To close our Uncanny series, we are bringing you a special bonus episode from our archive. In a live lecture originally delivered at the Freud Museum in January 2020, Dr Aaron Balick looks at deepfakes, artificial intelligence, and social media algorithms as he uncovers 'Why might some forms of technology give us the creeps'.
Producer: Karolina Heller
In this final episode exploring The Uncanny, Tom and Jamie look at the impact Freud's paper had on literature and the arts. Our hosts also reflect upon the Freud Museum's 2019 exhibition The Uncanny: A Centenary.
Producer: Karolina Heller
In this episode, Tom and Jamie will look at the third and final Part of Freud's The Uncanny, where Freud concludes by differentiating the uncanny in literature to real-life experiences.
Producer: Karolina Heller
In this episode, Tom and Jamie will be looking at part 2 of Freud’s paper The Uncanny, in which Freud delves into the wonderful world of Hoffmann’s ‘The Sandman’ and discusses doubles, hauntings and inexplicable repetitions in his search for the core of the uncanny effect.
Producer: Karolina Heller
In the first episode, Tom and Jamie will introduce Freud's 1919 paper The Uncanny. We will look closely at the unusual structure of the first section in this 3-part essay.
Producer: Karolina Heller
In the fifth and final instalment of our new podcast series, Tom will be joined by Emilia Raczkowska, the Freud Museum’s Education and Outreach Manager, to discuss how psychoanalysis has responded to the Covid-19 pandemic.
Producer: Karolina Heller
In this episode, Jamie Ruers is in conversation with the Freud Museum's curator, Bryony Davies. They will discuss the forthcoming exhibition '1920/2020: Freud in Pandemic', which addresses the parallels between Freud's experience with the Spanish Flu and the COVID-19 pandemic today.
Producer: Karolina Heller
In the third episode of our new podcast series, we’ll be looking at the final two chapters of Beyond the Pleasure Principle and tracing the emergence of Freud’s New Dual Instinct Theory, and his introduction of the Death Drive.
Producer: Karolina Heller
In the second part of our new podcast series we’ll be diving into the central part of the text, in which Freud discusses the ‘compulsion to repeat’. We’ll also be focussing on the concept of Speculation in Freud’s work, and trace a pathway to the appearance of the new Dual Instinct Theory.
Producer: Karolina Heller
In the first part of our new podcast series, we’ll be exploring the historical context of Freud’s ground-breaking work ‘Beyond the Pleasure Principle’, and discussing some of the prominent themes arising from the first 2 chapters, including Freud’s famous account of the ‘fort-da’ game.
Producer: Karolina Heller
The Freud Museum London is launching a brand new podcast called ‘Freud in Focus’ which will look in-depth at some of Freud’s key texts in a discussion format. The series will be presented by Tom DeRose and Jamie Ruers.
In the first five episodes, we will look at one of Freud’s most influential and controversial texts, Beyond the Pleasure Principle which was published in 1920. Starting with close readings of the text itself, we will then go on to think about its relevance for us today in the 21st-century.
The first episode will be aired Wednesday, 17th February 2021 and a new episode will be released every other Wednesday.
Producer: Karolina Heller
The exhibition room has displayed contemporary art exhibitions for over 30 years. The museum’s reputation for innovative, exciting shows has seen collaborations with artists such as Mark Wallinger, Alice Anderson, Louise Bourgeois, Gavin Turk and more. Displayed here is the exhibition Code Name Mary: The extraordinary life of Muriel Gardiner.
This room is dedicated to the life and work of Sigmund Freud’s youngest daughter Anna. In the glass case to your left as you enter there is a small biographical exhibit. At the back you can see a picture frame filled with various family photos
On either side of the door on the top landing hang two more portraits of Freud. They show him through the eyes of two artists – and reveal two different attitudes towards him.
As you climb the stairs you will probably pause on the half landing. This was where Freud’s wife Martha and her sister Minna loved to sit at their needlework, looking out onto the street.
An audio guide to Sigmund Freud’s study. The desk at the centre of the room was the focus of Freud’s life and work. It is so crowded that there hardly seems space for his papers. Freud chose to work face to face with an audience of antiquities.
Freud and his family arrived in England in June 1938 as refugees. He was an old man, with heart problems and cancer of the jaw, and had not wanted to leave Austria where he had lived his entire life. But already in 1933 the Nazis had burnt his books.
An audio guide to the Freud family dining room. This is where the family gathered together and in the case of the Freuds that was always an extended and changing family.
Of recent leaders there have been depressives, alcoholics, narcissists, populists and those affected by hubris syndrome and driven by their religious beliefs, as in Bush and Blair. But Donald Trump, a world-class narcissist, presents a completely different set of issues. This book is the first to place him in his historical, political, philosophical and medical context.
It is appropriate that it should come from someone uniquely qualified to do so. A writer on Military Conversations of 1906-14, the War Cabinet in 1940 and UK foreign policy post Brexit. David Owen was British Foreign Secretary 1977-79 and EU peace negotiator in the Balkans 1992-95. Also he has served on the board of several large international companies with interests in Russia, the US and the UK. As a former neuroscientist he has written extensively on hubris syndrome in journals like Brain and in 2008 in his classic book, In Sickness and In Power, still in print in a revised edition from 2016.
