Episodes
Friday Apr 04, 2014
Miroslaw Balka and James Putnam in conversation
Friday Apr 04, 2014
Friday Apr 04, 2014
Tuesday Feb 25, 2014
Making Sense of Dementia 2: Making a present of the past
Tuesday Feb 25, 2014
Tuesday Feb 25, 2014
Tuesday Feb 25, 2014
Tuesday Feb 25, 2014
Tuesday Feb 18, 2014
A Writers' Conversation: Lisa Appignanesi and Ruth Padel
Tuesday Feb 18, 2014
Tuesday Feb 18, 2014
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.
Monday Jan 27, 2014
The Madness of Medea: Meike Ziervogel and Lisa Dwan
Monday Jan 27, 2014
Monday Jan 27, 2014
Chaired by Dr Estela Welldon.
Are women who kill their children monsters? Actress Lisa Dwan has performed, to wide critical acclaim, French author Veronique Olmi’s play 'Beside the Sea', about a woman who kills her two children. Meike Ziervogel in her novel 'Magda' enters the head of the Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbel’s wife, who killed her six children.
Please note that Lisa Dwan's introductory reading has been cut from the podcast.
Joining Lisa and Meike will be Dr Amber Jacobs. Dr Jacobs lectures in the department of Psychosocial Studies at Birkbeck College, University of London. She is the author of On Matricide: Myth, Psychoanalysis and the Law of the Mother (Columbia University Press 2008) and has published other articles in the field of feminist theory, myth, psychoanalysis and visual culture.
The talk will be chaired by Dr Estela Welldon, psychoanalytical psychotherapist and author of Mother, Madonna, Whore: The Idealisation and Denigration of Motherhood (1988) and Playing with Dynamite: A Personal Approach to the Psychoanalytic Understanding of Perversions, Violence, and Criminality (2011).
In association with Peirene Press.
Part of a season of performances, talks, films and events accompanying the 'Mad, Bad and Sad: Women and the Mind Doctors' exhibition 10 October 2013 - 2 February 2014.
Tuesday Jan 14, 2014
PROJECTIONS: Cinema Hysteria 2
Tuesday Jan 14, 2014
Tuesday Jan 14, 2014
Three week evening course with Mary Wild
Session 2: DEMONS - hysteria in horror/melodrama
The Entity, Sunset Blvd., Black Narcissus, Possession, Teeth, The Piano Teacher
"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.
Monday Jan 13, 2014
Can Artists Teach the Mind Doctors? Can Artworks be a Case Study?
Monday Jan 13, 2014
Monday Jan 13, 2014
Professor Griselda Pollock
Griselda Pollock discusses some of the cases from her virtual feminist museum's exhibition on Trauma and Aesthetic Transformation in the aftermath of the publication of After-affects I After-Images: Trauma and Aesthetic Transformation in the Virtual Feminist Museum (Manchester University Press, 2013)
Professor Griselda Pollock is the Director, Centre for Cultural Analysis, Theory & History (CentreCATH), and Professor of Social & Critical Histories of Art, School of Fine Art, History of Art & Cultural Studies, University of Leeds.
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.
Wednesday Dec 11, 2013
Anna Kavan and the Politics of Madness
Wednesday Dec 11, 2013
Wednesday Dec 11, 2013
Victoria Walker
Author Anna Kavan’s critical and popular reception since her death in 1968 has been defined by a cult of personality fuelled by revelations about her psychiatric breakdown, heroin use and adoption of her own fictional character’s name. Victoria Walker unravels some of the accumulated mythology around this writer, and examines her complex association with, and interest in, early twentieth-century psychiatry and psychotherapy.
As well as being treated in private asylums and nursing homes, Kavan underwent a short analysis at the Tavistock Clinic, experienced Ludwig Binswanger’s method of existential psychotherapy at the Bellevue Sanatorium, and had a close personal relationship with her longtime psychiatrist Karl Bluth. Kavan promoted a radical politics of madness, giving voice to the disenfranchised and marginalized psychiatric patient and presaging the anti-psychiatry movement.
Dr Victoria Walker’s research focuses on twentieth-century women writers and fictional representations of psychiatric treatment. She wrote the introduction to the recent edition of Kavan’s 'I Am Lazarus'. She teaches at King’s College, London and administers the Anna Kavan Society.
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.
Wednesday Dec 11, 2013
Women in Prison, Women in Treatment
Wednesday Dec 11, 2013
Wednesday Dec 11, 2013
Dr Cleo Van Velsen in conversation with Dr Lisa Appignanesi
Dr Cleo Van Velsen is Consultant Psychiatrist in Forensic Psychotherapy in a Personality Disorder Medium Secure Unit in East London. She is also a psychoanalyst. Although this is a male unit she has experience in the assessment, management and treatment of women in forensic contexts - women who have suffered trauma and engaged in violence. She discusses her experiences of working with forensic patients with Lisa Appignanesi, whose soon to be published book 'Trials of Passion' explores the intersection of the law and psychiatry.
