytic Poetry Festival 2015: Memory and Memorialisation
Tuesday Oct 28, 2014
Tuesday Oct 28, 2014
Five distinguished poets explore themes of memory and memorialisation in their work through talks, readings and conversations with psychoanalysts and psychotherapists.
Stephen Wilson
Re-membering Isaac Rosenberg
Deryn Rees-Jones
Remembering and imagining: The Case of Helen Thomas
Helen Thomas, the wife of the poet Edward Thomas, wrote two memoirs after her husband's death in 1917. Deryn Rees-Jones explores her own response to Helen's life, marriage and widowhood in discussion with Judith Palmer. There will also be a showing of the animation 'And You, Helen', made by the artist Charlotte Hodes to accompany Edward Thomas's poem, and the book of the same name by the artist and Deryn Rees-Jones, published by Seren Books.
Monday Oct 27, 2014
Contemporary Art at the Freud Museum
Monday Oct 27, 2014
Monday Oct 27, 2014
Dr Joanne Morra
Part of Inside Out Festival 2014
The Freud Museum London is internationally recognized as one of the most important sites for the history of psychoanalysis. Perhaps less well-known is the fact that over the past 25 years it has hosted over 70 contemporary art exhibitions by celebrated artists such as Louise Bourgeois, Sophie Calle, Matt Collishaw, Vera Frenkel and Sarah Lucas.
What is the purpose of these exhibitions? How do these artistic interventions animate the Museum? What can they tell us about psychoanalysis and contemporary art? Looking at selected previous exhibitions, as well as the forthcoming ‘Freud and Eros: Love, Lust and Longing’, this talk will address these questions and others.
Dr Joanne Morra is Reader in Art History and Theory at Central Saint Martins and a Founding Principal Editor of Journal of Visual Culture. Joanne has published widely on modern and contemporary art, critical theory and psychoanalytic theory and practice. Recently she curated the exhibition Saying It, with work by Mieke Bal & Michelle Williams Gamaker, and Renate Ferro at the Freud Museum, London (2012). Joanne is presently completing the book Inside the Freud Museums: Art, Curating and Site-Responsivity (I.B. Tauris, 2015).
This lecture is part of Inside Out Festival 2014 and one of a wide ranging and imaginative public programme of events, talks, films and performances which accompanies the exhibition 'Freud and Eros: Love, Lust and Longing', 22 October - 22 February 2015.
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