Freud Museum London: Psychoanalysis Podcasts

Daddy Issues - Katherine Angel in conversation with Josh Cohen

In the wake of #MeToo, we have begun to talk more openly about the widespread harm inflicted by men on women. But little has been said about the fact that many of these men are also fathers.

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).

Sharon Kivland: The Missed Encounter

...a disappointment, an ear, and a snail.

Anouchka Grose: Narcissism, Censorship and the Unconscious

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.

Everyday Madness: Lisa Appignanesi in conversation with Adam Phillips

Lisa Appignanesi discusses her new book, Everyday Madness: on Grief, Anger, Loss and Love (September 2018) with Adam Phillips.

‘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.

 

Everyday Madness: on Grief, Anger, Loss and Love is available
from the Freud Museum Shop.

‘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.

Class and Psychoanalysis

Joanna Ryan in discussion with Barry Watt

What does psychoanalysis have to say about the emotional landscapes of class, the hidden injuries and disavowed privileges? How does class figure in clinical work and what part does it play in psychotherapeutic trainings?

In these times of increasing inequality, Joanna Ryan will discuss aspects of her timely new book Class and Psychoanalysis: Landscapes of Inequality, exploring what can be learned about the psychic formations of class, and the class formations of psychoanalysis. Addressing some of the many challenges facing a psychoanalysis that aims to include class in its remit, she holds the tension between the radical and progressive potential of psychoanalysis, in its unique understandings of the unconscious, with its status as a mainly expensive and exclusive practice.

The aim of this evening’s discussion, part of the 20th anniversary celebrations of the Site for Contemporary Psychoanalysis, is to open up debate about this important but neglected subject.

“Class and Psychoanalysis is a text of great importance. Joanna Ryan writes in a clear and objective way about the neglect of social class in psychoanalysis, yet behind this objectivity is a passionate involvement that will strike a chord with all concerned psychoanalysts and psychotherapists. The book presents the best available overview of the history, theory and practice of psychoanalysis in relation to social class, combining this with interview material from the author’s own studies of psychotherapists to give a detailed and compelling picture of how class enters the consulting room. Engaging with this profound yet accessible book is essential for all who care about class injuries and how we might find ways to respond to them.” - Stephen Frosh, Professor of Psychosocial Studies, Birkbeck, University of London

Joanna Ryan, Ph.D., is a psychoanalytic psychotherapist; she has worked widely in clinical practice, teaching and supervision; in academic research; and in the politics of psychotherapy. She is co-author (with N. O'Connor) of Wild Desires and Mistaken Identities: Lesbianism and Psychoanalysis; co-editor (with S. Cartledge) of Sex and Love: New Thoughts on Old Contradictions; author of The Politics of Mental Handicap and many other publications.

Barry Watt is a psychoanalytic psychotherapist, a senior psychotherapist at the Psychosis Therapy Project, a member of The Site for Contemporary Psychoanalysis and a social housing activist and campaigner.

In Writing: Adam Phillips in conversation with Josh Cohen

In his latest publication In Writing acclaimed psychoanalyst and writer, Adam Phillips celebrates the art of close reading and asks what it is to defend literature in a world that is increasingly devaluing language in this enjoyable collection of essays on literature.

Through an exhilarating series of encounters with – and vivid readings of – writers he has loved, from Byron and Barthes to Shakespeare and Sebald, Phillips infuses the love of writing with deep insights drawn from his work as a practicing psychoanalyst to demonstrate, in his own unique style, how literature and psychoanalysis can speak to and of each other.

For Adam Phillips - as for Freud and many of his followers - poetry and poets have always held an essential place, as both precursors and unofficial collaborators in the psychoanalytic project. But the same has never held true in reverse. What, Phillips wonders, at the start of this deeply engaging book, has psychoanalysis meant for writers? And what can writing do for psychoanalysis?

He discusses how literature and psychoanalysis can speak to and of each other with psychoanalyst and writer, Josh Cohen.

'Reading Phillips, you may be amused, vexed, dazzled. But the one thing you will never be is bored.'
Observer

'It is a pleasure simply to hear him think.'
Sunday Telegraph

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.

Josh Cohen is a psychoanalyst in private practice and Professor of Literary Theory at Goldsmiths University of London. He is the author of four books and numerous articles on psychoanalysis, modern literature and cultural theory, including How to Read Freud and, most recently, The Private Life: Why We Remain in the Dark. He is currently completing a book on inertia on psychic and cultural life, provisionally titled Not Working.

Lacan on Love: An Interview with Bruce Fink

Lacanian psychoanalyst Bruce Fink discusses his latest work, Lacan on Love.