Part of an exciting series of talks and events which coincide with the exhibition ‘Freud, Dali and the Metamorphosis of Narcissus’, on display until 24 February 2019.
Join author Katherine Angel for a discussion on her latest book Daddy Issues with Josh Cohen.
Bold, challenging and nuanced, Daddy Issues examines the place of fathers in contemporary culture and asks how the mixture of love and hatred we feel towards our fathers can be turned into a relationship that is generative rather than destructive. If we are to effectively dismantle patriarchy, it is vital that fathers are kept on the hook.
“A timely, necessary work from one of our most vital thinkers. Moving with ease across psychoanalysis, popular culture and literary criticism, weaponising the thought of Woolf, Winnicott and Solanas, Daddy Issues flips the familial script and takes aim at all our Daddies: domestic, cultural, patriarchal, even presidential. The result is a wincingly perceptive, deeply engaged book, one that takes us into the dark heart of a cultural fixation, then shows us, with deep care and empathy, the way back out.”—Sam Byers, author of PERFIDIOUS ALBION
Katherine Angel is the author of Unmastered, A Book on Desire Most Difficult to Tell (Penguin, FSG). Katherine has a PhD in the history of sexuality and psychiatry from the University of Cambridge, and teaches creative and critical writing at Birkbeck, University of London.
Josh Cohen is a psychoanalyst in private practice, and Professor of Modern Literary Theory at Goldsmiths, University of London. He is the author of many books, including How to Read Freud (2005), The Private Life (2013) and, most recently, Not Working (2019).
These include talk therapies, somatic approaches, medications and other biological treatments from harm reduction programs to transcranial magnetic stimulation, life coaching, popular and accessible self-help groups, online programmes, men’s groups, women’s groups, podcasts and mental health apps (including ones like Woebot, in which app users can have a “conversation” with an artificial-intelligence therapist). Add these choices to insurance companies’ demands for time and cost efficiency, and providers of open ended talk therapies, such as psychoanalysis, need to explicitly articulate what they uniquely have to offer.
Within the context of this climate and broader conversation, Dr. Yael Baldwin will address the unique place and role of Lacanian psychoanalysis, with its emphasis on the importance of human speech and the effects of the signifier (a linguistic term for the sounds we produce, hear, or write during speech) as it relates to the formations and workings of the unconscious, the constitution of the ego, the profound role of lack, loss, and desire in our lives, and ultimately the Lacanian ethics of subjective responsibility as these relate to treatment.
Dr. Yael Baldwin is a clinical psychologist, Professor of Psychology and Chair of Social Sciences at Mars Hill University, and the author of many articles, anthology chapters, and books on Lacan, including: Let’s Keep Talking: Lacanian Tales of Love, Sex, and Other Catastrophes. Most recently, she has a chapter entitled “On an ex post facto Syllabary” in Reading Lacan’s Ecrits: From ‘Signification of the phallus’ to ‘Metaphor of the subject.”
This talk focus on how these modern-day American conceptualizations of schizophrenic patients as violent emerged during the civil-rights era of the 1950s-1970s in response to a larger set of conversations about race. It integrates institutional, professional, and cultural discourses in order to trace shifts in popular and medical understandings of schizophrenia from a disease of white docility to one of “Negro” hostility, and from a disease that was nurtured to one that was feared.
The first section tracks the medicalization of race and schizophrenia within a particular institution, the Ionia Hospital for the Criminally Insane. The talk’s second section contextualizes the Ionia case histories within shifting psychiatric definitions of schizophrenia. We will explore the ways in which published case studies explicitly connected clinical presentations of African-American men with the politics of the civil rights movement in ways that treated aspirations for liberation and civil rights as symptoms of mental illness.
Finally, the third section reads shifts in psychiatric nosology within changing American cultural concerns about black masculinity. Triangulating the historical connections between institutional forces, psychiatric practices, and civil-rights politics helps me grapple with some of the seemingly naturalized characteristics of present-day schizophrenia discourse—characteristics that often appear denatured of their explicit connections to race. These include cultural tropes of angry, homeless mentally ill persons, or findings demonstrating that persons with schizophrenia reside in prisons far more often than in psychiatric care facilities.
Jonathan M. Metzl, MD, PhD, is based at Vanderbilt University, Nashville, Tennessee where he is Frederick B. Rentschler II Professor of Sociology and Medicine, Health and Society; the Director of the Center for Medicine, Health, and Society; and Professor of Psychiatry. His most recent publication is Dying of Whiteness: How the Politics of Racial Resentment is Killing America’s Heartland (2019).
Leading art critic, writer and Editorial Director of Frieze Magazine, Jennifer Higgie, presents a talk with artist Daniel Silver and artist and curator of The Enigma of the Hour: 100 Years of Psychoanalytic Thought Simon Moretti in response to the exhibition, expanding on the themes of translation, transformation, temporality and metaphor, key to both art and psychoanalysis.
Jennifer Higgie is a writer and the editorial director of Frieze Magazine. She is the editor of The Artist’s Joke published by the MIT Press.
Part of a series of events which coincide with The Enigma of the Hour: 100 Years of Psychoanalytic Thought an exhibition marking the centenary of The International Journal of Psychoanalysis, on display from 6 June – 4 August 2019.