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.
Tuesday Dec 03, 2013
Susan Hiller in conversation with Susie Orbach
Tuesday Dec 03, 2013
Tuesday Dec 03, 2013
Tuesday Dec 03, 2013
The Many Minds of Marilyn Monroe
Tuesday Dec 03, 2013
Tuesday Dec 03, 2013
Sarah Churchwell
In 1956 while filming The Prince and the Showgirl with Laurence Olivier, Marilyn Monroe suffered a crisis that brought her to see Anna Freud. Marilyn had a long history of encounters with the psychoanalytic profession. Her trajectory illuminates some of the difficulties celebrity engenders. Writer and broadcaster Prof. Sarah Churchwell, author of ‘Careless People: Murder, Mayhem and the Invention of The Great Gatsby’ and ‘The Many Lives of Marilyn Monroe’, discusses Marilyn's life.
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.
Monday Nov 11, 2013
Freud in Bloomsbury
Monday Nov 11, 2013
Monday Nov 11, 2013
Monday Nov 04, 2013
Sites of the Unconscious
Monday Nov 04, 2013
Monday Nov 04, 2013
Monday Oct 28, 2013
Monday Oct 28, 2013
Closing Discussion: Internal and External Reality: The Ferenczi Project
Monday Oct 28, 2013
Sincerity and Freedom in Psychoanalysis 8: Psychoanalysis and Politics
Monday Oct 28, 2013
Monday Oct 28, 2013
Monday Oct 28, 2013
Sincerity and Freedom in Psychoanalysis 7: Ferenczi and Others
Monday Oct 28, 2013
Monday Oct 28, 2013
Panel 7: Ferenczi and Others
Monday Oct 28, 2013
Monday Oct 28, 2013
Panel 6: Therapeutic Ethics and Analytic Concepts
Monday Oct 28, 2013
Sincerity and Freedom in Psychoanalysis 5: Kino-Analytic Panel
Monday Oct 28, 2013
Monday Oct 28, 2013
Panel 5: Kino-Analytic Panel
Monday Oct 28, 2013
Sincerity and Freedom in Psychoanalysis 4: From Babies to Maturity
Monday Oct 28, 2013
Monday Oct 28, 2013
Panel 4: From Babies to Maturity
Monday Oct 28, 2013
Monday Oct 28, 2013
Panel 3: Experiencing, Re-Experiencing, Symbolization and New Beginnings
Monday Oct 28, 2013
Sincerity and Freedom in Psychoanalysis 2: Sincerity, Honesty and Freedom
Monday Oct 28, 2013
Monday Oct 28, 2013
Panel 2: Sincerity, Honesty and Freedom
Monday Oct 28, 2013
Monday Oct 28, 2013
Panel 1: Analysts, Scholars, Detectives and Patients: Who is who in the Clinical Diary?
Monday Oct 28, 2013
Sincerity and Freedom in Psychoanalysis: Opening the Diary
Monday Oct 28, 2013
Monday Oct 28, 2013
Introductory remarks by Dawn Kemp and Judit Szekacs
Thursday Oct 10, 2013
Thursday Oct 10, 2013
Thursday Oct 10, 2013
Thursday Oct 10, 2013
Inge Wise - Die Walküre: A Tale of Oedipal Longings and Desires
Wagner, Freud and the End of Myth: Day conference, Saturday 28 September 2013
[No abstract]
Inge Wise studied English, French and Spanish literature and worked as simultaneous interpreter prior to training at the Tavistock Clinic and the British Psychoanalytic Society. She is a fellow of both the BPAS and of the Institute of Psychoanalysis. She founded the Psychoanalytic Ideas series published by the Institute of Psychoanalysis, which she co-edited with Paul Williams until 2011. She works in private practice and teaches/supervises in the UK and abroad. Music has been a constant in her life.
Thursday Oct 10, 2013
Thursday Oct 10, 2013
In this conversation we will explore Bryan Magee's long-standing work on music and philosophy with reference to the impact on Wagner's operas of 19th century philosophers, most notably Schopenhauer, and Wagner’s concomitant influence on philosophy through his association with Nietzsche. In their writing, all three men elaborated ideas about unconscious forces and desires at work in human affairs, famously anticipating Freud and modernism. No 20th century composer could avoid the influence of Wagner and there were many artistic developments, including the breakdown of tonality itself. Likewise, with the advent of psychoanalysis there was no going back to any ideal of a unitary self or a philosophical ‘subject’.