Quintessentially fascinating, love intrigues and perplexes us, and drives much of what we do in life. As wary as we may be of its illusions and disappointments, many of us fall blindly into its traps and become ensnared time and again. Deliriously mad excitement turns to disenchantment, if not deadening repetition, and we wonder how we shall ever break out of this vicious cycle.

Can psychoanalysis – with ample assistance from philosophers, poets, novelists, and songwriters – give us a new perspective on the wellsprings and course of love? Can it help us fathom how and why we are often looking for love in all the wrong places, and are fundamentally confused about “what love really is”?

In this lively and wide-ranging exploration of love throughout the ages, Fink argues that it can. Taking within his compass a vast array of traditions – from Antiquity to the courtly love poets, Christian love, and Romanticism – and providing an in-depth examination of Freud and Lacan on love and libido, Fink unpacks Lacan’s paradoxical claim that “love is giving what you don’t have.” He shows how the emptiness or lack we feel within ourselves gets covered over or entwined in love, and how it is possible and indeed vital to give something to another that we feel we ourselves don’t have.

This first-ever commentary on Lacan’s Seminar VIII, Transference, provides readers with a clear and systematic introduction to Lacan’s views on love. It will be of great value to students and scholars of psychology and of the humanities generally, and to analysts of all persuasions.

Lacan on Love: An Exploration of Lacan's Seminar VIII, Transference is published by Polity. Available from the Freud Museum Shop.

Avoiding the Object (On Purpose): Cornelia Parker and Darian Leader

Discussion Only.

Artist Cornelia Parker will be in conversation with Psychoanalyst and Author, Darian Leader, discussing her art and its relation to the unconscious. They will talk about transitional objects, avoiding the object on purpose, memory, and violence as a metaphor.

Nominated for the Turner Prize in 1997, Cornelia Parker became well known for her installations and interventions, including Cold Dark Matter: An Exploded View 1991 (Tate Modern) where she suspended the fragments of a garden shed, blown up for her by the British Army, and The Maybe, a collaboration with actress Tilda Swinton, at the Serpentine Gallery in 1995. She is currently working on the annual roof commission for the Metropolitan Museum, New York.

She has works in the Tate Collection, MoMA and Met Museum NY and in numerous public and private collections in Europe and the USA. She was elected to the Royal Academy in 2009 and awarded an OBE 2010. She is represented by Frith Street Gallery, London.

Darian Leader is a writer, psychoanalyst, trustee of the Freud Museum and founding member of the Centre for Freudian Analysis and Research. He has written numerous books, including Strictly Bipolar (2013), What is Madness? (2011), The New Black (2008) and Freud's Footnotes (2000).

Unforbidden Pleasures

Adam Phillips in conversation with Deborah Levy

     

Unforbidden Pleasures is the dazzling new book from Adam Phillips, author of Missing Out and Going Sane.

Adam Phillips takes Oscar Wilde as a springboard for a deep dive into the meanings and importance of the Unforbidden, from the fall of our 'first parents' Adam and Eve to the work of the great twentieth-century psychoanalytic thinkers.

Unforbidden pleasures, he argues, are always the ones we tend not to think about, yet when you look into it, it is probable that we get as much pleasure, if not more, from them. And we may have underestimated just how restricted our restrictiveness, in thrall to the forbidden and its rules, may make us.

Adam Phillips is a psychoanalyst and the author of several previous books, all widely acclaimed, including On Kissing, Tickling and Being Bored, Going Sane and Side Effects. His most recent books are On Kindness, co-written with the historian Barbara Taylor, Missing Out: In Praise of the Unlived Life, On Balance and One Way and Another.

‘Every mind-blowing book from Adam Phillips suspends all the certainties we are most attached to and somehow makes this feel exhilarating’ - Deborah Levy

‘Phillips radiates infectious charm. The brew of gaiety, compassion, exuberance and idealism is heady and disarming’ - Sunday Times

‘Phillips is one of the finest prose stylists at work in the language, an Emerson for our time’ - John Banville

Unforbidden Pleasures is published by Hamish Hamilton (5 November 2015)

Deborah Levy writes fiction, plays, and poetry. Her work has been staged by the Royal Shakespeare Company, and she is the author of highly praised books including The Unloved, Swallowing Geography, and Beautiful Mutants. Her novel Swimming Home was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize. In 2012 Levy adapted two of Freud's case histories, Dora and The Wolfman for BBC Radio 4. Things I Don’t Want to Know is the title of Levy’s sparkling response to George Orwell’s essay ‘Why I Write’, an autobiographical essay on writing, gender politics and philosophy. Her new novel, Hot Milk, will be published in 2016 by Hamish Hamilton.