In November 2015, George Osbourne announced the closure of the largest women’s prison in Europe, HMP Holloway. The recently published book, The End of the Sentence, Psychotherapy with Female Offenders, edited by Pamela Windham Stewart and Jessica Collier is part of the Forensic Psychotherapy Monograph Series edited by Brett Kahr. The End of the Sentence records the rich and varied therapeutic interventions provided over 25 years at HMP Holloway.
The Freud in Prison conversation continues thinking about current forensic psychotherapy described in The End of the Sentence. A key part of the discussion will explore the correlation between the high number of inmates who are victims of childhood sexual abuse (estimated at 65% of offenders have been sexually abused). The other aspect for discussion, and related to the first, is the creative power of psychotherapy in a forensic setting.
This conversation is between psychotherapist Pamela Windham Stewart and Kelly. While a former inmate, Kelly attended weekly psychotherapy as well as participating in weekly Managing Emotions Groups facilitated by Professor Gill McGauley and Pamela. From this experience Kelly has devised a 10-week group for women who were abused as children which she will discuss.
Can psychotherapy have a bigger, more vocal role to play in prisons and in society as a whole? Is psychotherapy a creative process which should take up a larger political role? And can we also consider what it is about child sexual abuse that is a mental prison for individuals, institutions and society at large?
…And may also have been a prison for Freud?
Join artist Emma Smith for an evening of discussion with special guests from the fields of child psychotherapy and democratic education, and specialists in twentieth century feminist, psychoanalytic and social history.
Emma will introduce her exhibition, Wunderblock, and invite the panel to join her in unpacking some of the research, key themes, and ideas behind it. Areas for discussion will include the history of state interest and intervention into child development after the Second World War, the post-war emphasis on the accountability of the mother, and Emma’s interest in children and young people’s agency and ability to influence the world around them.
The event will cover the exhibition’s post-war context as well as contemporary approaches to working with children and young people. It will encourage reflection on the extent to which post-war research and debate still influences our attitudes to children and young people, mental health, teaching, and parenting.
Emma will be joined by Dr Shaul Bar-Haim from the University of Essex, Dr Helen McCarthy from the University of Cambridge, leading educator Ramin Farhangi, and child therapist and psychoanalyst, Antje Netzer-Stein.
Wunderblock is curated by Rachel Fleming-Mulford, and is commissioned by Birkbeck, University of London for the Hidden Persuaders Project, funded by the Wellcome Trust Public Engagement Fund.
Speaker biographies:
Dr Shaul Bar-Haim is a Lecturer in the Department of Sociology at the University of Essex. Shaul’s research specialisms include the intellectual history of psychoanalysis and other twentieth-century 'psy' disciplines, the history of childhood, and critical theory. His forthcoming book is The Maternalists: Psychoanalysis, Motherhood, and the British Welfare State, University of Pennsylvania Press (2020).
Ramin Farhangi is a leading educator and advocate for democratic schooling. He is the cofounder of Ecole Dynamique (2015, Paris). This is based on the Sudbury concept, where the school is run by a direct democracy in which students and staff are equal in rights. Ramin is also the cofounder of EUDEC France, a network of 38 democratic schools and 30 projects. His TEDx talks have reached nearly 400 000 views.
Dr Helen McCarthy is University Lecturer in Modern British History at the University of Cambridge and a fellow of St John's College. Her current book project explores histories of women, mothering and paid work in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and will be published as Double Lives: A History of Working Motherhood by Bloomsbury Books in 2020.
Antje Netzer-Stein is a child and adolescent psychotherapist, a child and adult psychoanalyst, and a fellow of the British psychoanalytic society. Currently she works in private practice across a range of ages and teaches at the Tavistock Clinic, the Institute of Psychoanalysis and abroad. Previously she worked for many years as a consultant child psychotherapist in the adolescent and young adult service of the Tavistock.
Drawing on Freud and Lacan, Zupančič argues that sexuality is at the point of a “short circuit” between ontology and epistemology.
Sexuality and knowledge are structured around a fundamental negativity, which unites them at the point of the unconscious. The unconscious (as linked to sexuality) is the concept of an inherent link between being and knowledge in their very negativity.
Alenka Zupančič is a Slovene philosopher and social theorist. She works as research advisor at the Institute of Philosophy, Scientific Research Center of the Slovene Academy of Sciences. She is also professor at the European Graduate School in Switzerland, and at the Graduate School ZRC SAZU (Ljubljana). She is the author of numerous articles and books on psychoanalysis and philosophy, including Ethics of the Real: Kant and Lacan; The Shortest Shadow: Nietzsche's Philosophy of the Two; Why Psychoanalysis: Three Interventions; The Odd One In: On Comedy; and, most recently, What is Sex?
Psychotherapist and Author, Philippa Perry joins us to discuss her latest book, The Book You Wish Your Parents Had Read (and Your Children Will Be Glad that You Did), Published 3rd of March 2019.
The most influential relationships are between parents and children. Yet for so many families, these relationships go can wrong and it may be difficult to get back on track. In this book Philippa Perry shows how strong and loving bonds are made with your children and how such attachments give a better chance of good mental health, in childhood and beyond. Almost every parent loves their children, but by following the refreshing, sage and sane advice and steps in this book you will also find yourselves liking one another too.
