Freud Museum London: Psychoanalysis Podcasts

Psychoanalytic Poetry Festival 2015: Memory and Memorialisation

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

Psychoanalytic Poetry Festival 2015: Memory and Memorialisation

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.

Psychoanalytic Poetry Festival 2015: Memory and Memorialisation

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

Psychoanalytic Poetry Festival 2015: Memory and Memorialisation

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.

Virginia Woolf and the Perils of Hindsight

Susan Sellers 

One of the 20th century's greatest writers and with her husband, Leonard, Freud’s publisher in Britain, Virginia Woolf also struggled with mental illness and the doctors who ‘treated’ her. Prof Susan Sellers discusses aspects of Woolf’s life and work.

Susan Sellers, author, translator, editor and novelist, is Professor of English and Related Literature at the University of St Andrews and co-General Editor of the Cambridge University Press edition of the writings of Virginia Woolf. Sellers’ first novel Vanessa and Virginia is in part a fictional biography of Virginia Woolf.

Part of a season of performances, talks, films and events accompanying the exhibition 'Mad, Bad and Sad: Women and the Mind Doctors', 10 October 2013 - 2 February 2014.

PROJECTIONS: Cinema Hysteria 1

Three week evening course with Mary Wild

Session 1: SEDUCTION - erotica/romance
Basic Instinct, Bitter Moon, Lola Montes, The Seven Year Itch, Belle De Jour, Talk To Her

"What does it mean to be a woman?" "What does a woman want?" An exploration of female desire provides dynamically elusive answers to these eternal questions. Originating in ancient Greek notions of the 'wandering womb', hysteria was Sigmund Freud’s 'splendid child’, defined in his landmark Dora case study. The hysteric’s body is a theatre where irrepressible ghosts of past trauma are disguised in blindness, deafness, seizures and convulsions – she unconsciously shape-shifts into a medium of warped communication, her symptoms do all the talking for her. At the core of hysteria is a twisted fascination with beauty, so closely bound up with femininity that it runs the risk of replacing it. Through her identification with the male gaze, the hysteric becomes a tragic seductress, desiring the desire of the other. Exaggerated womanliness is the theme of this 'masquerade': the ultimate woman might be an imaginary one, a metaphysical alien-goddess, dreamed up by the male animal. "The woman does not exist," so said Lacan, and pandemonium ensued. But becoming a woman implies extraordinary transformation, at the very least. 

Hysteria has not disappeared from modern Western world; instead our culture manifests a hidden hysteria but does not recognise it. PROJECTIONS: CINEMA HYSTERIA is a three-part course by MARY WILD examining the central role of hysteria within different film genres (e.g., erotica/romance, horror/melodrama, fantasy/sci-fi). The mystery of femininity will be investigated psychoanalytically via the unconscious connection between the body and language. So rather than the wandering womb, it is in fact the exiled signifier that roams, creeping, searching for a mode of expression among possessed images on the cinema screen.

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. MARY WILD, a Freudian cinephile from Montreal, is the creator of PROJECTIONS.

Freud in Bloomsbury

The affinity between Freud and Bloomsbury was obvious from 1910 and became productive when core members of the Bloomsbury group becoming psychoanalysts in the 1920s and the Hogarth Press became the official psychoanalytic publishing house. The lecture will explore the reasons for this affinity and also ask if the history of psychoanalysis in Britain has been radically different from other countries because of its original alliance with an entrenched anti-establishment elite from the English rentier class, both extremely well-connected and bohemian.

John Forrester is Professor of History and Philosophy of the Sciences in the University of Cambridge, author of 'Language and the Origins of Psychoanalysis' (1980), 'The Seductions of Psychoanalysis' (1990), (with Lisa Appignanesi) 'Freud’s Women' (1992), 'Dispatches from the Freud Wars' (1997) and 'Truth Games' (1997). He is completing (with Laura Cameron) 'Freud in Cambridge', a study of the reception of psychoanalysis in the 1920s. He is interested in reasoning in cases in science, medicine and law. He is Editor of Psychoanalysis and History.

Part of a season of talks and events accompanying the forthcoming exhibition 'Mad, Bad and Sad: Women and the Mind Doctors', 10 October 2013 - 2 February 2014.