Conference: The Unconscious Today 2

Session 2: The Unconscious and the Psychopathology of Everyday Life

David Tuckett - Conviction Narrative Theory: Bringing Modern Psychoanalysis into the Heart of Economics and Decision Science

David Tuckett will take us on a fascinating journey through modern psychopathology of everyday life, demonstrating the paramount importance of the unconscious processes in problem-solving and decision-making, with a particular emphasis on the psychology of financial behaviour. Arguing that the human mind was designed to make decisions under uncertainty, he will explore the compelling stories consumers and investors constantly make up, to contain a range of emotional experiences and he will explain how these narratives of 'conviction' affect the wider economy.

David Tuckett is a psychoanalyst, Professor and Director of the Centre for the Study of Decision-Making Uncertainty at UCL in the Faculty of Brain Sciences, as well as a Fellow of the British Psychoanalytical Society. He trained in Economics, Medical Sociology and Psychoanalysis and currently divides his time between clinical practice and research – since winning a 2006 Leverhulme Research fellowship for a "psychoanalytic study of investment markets" he has been collaborating with a range of colleagues in economics, finance, psychology, social anthropology, computer science and neuroscience to introduce psychoanalytical understanding to behaviour in the financial markets and the economy more generally. His book Minding the Markets: An Emotional Finance View of Financial Instability was published in New York and London by Palgrave Macmillan in June 2011 and a further monograph written with Professor Richard Taffler (University of Warwick School of Management) entitled “Fund Management: An Emotional Finance Perspective” was published by the Research Foundation of CFA Institute. Prior to this he received the 2007 Sigourney Award for distinguished contributions to the field of psychoanalysis. He has published books and articles in sociology, psychoanalysis, economics, and finance and is a former President of the European Psychoanalytic Federation, Editor in Chief of the International Journal of Psychoanalysis and Principal of the Health Education Studies Unit at the University of Cambridge.

The Unconscious from Freud to Lacan

While the contents of the unconscious might be obscure and perplexing, when Freud spoke about 'the unconscious' he meant something very precise. This talk will look at Freud's 'discovery' of the unconscious, and at his conceptualisation of it. It will also deal with the peculiar logic of symptom formation. From there, it will go on to look at Lacan's notion of the language-like unconscious, showing how this was developed in accordance with Freud's ideas.

Anouchka Grose is a psychoanalyst and writer practising in London. She is a member of the Centre for Freudian Analysis and Research, where she regularly lectures. She is the author of No More Silly Love Songs: a realist’s guide to romance (Portobello, 2010) and Are you Considering Therapy (Karnac, 2011), and is the editor of 'Hysteria Today', a collection of essays to be published by Karnac later this year. She also writes for The Guardian and teaches at Camberwell School of Art.

Part of an exciting season of talks, events and conferences accompanying the exhibition ‘Festival of the Unconscious’, 24 June- 4 October 2015.

Freud Out Loud

Civilization and its Discontents: A Marathon Reading

The Centre for Creative and Critical Thought at the University of Sussex together with the Freud Museum London are pleased to announce a marathon reading of Sigmund Freud’s classic text, Civilization and its Discontents, at the Freud Museum on Sunday 14 June.

Civilization and Its Discontents, written in 1929, remains the definitive text on human destructiveness. As news of wars around the globe, appalling brutality, religious conflict and sexual violence continue unabated, the relevance of this work is undeniable. ‘Men are not gentle creatures’ Freud wrote, ‘but ...creatures whose instinct [is] aggressiveness.’

The event is free with an admission ticket to the Freud Museum. There are no tickets and audience members can come and go as they please. This is a staged reading and interactive performance.

The reading will last in all approximately four and a half hours. At the end, after the Museum closes, audience members are invited to stay for discussion and light refreshments.

This staged reading revisits a classic text in a modern context, a face-to-face encounter for those hungry to engage with serious and pertinent ideas. A successful similar event took place in New York in January, and this is the first European marathon reading. Readers will include well known psychoanalysts, academics, writers, artists and performers. A list of confirmed names will be added shortly.

“To read Civilization and its Discontents in 2015 is to bear witness to the deadly violence whose daily presence is all-too-familiar to us and imagine the conditions that might provide a loving counterweight to that violence.” 
Simon Critchley, Philosopher.