Philippa Perry has been a psychotherapist for the past twenty years. A faculty member of The School of Life, she has presented several documentaries including The Truth about Children Who Lie for BBC Radio 4 and Being Bipolar for Channel 4. Most recently, Philippa has worked on a BBC Radio 4 programme, The Age of Emotion (forthcoming), and contributed towards the radio documentary Humiliation. She lives in London with her husband, the artist Grayson Perry, and her cat Kevin. They have one grown up daughter, Flo.
Freud’s dream of a botanical monograph contains a reproach directed against him for having neglected the science of botany. In botany post-Linneaus, a vision of plant sexuality emerges that resembles in its freedom from constraints Freud’s account of the polymorphously perverse character of human sexuality before it comes under control of the Oedipus complex. My paper will argue that for modern artists working in a surrealist idiom, many of them women, botany – acting in concert with psychoanalysis – offers the means to defy restrictive norms governing gender and sexual relations. I will survey various artists where I believe this to be the case, examining in depth Helen Chadwick’s “Piss Flowers” (1991-2), cast from cavities produced by peeing into snow. When inverted, these casts present a surprising analogy to the pistils and stamens of a typical, bisexual flower. Drawing subversively upon Freud’s urethral eroticism, combined with her knowledge of Linnaeus, the “Piss Flowers” (created at a moment when Chadwick was collaborating with AIDS charities) propose a queer alternative to human sexual dimorphism.
...a disappointment, an ear, and a snail.
Salvador Dalí’s proposition for Symbolically Functioning Objects (1931) made an important contribution to the establishment of objects as a major priority for surrealism. In line with the surrealist group’s research strategies, this novel category of objects is presented in the framework of a game, one in which the construction of assemblages by participants is answered by a second phase of interpretation in terms of unconscious motivations. The challenges of such interpretation, however, were by no means unfamiliar to surrealists. Just a few years earlier, issue 9-10 of the group’s journal La Révolution surréaliste (1927) had published an exclusive extract of Freud’s The Question of Lay Analysis, while at least one psychoanalyst – Jean Frois-Wittmann – was close to the group at the turn of the decade, supporting the sense that Dalí’s appropriation of psychoanalytic method is carried out in a highly informed context, even if to very different ends: symbolism, eroticism, mobility are all harnessed in such a way as to reveal an extravagant complicity between subjects, objects and the motivations crossing between them. A conversation between analysis, play and the object is at stake here, one in which none of these parameters emerge unchanged.
This paper explores Freud and Dalí’s rather different ideas about censorship. Starting with their comically perplexing meeting, it will also look at the myth of the ‘crazy artist’ in the context of Freud’s ideas about the unconscious and narcissism.
‘The small translucent bottle of shampoo outlived him. It was the kind you take home from hotels in distant places. For over a year it had sat on the shower shelf where he had left it. I looked at it every day.”
After the death of her partner of thirty-two years, Lisa Appignanesi was thrust into a state striated by rage and superstition in which sanity felt elusive. The dead of prior generations loomed large and haunting. Then, too, the cultural and political moment seemed to collude with her condition: everywhere people were dislocated and angry.
In this electrifying and brave examination of an ordinary enough death and its aftermath, Appignanesi uses all her evocative and analytic powers to scrutinize her own and our society’s experience of grieving, the effects of loss and the potent, mythical space it occupies in our lives.
With searing honesty, lashed by humour, she navigates us onto the terrain of childhood, the way it forms our feelings of love and hate, and steers us towards a less tumultuous version of the everyday.
This book may be short, but life, death, madness, love, and grandchildren, are all there seen through the eyes of a writer who is ever aware of the historical and current vagaries of woman’s condition.
‘Appignanesi luminously conveys the wayward emotions that make bereavement a language that is hard to understand, yet speaks to us every day when we experience a great loss. You will find all of life in this rewarding, scholarly and entertaining conversation about freedom, Freud, fury, enduring love, and how mythic and modern families haunt each other’
Deborah Levy‘Wonderful, moving, extraordinary. It is sui generis. I feel enormously privileged to have read it – twice. Its structure is remarkable – an enacting of the last two years. Bravo bravo’
Edmund de Waal
Lisa Appignanesi has been a university lecturer in European Studies and was Chair of the Freud Museum London. Her works of non-fiction include ‘Freud’s Women’ (with John Forrester), a biographical portrait of Simone de Beauvoir, and a history of cabaret. She has edited ‘The Rushdie File’ and a number of books on contemporary culture, as well as producing various films for television. Lisa Appignanesi lives in London with her two children.
Adam Phillips is a practising psychoanalyst and a visiting professor in the English department at the University of York. He writes regularly for the London Review of Books, the Observer and the New York Times, and he is General Editor of the Penguin Modern Classics Freud translations. His most recent book is In Writing and he recently curated an exhibition, The Vulgar: Fashion Redefined, at the Barbican, London.
In what ways does classical mythology in general hold up a mirror to the anxieties and aspirations of the here-and-now?
