Episodes
Friday Nov 30, 2012
'Memoir' Jackie Kay and Gillian Slovo in Conversation with Robert Downes
Friday Nov 30, 2012
Friday Nov 30, 2012
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
Friday Nov 30, 2012
'Under Freud's Couch' Leif Elggren Performance, presentation and discussion
Friday Nov 30, 2012
Friday Nov 30, 2012
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.
Tuesday Nov 13, 2012
Keeping Schtum - a secret history of Jewish football
Tuesday Nov 13, 2012
Tuesday Nov 13, 2012
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.