Readers include:

Sara Jane Bailes, University of Sussex

Caroline Bainbridge, Roehampton University

Julia Borossa, Middlesex University

Peter Boxall, University of Sussex

Josh Cohen, Goldsmiths, University of London, psychoanalyst

Gerald Davidson, actor, researcher

Simon Glendinning, LSE, Philosopher

Anouchka Grose, psychoanalyst and author

Rachel Holmes, historian and author

Deborah Levy, novelist

Michael Molnar, researcher and former Director, Freud Museum London

David Morgan, consultant psychotherapist, psychoanalyst Bpas Bpa

Ankhi Mukherjee, University of Oxford

Cathy Naden, performer/writer

Dany Nobus, Brunel University London

Ruth Padel, poet

Jocelyn Pook, composer and musician

Eric Prenowitz, University of Leeds

Alan Read, King's College London

Caroline Rooney, University of Kent

Nicholas Royle, University of Sussex

Kalu Singh, author

Marquard Smith, Kingston University

David Williams, RHUL, writer, dramaturg

Timberlake Wertenbaker, playwright

Sarah Wood, University of Kent

Do we need a Critical Psychotherapy? Exploring Talking Therapies in Neoliberal Society 4

Session 4: USERS' AND EDUCATORS' PERSPECTIVES

Tom Cotton and Del Lowenthal - Personal versus medical meanings in breakdown, treatment and recovery from ‘schizophrenia’

Jay Watts - Systemic means to subversive ends: maintaining the therapeutic space as a unique encounter

Respondent: Rai Waddingham

Do we need a Critical Psychotherapy? Exploring Talking Therapies in Neoliberal Society 3

Session 3: EXTERNAL CRITIQUES

Adrian Cocking - When Love Is Not All We Want: Queers, Singles and the Therapeutic Cult of Relationality

Anastasios Gaitanidis - Critical theory and psychotherapy

Respondent: Julie Walsh

Do we need a Critical Psychotherapy? Exploring Talking Therapies in Neoliberal Society 2

Session 2: WHAT CAN WE LEARN FROM CRITICAL PSYCHOLOGY AND CRITICAL PSYCHIATRY?

Ian Parker - Toward critical psychotherapy and counselling: what can we learn from critical psychology (and political economy)?

Hugh Middleton - The Medical Model: What is it, where did it come from and how long has it got?

Respondent: David Morgan

Sex Versus Survival: The Life and Ideas of Sabina Spielrein

Author's Talk: John Launer with Dr Graham Music

Who was Sabina Spielrein? Her dramatic life story is most famous for her notorious affair with Carl Jung, dramatised in the film A Dangerous Method starring Keira Knightley. Yet she was a woman who overcame family and psychiatric abuse to become an original thinker in the field of sexual psychotherapy.

Drawing on thorough and novel research into Spielrein’s diaries, professional papers and correspondence, Sex Versus Survival is the first biography to put her life and ideas at the centre of the story. John Launer examines Spielrein’s tumultuous affair with Jung and its influence on both of their lives and intellectual journeys, and her key role in the rift between Carl Jung and Sigmund Freud, and in the development of psychoanalysis.

A Russian Jew, who lost her life in the Holocaust in 1942, Spielrein’s innovative theories have chiefly been suppressed because of her gender. Sex Versus Survival is a significant stage in the rediscovery of the life and ideas of an extraordinary woman and an acknowledgment of her prominent role in the history of sexual psychology.

John Launer was on the senior staff of the Tavistock Clinic in London, the leading training institute in the UK for psychological treatment, and is now an Associate Dean for postgraduate medical education at the University of London. He is a doctor and family therapist, and a renowned medical columnist both nationally and internationally.

The talk will be chaired by Dr Graham Music, Consultant Psychotherapist at the Tavistock and Portman Clinics, author of The Good Life and Nurturing Natures.

Part of a season of talks and events accompanying the exhibition 'Freud and Eros: Love, Lust and Longing', 22 October 2014 - 22 February 2015.

Lacan: The Unconscious Reinvented

Colette Soler, joined by Darian Leader

Lacan’s work is often caricatured as arcane, convoluted, ‘theoretical’ and, above all, difficult. But Lacan himself engaged continually with the ideas of his contemporaries and grounded his work in analytic practice. If you have been put off reading Lacan in the past, here is a chance to see what the fuss is about, in a way that relates directly to clinical work and wider issues of the world we live in.

Colette Soler - Psychoanalyst, Founder Member of the Ecole de Psychanalyse des Forums du Champ Lacanien. Her books include What Lacan said about Women (Other Press, 2006) and Lacanian Affects (Routledge, 2014).