This lecture will address these and other questions relating to the enduring power of ancient myth – above all, the tales of metamorphosis contained in Ovid’s Metamorphoses. Writer and academic James Cahill will discuss how these stories have continued to infiltrate and inspire the art of the last hundred years, both overtly and in more oblique or unexpected ways, while also giving fundamental shape to modern literature and psychoanalysis. He will argue that Salvador Dalí’s iconic reimagining of the Narcissus myth stands at the crux between different modes of ‘response’ to the classical, looking simultaneously backwards (to the mythologizing paintings of the Renaissance, for instance) and forwards to the experiments of conceptual art and postmodernism – at once an illustration of the ancient myth and an enactment of its subliminal themes.
Part of an exciting series of talks and events which coincide with ‘Freud, Dali and the Metamorphosis of Narcissus’ on display at the museum from 3 October 2018 – 24 February 2019.
James Cahill is a writer based in London. He is the lead author of Flying Too Close to the Sun, a major new survey of classical myth in western art published by Phaidon in 2018. His book Ways of Being, an anthology of artists’ statements, was published this summer by Laurence King. In 2017 he completed a PhD at Cambridge University examining the relationship between contemporary British art and the classical tradition. He previously studied at the Courtauld Institute of Art and Oxford University. His writing has appeared in publications including Apollo, The Burlington Magazine, Elephant, The Erotic Review, Frieze, The Los Angeles Review of Books, The London Review of Books, and The Times Literary Supplement. He has authored or co-authored books on artists including Angus Fairhurst, Maggi Hambling and Richard Patterson, and has curated exhibitions at King’s College London and the Museum of Classical Archaeology, Cambridge. His PhD research led to a postdoctoral fellowship (2017-18) at King’s College London, where he helped to set up Modern Classicisms, a multidimensional research project exploring the connections between antiquity and modern art.
Flying Too Close to the Sun, by Phaidon Editors, with an introduction by James Cahill
is available from the Freud Museum Shop.
Dalí was a passionate admirer of the father of psychoanalysis and finally met him in London on July 19th 1938. This year marks the 80th anniversary of this event. A new exhibition at the Freud Museum will explore the connection between the two men, starting from their one meeting, to which Dalí brought his recently completed painting The Metamorphosis of Narcissus.
The painting, on loan from the Tate, will be the central point in the exhibition for an exploration of the extensive influence of Freud on Dalí and on Surrealism. Also considered will be Freud’s own attitude to painting, illuminated by his response to this encounter with Dalí.
Part of an exciting series of talks and events which coincide with ‘Freud, Dali and the Metamorphosis of Narcissus’ on display the Museum from 3 October 2018 – 24 February 2019.
Dawn Ades is Professor Emerita of the History and Theory of Art at the University of Essex, Professor of the History of Art at the Royal Academy, a former trustee of Tate (1995-2005) and of the National Gallery (2000-2005) and a Fellow of the British Academy. In 2013 she was appointed CBE for services to higher education.
The many exhibitions she has organized or co-curated, in the UK and abroad, include Dada and Surrealism Reviewed (1978); Art in Latin America: the Modern Era 1820-1980 (1989); Dalí’s Optical Illusions (2000); Salvador Dalí: the Centenary Exhibition (2004); Undercover Surrealism: Georges Bataille and Documents (2006); Close-Up: Proximity and Defamiliarisation in Art, Photography and Film (2008); and Dalí/Duchamp, (Royal Academy and the Dalí Museum 2017-18).
Darian Leader is a psychoanalyst working in London and a member of the Centre for Freudian Analysis and Research and of The College of Psychoanalysts-UK. He is the author of several books including: ‘Why do women write more letters than they post?’; ‘Freud’s Footnotes’; ‘Stealing the Mona Lisa: What Art Stops Us From Seeing’; ‘Why do people get ill?’ (with David Corfield) , ‘The New Black: Mourning, Melancholia and Depression’, ‘What is Madness?’ , ‘Strictly Bipolar’ and ‘Hands’, and frequently about contemporary art.
Despite Freud’s traditional views on women, psychoanalysis was one of the first professions to open its doors to them. Feminists past and present may have contested Freud’s ever-changing understandings of femininity. They have also elaborated on them.
In this discussion, Lisa Appignanesi co-author of the now classic Freud’s Women and psychoanalyst Susie Orbach, founder of the Women’s Therapy Centre and author of that perennial bestseller Fat is A Feminist Issue explore what women past and present have contributed to psychoanalysis.
Freud's Women is held in conjunction with the Freud Museum London's winter exhibition, So This is the Strong Sex, Early Women Psychoanalysts.
ABOUT THE SPEAKERS
Lisa Appignanesi is Chair of the Royal Society of Literature and the Man Booker International Prize. Her many books include Mad, Bad and Sad: A History of Women and the Mind Doctors and Trials of Passion: Crimes in the Name of Love and Madness.
Susie Orbach is a leading psychoanalyst. Amongst her many books are Bodies and In Therapy. Founder of the Women's Therapy Centre and the Women's Therapy Centre Institute, Susie has recently received the first ever Lifetime Achievement Award from the British Psychoanalytic Council.
Open Discussion
Solitary Pleasures in art and psychoanalysis is a day-long conference to accompany Solitary Pleasures, a group exhibition at the Freud Museum.