Darian Leader - British psychoanalyst and author. He is a founding member of the Centre for Freudian Analysis and Research (CFAR), President of the College of Psychoanalysts, a Trustee of the Freud Museum, and Honorary Visiting Professor in Psychoanalysis at Roehampton University.

This recording may not be further used or cited without the express permission of the speakers.

What about Me? The struggle for identity in a market-based society

Paul Verhaeghe in conversation with Lisa Appignanesi

In What about Me? Paul Verhaeghe’s main concern is how social change has led to a psychic crisis and altered the way we think about ourselves. He investigates the effects of 30 years of neoliberalism, free-market forces, privatisation, and the relationship between our engineered society and individual identity. It turns out that who we are is, as always, determined by the context in which we live. Tonight he discusses these concerns with Lisa Appignanesi, former Chair of the Freud Museum and author most recently of Trials of Passion: Crimes in the Name of Love and Madness.

Paul Verhaeghe PhD, is senior professor at Ghent University and holds the chair of the department for psychoanalysis and counselling psychology. He has published eight books, with five translated into English. Love in a Time of Loneliness became an international bestseller and What about Me? has been reprinted ten times within its first year of publication.

Becoming Freud: The Making of a Psychoanalyst

Adam Phillips in conversation with Lisa Appignanesi

 

Adam Phillips, one of the world’s foremost authorities on Freud discusses his strikingly original new biography of the father of psychoanalysis, Becoming Freud: The Making of a Psychoanalyst (Yale University Press 2014), with Lisa Appignanesi, former Chair of the Freud Museum London and author most recently of Trials of Passion: Crimes in the Name of Love and Madness.

The Construction of Memory 1: Alasdair Hopwood and Fiona Gabbert

Alasdair Hopwood: Introductory Remarks

Fiona Gabbert: The Psychology of False Memory

Is it possible to develop a 'memory' for something that was not experienced? Plenty of evidence now exists to suggest that it is possible ...but how does this happen, and can we distinguish false memories from our 'real' memories? This seminar provides an overview of how psychologists investigate the phenomenon of false memories, and what the findings can tell us about how our memories work. The implications of this body of research will also be discussed with reference to real life examples.

These recordings may not be further used or cited without the express permission of the speakers.

Charms and Other Anxious Objects

Paul Coldwell (University of the Arts London) discusses his work exploring the relations between art, the archive, the uncanny and the museum. With Carol Seigel, Director of the Freud Museum.

Artist Paul Coldwell’s work is centred on our relationship to objects and how meanings can be projected onto them. This exhibition is the result of visual research in the archives of the Bethlem Royal Hospital and the Freud Museum, and engages with notions of anxiety, self-perception, worth and identity.

Part of the Anxiety Arts Festival 2014.

Trials of Passion: Crimes in the Name of Love and Madness

Lisa Appignanesi in Conversation with Dany Nobus

In her latest book - Trials of Passion: Crimes in the Name of Love and Madness (Virago/Little Brown) - Lisa Appignanesi takes us into the theatre of the courtroom to witness the fascinating interplay between the law, which presupposes a person in the dock fully in charge of acts and understanding, the accused who may be derailed by passion or trapped in a delusional system, and judge, jury and the psychiatrists whose expertise as witnesses was founded on a knowledge of extreme emotion.  She discusses crimes of passion and the rise of the forensic psychiatrist with Dany Nobus, psychoanalyst and Pro Vice-Chancellor of Brunel University.

Freud’s cancer and its influence on his theories

Martin Schmidt chaired by Jonathan Burke

The terrible loss of his friends, daughter and beloved grandson together with the relentless onslaught of his own cancer had a huge impact not only on Freud’s mood but also his writing. This change in direction reflected a darker, sombre tone in his prose. He started to use the language of death and destructiveness rather than pleasure seeking to explain the aetiology of anxiety, aggression and guilt.

From the detection of his illness until his death, he remained prolific, publishing over forty significant papers and major works including The Ego and the Id (1923b), Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety (1926d), The Future of an Illusion (1927c), Civilization and its Discontents (1930a) and Moses and Monotheism (1939). This talk, based on Martin’s chapter in The Topic of Cancer (2013, Ed. Jonathan Burke. Karnac, London), explores Freud’s final years and the dynamics at work in his writing.