The conference, like the exhibition, reveals masturbation as a topic that can transform our understanding of human subjectivity and sexuality. Perhaps the most common form of human eroticism, it is also one of the least theorised. The conference will explore our complex sexual, erotic, and intimate encounters with ourselves and one another by viewing masturbation as an all-inclusive practice – gay, lesbian, heterosexual, bisexual, trans, queer, +, offering possibilities of a shared exchange and an intimate encounter between couples, lovers and strangers in ways that redefine desires and eroticism’s possibilities.
Conference themes:
History – the cultural history of masturbation
Talking – masturbation in clinical practice and literature
Educating – masturbation in sexual health and wellbeing
Making – masturbation in creativity and art practice
Open Discussion
Solitary Pleasures in art and psychoanalysis is a day-long conference to accompany Solitary Pleasures, a group exhibition at the Freud Museum.
The conference, like the exhibition, reveals masturbation as a topic that can transform our understanding of human subjectivity and sexuality. Perhaps the most common form of human eroticism, it is also one of the least theorised. The conference will explore our complex sexual, erotic, and intimate encounters with ourselves and one another by viewing masturbation as an all-inclusive practice – gay, lesbian, heterosexual, bisexual, trans, queer, +, offering possibilities of a shared exchange and an intimate encounter between couples, lovers and strangers in ways that redefine desires and eroticism’s possibilities.
Conference themes:
History – the cultural history of masturbation
Talking – masturbation in clinical practice and literature
Educating – masturbation in sexual health and wellbeing
Making – masturbation in creativity and art practice
Open Discussion
Solitary Pleasures in art and psychoanalysis is a day-long conference to accompany Solitary Pleasures, a group exhibition at the Freud Museum.
The conference, like the exhibition, reveals masturbation as a topic that can transform our understanding of human subjectivity and sexuality. Perhaps the most common form of human eroticism, it is also one of the least theorised. The conference will explore our complex sexual, erotic, and intimate encounters with ourselves and one another by viewing masturbation as an all-inclusive practice – gay, lesbian, heterosexual, bisexual, trans, queer, +, offering possibilities of a shared exchange and an intimate encounter between couples, lovers and strangers in ways that redefine desires and eroticism’s possibilities.
Conference themes:
History – the cultural history of masturbation
Talking – masturbation in clinical practice and literature
Educating – masturbation in sexual health and wellbeing
Making – masturbation in creativity and art practice
Jordan Mckenzie presents a live reading examining SPENT, a series of auto-drawings made over a two year period that explored repetition and mark making in relation to onanistic production.
Jordan McKenzie has presented performances, films, drawings and installations both nationally and internationally, including ‘Shame Chorus’, an uplifting project developed with the London Gay Men’s Choir and commissioned by the Freud Museum London. He is Lecturer in Drawing at Camberwell College of Arts, University of the Arts London.
Solitary Pleasures in art and psychoanalysis is a day-long conference to accompany Solitary Pleasures, a group exhibition at the Freud Museum.
The conference, like the exhibition, reveals masturbation as a topic that can transform our understanding of human subjectivity and sexuality. Perhaps the most common form of human eroticism, it is also one of the least theorised. The conference will explore our complex sexual, erotic, and intimate encounters with ourselves and one another by viewing masturbation as an all-inclusive practice – gay, lesbian, heterosexual, bisexual, trans, queer, +, offering possibilities of a shared exchange and an intimate encounter between couples, lovers and strangers in ways that redefine desires and eroticism’s possibilities.
Conference themes:
History – the cultural history of masturbation
Talking – masturbation in clinical practice and literature
Educating – masturbation in sexual health and wellbeing
Making – masturbation in creativity and art practice
There is a penis museum in Iceland, but no vagina equivalent anywhere in the world. Florence discusses her experience in why she chose to set up the world's first bricks and mortar vagina museum and the strange reactions she's got along the way.
Florence Schechter is a Science Communicator and Director of The Vagina Museum.
Solitary Pleasures in art and psychoanalysis is a day-long conference to accompany Solitary Pleasures, a group exhibition at the Freud Museum.
The conference, like the exhibition, reveals masturbation as a topic that can transform our understanding of human subjectivity and sexuality. Perhaps the most common form of human eroticism, it is also one of the least theorised. The conference will explore our complex sexual, erotic, and intimate encounters with ourselves and one another by viewing masturbation as an all-inclusive practice – gay, lesbian, heterosexual, bisexual, trans, queer, +, offering possibilities of a shared exchange and an intimate encounter between couples, lovers and strangers in ways that redefine desires and eroticism’s possibilities.
Conference themes:
History – the cultural history of masturbation
Talking – masturbation in clinical practice and literature
Educating – masturbation in sexual health and wellbeing
Making – masturbation in creativity and art practice
Prof. Johnny Golding is Professor of Philosophy & Fine Art at the RCA where she leads the PhD Research Group ‘Entanglement’. Internationally renowned for her philosophy-poetic enactments and sound-scape exhibitions, her research covers the entangled dimensionalities of Radical Matter, an intra-disciplinary arena of art, philosophy and the wild sciences.
Solitary Pleasures in art and psychoanalysis is a day-long conference to accompany Solitary Pleasures, a group exhibition at the Freud Museum.
The conference, like the exhibition, reveals masturbation as a topic that can transform our understanding of human subjectivity and sexuality. Perhaps the most common form of human eroticism, it is also one of the least theorised. The conference will explore our complex sexual, erotic, and intimate encounters with ourselves and one another by viewing masturbation as an all-inclusive practice – gay, lesbian, heterosexual, bisexual, trans, queer, +, offering possibilities of a shared exchange and an intimate encounter between couples, lovers and strangers in ways that redefine desires and eroticism’s possibilities.
Conference themes:
History – the cultural history of masturbation
Talking – masturbation in clinical practice and literature
Educating – masturbation in sexual health and wellbeing
Making – masturbation in creativity and art practice
David Morgan (psychoanalyst)
Giving a Toss: From Onan's Simple Pleasure to Developmental Cul de Sac
Masturbation is a dress rehearsal for what hopefully becomes a sexual relationship. It operates in the main at a fantasy level in the mind of one, and leads sometimes, as part of a sexual lexicon, to two person mutuality.
However in this time of market economy pornography it can become a developmental Cul de sac where fantasy provides an endless cornucopia in which the real person with real limitations is commodified and becomes a ‘second eleven’ choice.
David Morgan is a Psychoanalyst at the BPAS and a Training Analyst at the BPA. He is the organiser of the Political Minds seminars at the British Psychoanalytic Society and hosts the 'Frontier Psychoanalyst' podcasts. He is co-editor with Stan Ruszczynski of Sexuality Delinquency and Violence, published by Karnac Books. He has worked as a consultant psychotherapist in the NHS for 25 years at Camden Psychotherapy Unit and the Portman Clinic, regularly contributes to radio and television programmes, and lectures nationally and internationally.
Solitary Pleasures in art and psychoanalysis is a day-long conference to accompany Solitary Pleasures, a group exhibition at the Freud Museum.
The conference, like the exhibition, reveals masturbation as a topic that can transform our understanding of human subjectivity and sexuality. Perhaps the most common form of human eroticism, it is also one of the least theorised. The conference will explore our complex sexual, erotic, and intimate encounters with ourselves and one another by viewing masturbation as an all-inclusive practice – gay, lesbian, heterosexual, bisexual, trans, queer, +, offering possibilities of a shared exchange and an intimate encounter between couples, lovers and strangers in ways that redefine desires and eroticism’s possibilities.
Conference themes:
History – the cultural history of masturbation
Talking – masturbation in clinical practice and literature
Educating – masturbation in sexual health and wellbeing
Making – masturbation in creativity and art practice
Ivan Ward Whacking and Strumming: A Freudian Perspective
Freud called it the ‘primal addiction’, but is there a more positive way of looking at masturbation from a Freudian perspective?
Ivan Ward is Deputy Director and Head of Learning at the Freud Museum London and manager of the museum’s conference programme. He is the author of a number of books and papers on psychoanalytic theory and on the applications of psychoanalysis to social and cultural issues. His latest publication is ‘Parsifal as Castration Drama’ (2017) in a special issue of The Wagner Journal based on a conference organised by the Freud Museum in 2016.
Solitary Pleasures in art and psychoanalysis is a day-long conference to accompany Solitary Pleasures, a group exhibition at the Freud Museum.
The conference, like the exhibition, reveals masturbation as a topic that can transform our understanding of human subjectivity and sexuality. Perhaps the most common form of human eroticism, it is also one of the least theorised. The conference will explore our complex sexual, erotic, and intimate encounters with ourselves and one another by viewing masturbation as an all-inclusive practice – gay, lesbian, heterosexual, bisexual, trans, queer, +, offering possibilities of a shared exchange and an intimate encounter between couples, lovers and strangers in ways that redefine desires and eroticism’s possibilities.
Conference themes:
History – the cultural history of masturbation
Talking – masturbation in clinical practice and literature
Educating – masturbation in sexual health and wellbeing
Making – masturbation in creativity and art practice
Milja Kaunisto (novelist)
A Man’s Right Hand — Dr. Tissot’s Crusade Against Masturbation
In 18th century Switzerland, at the time of Enlightment, the beginning of industrialization, great luxury and social injustice, Dr. Samuel-August Tissot believes he has found a disease that he claims “has killed more young men than any other diseases combined”. With the help of his research assistant, Dr. Petrus von Taube, Tissot embarks on a journey to cure the world of masturbation once and for all.
Milja Kaunisto is a Finnish author of best-selling historical novels, and acclaimed for her frankness in depicting human sexual behaviour. She is currently writing her eighth novel, A Man’s Right Hand, a portrait of 18th-century Swiss physician, Dr. Tissot, and his campaign against masturbation. Through writing this novel, Kaunisto wants to both demystify and celebrate the humankind’s most hidden, underrated and long-lasting love affair: the solitary pleasure.
Solitary Pleasures in art and psychoanalysis is a day-long conference to accompany Solitary Pleasures, a group exhibition at the Freud Museum.