Martin Schmidt MBPsS, is a Jungian analyst (Training Analyst of the Society of Analytical Psychology, London) psychologist and lecturer on the post-graduate arts therapies programmes at the Universities of Roehampton and Hertfordshire. He is in private practice in London and teaches widely both in the UK and abroad. His paper Psychic Skin: psychotic defences, borderline process and delusions (Feb 2012, Vol 57, no 1) won the Fordham prize for best clinical paper in the Journal of Analytical Psychology in 2012 and was nominated for the Gradiva award by the National Association for the Advancement of Psychoanalysis, New York in 2013. His most recent publication is a chapter entitled Freud’s Cancer in The Topic of Cancer (Ed. J Burke, Karnac:2013). For over seven years, he has been a visiting supervisor/lecturer on the International Association of Analytical Psychology (IAAP) Russian Revival programme for the first trainee Jungian analysts in Moscow and St Petersburg. He is currently the IAAP liaison person for Serbia and provides support, teaching and supervision for Jungian analysts and trainees in Serbia, Ukraine and Kazakhstan.

Out of Time: The Pleasures and Perils of Ageing

Lynne Segal and Susie Orbach in conversation

Feminist writer and activist, Lynne Segal, discusses her recently published Out of Time: The Pleasures and Perils of Ageing with psychotherapist, psychoanalyst, social critic and writer Susie Orbach - author of many celebrated books, amongst them Bodies and On Eating, and recently co-edited Fifty Shades of Feminism, with Lisa Appignanesi and Rachel Holmes.

In her autobiography Making Trouble (2007), Segal described herself as ‘a reluctantly ageing woman’, and mused about the need for ‘a feminist sexual politics of ageing’. Out of Time is her answer to these issues.

Fears of ageing, Segal argues, are fed to us from childhood in stories and fairy tales full of monstrous, quintessentially female, figures. She confronts the simplistic attributions of generational blame frequently named as causes of the economic crisis, the growing erotic invisibility for ageing women as well as the expectations of gender and ageing that inevitably constrain ambition and political engagement. 

Out of Time also examines the representation of ageing in the work of other writers (many of them feminists) including Simone de Beauvoir, Alice Walker, Adrienne Rich, Philip Roth, Diane Athill, Joyce Carol Oates, John Berger, Grace Paley, Jo Brand, Jacques Derrida and John Updike.

Out of Time: The Pleasures and Perils of Ageing (Novemeber 2013) Verso 

Mad, Bad and Sad

Jacqueline Rose and Sally Alexander in conversation

 

To conclude the 'Mad, Bad and Sad: Women and the Mind Doctors' season, Prof Jacqueline Rose and Prof Sally Alexander explore the complex history of hysteria and psychoanalysis in its relationship to women.

The Private Life: Why we Remain in the Dark

Author's Talk: Josh Cohen

The war over private life spreads inexorably. Some seek to expose, invade and steal it, others to protect, conceal and withhold it. Either way, the assumption is that privacy is a possession to be won or lost. But what if what we call private life is the one element in us that we can't possess? Could it be that we're so intent on taking hold of the privacy of others, or keeping hold of our own only because we're powerless to do either? In this ground-breaking book, Josh Cohen uses his experience as a psychoanalyst, literature professor and human being to explore the conception of private life as the presence in us of someone else, an uncanny stranger both unrecognisable and eerily familiar, who can be neither owned nor controlled.

Drawing on a dizzying array of characters and concerns, from John Milton and Henry James to Katie Price and Snoopy, from philosophy and the Bible to pornography and late-night TV, The Private Life weaves a richly personal tapestry of ideas and experience. In a culture that floods our lives with light, it asks, how is it that we remain so helplessly in the dark?

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

The Psychodynamics of Social Networking

Aaron Balick in conversation with Susie Orbach

A collaboration between The Relational School and The Freud Museum London, exploring the impact that social networking has had on our society and how it is profoundly influencing our lives.

Over the past decade the very nature of the way we relate to each other has been utterly transformed by online social networking and the mobile technologies that enable unfettered access to it. Our very selves have been extended into the digital world in ways previously unimagined, offering us instantaneous relating to others over a variety of platforms like Facebook and Twitter. In ‘The Psychodynamics of Social Networking’, Aaron Balick draws on his experience as a psychotherapist and cultural theorist to interrogate the unconscious motivations behind our online social networking use: powerfully arguing that social media is not just a technology, but is essentially human and deeply meaningful.

'The Psychodynamics of Social Networking' is the first book to be published in the new series "Psychoanalysis and Popular Culture" produced by the Media and the Inner World research network [MiW] and Karnac Books.

Dr Aaron Balick is a UKCP registered psychotherapist, supervisor and a media and social networking consultant working in London. Aaron is also an honorary lecturer at the Centre for Psychoanalytic Studies at the University of Essex where he participates in the post-graduate MA and PhD programmes in psychoanalytic studies. He writes for both academic and lay audiences having published several academic articles and book chapters while at the same time contributing a psychological angle on national press and radio. Aaron is a media spokesperson for the UKCP and a regular contributor as the "resident psychotherapist" on BBC Radio One's phone-in show, The Surgery with Aled and Dr. Radha.