The conference, like the exhibition, reveals masturbation as a topic that can transform our understanding of human subjectivity and sexuality. Perhaps the most common form of human eroticism, it is also one of the least theorised. The conference will explore our complex sexual, erotic, and intimate encounters with ourselves and one another by viewing masturbation as an all-inclusive practice – gay, lesbian, heterosexual, bisexual, trans, queer, +, offering possibilities of a shared exchange and an intimate encounter between couples, lovers and strangers in ways that redefine desires and eroticism’s possibilities.
Conference themes:
History – the cultural history of masturbation
Talking – masturbation in clinical practice and literature
Educating – masturbation in sexual health and wellbeing
Making – masturbation in creativity and art practice
Opening remarks from Dr Noreen Giffney and Eve Watson
Ms Ann Murphy
SESSION 3: ‘Experience’ & ‘Encounter’ in Practice & theory
Session three begins with each discussant giving a brief, informal talk (10 mins each) on the speaker’s understanding of the two terms ‘experience’ and ‘encounter’ based on the discussant’s practice as a clinician and/or an artist and/or a theorist. ‘Experience’ and ‘encounter’ are two central concepts underpinning the book Clinical Encounters in Sexuality.
Ms Ann Murphyis a clinical psychologist, psychoanalytic psychotherapist and visual artist. She was a founder and Director of the MSc in Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy in the Department of Psychiatry, School of Medicine at Trinity College Dublin. She lectures on psychoanalysis, particularly Melanie Klein and Wilfred Bion, on post-graduate courses at Trinity College Dublin and St Vincent’s University Hospital Dublin, and is a training analyst and clinical supervisor. She has a private practice in Dublin. She contributed to two recent publications: The Winnicott Tradition, edited by Margaret Boyle Spelman and Frances Thomson-Salo (Karnac 2015), and Clinical Encounters in Sexuality. Ann has exhibited in a number of venues, including The Lab, Dublin, Dublin Castle, PS2 Belfast, and Mermaid Arts Centre, County Wicklow. She is at the beginning of an interdisciplinary collaboration with psychoanalytic psychotherapist and cultural theorist Noreen Giffney, which will bring together visual arts practice with clinical psychoanalytic thinking.
Sasha Roseneil
SESSION 2: What Might Clinical Psychoanalysis Learn from Queer Theories of Sexuality?
Session two begins by talking about the Introduction (by Noreen) and Afterword (by Eve) to Clinical Encounters in Sexuality, before broadening out the discussion to consider the ways in which queer theories of sexuality might enrich and enliven clinical psychoanalytic considerations of sexuality. The session begins with four brief, informal responses (10 mins each), followed by discussion with delegates.
Professor Sasha Roseneil is Professor of Sociology and Executive Dean of the Faculty of Social Sciences at the University of Essex, and a group analyst. She has written extensively on transformations in gender, sexuality and personal relationships, and on social movements, citizenship and feminist and queer politics. She has just started a new Wellcome Trust funded project, ‘The Practice, Politics and Provision of the Talking Therapies since the 1960s’, and will be publishing a new book, The Tenacity of the Couple Norm in 2018 (with Isabel Crowhurst, Tone Hellesund, Ana Cristina Santos and Mariya Stoilova).
Professor Caroline Bainbridge
SESSION 1: Theories of Sexuality 113 Years after Freud’s ‘Three Essays’
Session one considers the continued importance and influence of Freud’s ‘Three Essays’ for contemporary considerations of sexuality, as well as more recent contributions by writers working in clinical contexts and academia. The session begins with four brief, informal responses (10 mins each) to Freud’s ‘Three Essays’, followed by discussion with delegates.
Professor Caroline Bainbridge is Professor of Psychoanalysis and Culture in the Department of Media, Culture and Language at the University of Roehampton. She is Director of the Media and the Inner World research network which she organises with Professor Candida Yates. She has a number of editorial responsibilities, working as the Film Section Editor for the International Journal of Psychoanalysis, and Series Editor (with Candida Yates) of the ‘Psychoanalysis and Popular Culture’ book list published by Karnac Books. She is the author of A Feminine Cinematics: Luce Irigaray, Women and Film (2008) and The Cinema of Lars von Trier: Authenticity and Artifice (2007); and the co-editor of Media and the Inner World: Psycho-cultural Approaches to Emotion, Media and Popular Culture (2014); Television and the Inner World: Psycho-cultural Perspectives (2013); and Culture and the Unconscious (2007).
Mr David RICHARDS
SESSION 2: What Might Clinical Psychoanalysis Learn from Queer Theories of Sexuality?
Session two begins by talking about the Introduction (by Noreen) and Afterword (by Eve) to Clinical Encounters in Sexuality, before broadening out the discussion to consider the ways in which queer theories of sexuality might enrich and enliven clinical psychoanalytic considerations of sexuality. The session begins with four brief, informal responses (10 mins each), followed by discussion with delegates.
Mr David Richards is a psychodynamic psychotherapist in private practice, working with individuals and couples and as a supervisor. He has worked in the NHS and voluntary sector, initially within the HIV field in the 1990s and then for many years managing a community counselling service for older adults. He is also a Senior Tutor on the MSc in Psychodynamic Counselling and Psychotherapy at Birkbeck, University of London. He has a long-standing interest in questions of sexuality and identity, and is a member of the Advisory Group on Sexual and Gender Diversity within the British Psychoanalytic Council, where he also currently serves on the Executive with a portfolio of diversity.