Susie Orbach is a psychoanalyst, writer and social critic. She co-founded The Women's Therapy Centre in 1976, has consulted to NHS, The World Bank and other organisations. She is convenor of www.endangeredbodies.org. She is Chair of the Relational School and the author of eleven books. She was Visiting Professor at LSE and a Guardian columnist for ten years. She is a member of the Government's expert panel on body image.

The Relational School is dedicated to understanding the therapeutic relationship and the uses of the inter-subjective space that is co-created within the therapeutic dyad. Our activities aim to create forums for further conversations around relationality coming from a variety of therapeutic disciplines as well as a formal association to disseminate the work.

Doing Psychoanalysis in Tehran

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.

Shakespeare and Psychoanalysis

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.

Football as Therapy

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.

’Missing Out’ Author’s Talk: Adam Phillips with Lisa Appignanesi

'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.

Fashion and Psychoanalysis: Styling the Self

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

In Treatment: Fact and Fiction

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.

All About Love - what can psychoanalysis tell us?

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.

The Lost Objects of Childhood Author’s talk: Deborah Levy

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 and Dora 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.

After-affect/After-image: Part 2 - From Aesthetics to Psychoanalysis: Case Studies

Trauma and Aesthetic Transformation

Convened by Griselda Pollock,

Centre for Cultural Analysis, Theory and History University of Leeds. AHRC Research Fellowship Symposium at the Anna Freud Centre 20 Maresfield Gardens, London NW3 on the 18th February 2012 Two weeks before the opening of the exhibition Louise Bourgeois: The Return of the Repressed, the Freud Museum presented an afternoon symposium for anyone interested in a transdisciplinary encounter across art, psychoanalysis and feminism. Griselda Pollock’s research has engaged with a series of artistic, cinematic and literary case studies dealing with bereavement, seduction, Holocaust survival, exile, migration and second generation transmitted trauma, in order to explore the proposition that art can be ‘a transport station of trauma’ (Bracha Ettinger). Examining the work of several different artists including Louise Bourgeois, Chantel Akerman and Vera Frenkel, the symposium will use psychoanalytical approaches to trauma in order investigate specific art practices as sites of transformation, blockage, encryption and dangerous failure. The symposiums aim was to open up a dialogue with clinical practitioners, cultural theorists and artists working in this area in order to ask: Do artists travel away from or towards an encounter with the traces of trauma? Can aesthetic practices teach us anything significant about the possibility of transformation of trauma or the dangers of such a re-encounter? Can art produce what Geoffrey Hartman calls ‘traumatic knowledge’?

After-affect/After-image: Part 1 - From Psychoanalysis to Aesthetics

Trauma and Aesthetic Transformation

Convened by Griselda Pollock,

Centre for Cultural Analysis, Theory and History University of Leeds. AHRC Research Fellowship Symposium at the Anna Freud Centre 20 Maresfield Gardens, London NW3 on the 18th February 2012 Two weeks before the opening of the exhibition Louise Bourgeois: The Return of the Repressed, the Freud Museum presented an afternoon symposium for anyone interested in a transdisciplinary encounter across art, psychoanalysis and feminism. Griselda Pollock’s research has engaged with a series of artistic, cinematic and literary case studies dealing with bereavement, seduction, Holocaust survival, exile, migration and second generation transmitted trauma, in order to explore the proposition that art can be ‘a transport station of trauma’ (Bracha Ettinger). Examining the work of several different artists including Louise Bourgeois, Chantel Akerman and Vera Frenkel, the symposium will use psychoanalytical approaches to trauma in order investigate specific art practices as sites of transformation, blockage, encryption and dangerous failure. The symposiums aim was to open up a dialogue with clinical practitioners, cultural theorists and artists working in this area in order to ask: Do artists travel away from or towards an encounter with the traces of trauma? Can aesthetic practices teach us anything significant about the possibility of transformation of trauma or the dangers of such a re-encounter? Can art produce what Geoffrey Hartman calls ‘traumatic knowledge’?

Talk: House/Museum by Dr Anthony Hudek

On 28 September 2011, as part of  the Freud Museum London 25th Anniversary programme, Dr Anthony Hudek gave a fascinating talk which was recorded for this podcast. When, and how, does a house become a museum – a ‘house museum’? How does this passage from one function to another affect the visitor’s experience? Taking Freud’s 1919 text ‘Das Unheimliche’ (‘The Uncanny’) as point of departure, this presentation seeks to identify what subsists, what survives when a house turns into a museum: the ghosts of its former occupants, the archive (once a personal collection of papers, books, memorabilia), and a sense (reassuring or unsettling) of domesticity. But Freud’s text does more than provide a useful guide to what lingers in the house museum, in particular his own. It plays out the paradox of the uncanny: that if the house museum, like the psychoanalytic text, depends on the veracity of its portrayal of the subjective matter it tries to exhibit/expose, it can only do so in the fractured guise of theatre and fiction, lest it fall prey to the very myths and phantasies its stated mission it is to dispel. Dr Antony Hudek, Mellon Research Fellow at University College London, will explore some of the thought provoking issues around how homes, such as the Freud family home at 20 Maresfield Gardens, become museums.

What Is an Object?

The poet Ruth Padel went to the conference "What Is an Object?" in February 2011 and was so enthralled she had to go home in the middle to write this poem about the Museum. It will be published in her next poetry collection The Mara Crossing (Chatto & Windus 2012), which is about migration from cells to souls: birds, whales, butterflies, people - and psychological displacement.

Freud’s Collection: Passion, Loss and Recovery

Freud's Collection: Passion, Loss and Recovery Talk by Dr Janine Burke On the 23rd June 2011, Dr Janine Burke, a writer who has written widely on Freud’s life and legacy told through his extraordinary art collection and his life-long obsession with acquiring antiquities returned to the Freud Museum to look again at Freud’s collections, and to reflect on the 25th anniversary celebrations. She discussed the Freuds’ flight from Vienna and the arrival of the family and the antiquities in Maresfield Gardens. She also discussed Anna Freud’s role as the inheritor of the collection and who became its worthy curator and guardian until her death. Janine Burke is the author of The Gods of Freud: Sigmund Freud's Art Collection (2006). She curated An Archaeology of the Mind: Sigmund Freud's Art Collection for Monash University and University of Sydney in 2007-2008. Dr Burke is a research fellow of Monash University.

Radio Schreber, Soliloques for Schziophonic voices

Radio Schreber, Soliloques for Schziophonic voices investigates the recurring theme of ‘hearing voices’ in sonic and literary works by paying homage to Daniel Paul Schreber’s Memoirs of My Nervous Illness. Written in 1903 during his second mental illness at Sonnenstein Public asylum, the Memoirs detail an alternate delusional world famously analysed by Freud in his Psycho-analytic Notes on An Autobiographical account of a case of paranoia (Dementia Paranoides) published in 1911.  This podcast contains the conversation between Ivan Ward, Lucia Farinati and Richard Crow that followed the event presented by Sound Threshold and held at the Freud Museum on 20/4/2011

Maggi Hambling: On the Artist’s Couch

Join Maggi Hambling, one of the country’s most distinguished artists and sculptors talking about her life and works, and whether these have been touched by psychoanalysis with Dawn Ades, art historian, writer and curator. This event was sold out, but you can listen to it here.

Hubris: The Road to Donald Trump, Power, Populism, Narcissism with David Owen

In Hubris: The Road to Donald Trump, Power, Populism, Narcissism David Owen analyses and describes the mental and physical condition of political leaders past and present with a particular view that what went before paved the way to President Trump.

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.

Words and Signifiers Still Matter - Yael Baldwin

Every day more modalities emerge on the mental health scene, all competing to help people suffer less and thrive more.

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.” 

The Hidden Persuader

Artist Emma Smith with guests specialising in child development, children’s rights, and psychoanalysis.

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.

The Book You Wish Your Parents Had Read

This book is about how we have relationships with our children, what gets in the way of a good connection and what can enhance it.

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.

David Lomas: A Language of Flowers: Surrealism, Psychoanalysis, and the Botanical Imaginary

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.

Krzysztof Fijalkowski: The Question of Play Analysis: Surrealism, Psychoanalysis and the Game of Symbolically Functioning Objects

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.

Martin Bladh: The Rorschach Text (reading)

Roundtable: The Private Life: Why we Remain in the Dark

Rachel Bowlby (UCL and Princeton), Howard Caygill (Kingston), Barbara Taylor (QMUL), Josh Cohen (Goldsmiths)

Speakers: Rachel Bowlby (UCL and Princeton), Howard Caygill (Kingston), Barbara Taylor (QMUL), Josh Cohen (Goldsmiths)

Part of Psychoanalysis and History Seminar organised by The Institute of Historical Research.