Bryan Magee has had a lifelong engagement with philosophy and music. His work includes the award winning radio and TV series in which he interviewed contemporary thinkers such as Sir Alfred Ayer and Herbert Marcuse as well as exploring the ideas of philosophers of the past. His books include the autobiographical Confessions of a Philosopher and an acclaimed introduction to Karl Popper. He wrote The Philosophy of Schopenhauer and two books on Wagner; Aspects of Wagner and The Tristan Chord; Wagner and Philosophy. Like these two major figures in his creative life Bryan Magee has himself been a man of action as wells of ideas. In the1960s he made documentaries on prostitution, abortion and homosexuality and was Labour MP for Leyton in the 1970s and 80s. He has the gift of communicating his own love of ideas and music in a way that engages both aficionados and newcomers.
Stephen Gee is a member and former Chair of The Site for Contemporary Psychoanalysis. He has contributed to Site conferences on Winnicott, Lacan, Homosexuality, and Class. He organised a rehearsed reading of Sarah Kane's '4:48 Psychosis' followed by a colloquium in which psychoanalysts of different schools talked about the issues raised by the play and the challenges facing people suffering with psychosis. He ran a performance group at the Studio Upstairs where he was also a supervisor. He is a member of the editorial group of the Site's psychoanalytic journal, and has written on the problematic history of psychoanalysis and homosexuality. He interviewed the director Phyllida Lloyd at The Site and at the English National Opera on her 2005 production of Wagner's Ring cycle. He has a private practice in South London and teaches regularly at The Site and on other psychoanalytic trainings.
Thursday Oct 10, 2013
Thursday Oct 10, 2013
Stephen Gross - Freud and Wagner: The Assault on Reason
Wagner, Freud and the End of Myth: Day conference, Saturday 28 September 2013
A highly significant connection linking Freud and Wagner is the German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer. His claim that true reality consists of the primordial and undifferentiated Will beyond both space and time as well as the reach of Reason and appearance, was hugely influential on Wagner's music, particularly "Tristan and Isolde" as Bryan Magee has argued in his celebrated study Wagner and Philosophy. Freud's notion of the unconscious, most specifically the id as seat of the sex drives, can now be seen as a derivation of Schopenhauer's ideas, thereby establishing his link with Wagner. The fierce resistance and hostility towards both Freud and Wagner was founded not only on their perceived assault on prevailing sexual mores, but their assault on Reason itself, and, in Wagner's case, on his association with Nazism.
Stephen Gross is an analytic psychotherapist in private practice. He also teaches and supervises at WPF Therapy and other training organisations. He is particularly interested in the overlap between psychotherapy and literature, especially the works of Shakespeare on which he has published widely. His first play, "Freud's Night Visitors" has been performed twice at The Freud Museum London.
Thursday Oct 10, 2013
Thursday Oct 10, 2013
Estela Welldon - The Chaste and the Driven: Power struggles in Wagner's Women
Wagner, Freud and the End of Myth: Day conference, Saturday 28 September 2013
Far from being the passive victims of popular imagination, Wagner’s women are often complex, paradoxical and driven characters, representing diverse aspects of femininity and female desire. Wagner’s mythic narratives unveil power struggles between men and women, and between women themselves, representing warring currents of emotion within female psychology.
Estela Welldon is a psychotherapist who worked for many years at the Portman Clinic and in private practice. She is the founder of the International Association for Forensic Psychotherapy and a Fellow of the Royal College of Psychiatrists. She is most famous for her book Mother, Madonna Whore: The Idealization and Denigration of Motherhood (1988) which quashed the myth that ‘perversion’ was largely a male preserve and opened up a whole new field of therapeutic enquiry. In 1997 Oxford Brookes University awarded Dr. Welldon a D.Sc. Honorary Doctorate of Science degree for her contributions to the field of forensic psychotherapy, and this year she was invited to become an Honorary member of the American Psychoanalytic Association. She is principal editor of A Practical Guide to Forensic Psychotherapy (1997) and author of Sadomasochism (2002). Her latest publication is Playing with Dynamite: A Personal Approach to the Understanding of Perversions, Violence and Criminality (Karnac, 2011) Her interest in Wagner is long-standing.
Thursday Oct 10, 2013
Thursday Oct 10, 2013
Gavin Plumley - Private Theatre and Hysterical Opera: Wagner’s influence in Freud’s Vienna
Wagner, Freud and the End of Myth: Day conference, Saturday 28 September 2013
Post-Wagnerian composers in Vienna, hugely influenced by the Bayreuth Behemoth, actively explored the kind of mental dissociation described in Freud and Breuer's Studies on Hysteria (1894). Employing vast orchestras to create swirling psychodramas, their operas offer a beguiling artistic response to Anna O's idea of 'private theatre', and to Wagner’s use of the mythological as a way of approaching psychological ‘truths’. A few decades later many of those composers, exiled by the Nazis, employed the same soundworld to accompany the ultimate dissociative narratives of Hollywood's Silver Screen. In this paper I will look at operas by Schreker, Korngold and their contemporaries through a Freudian lens.
Gavin Plumley is a writer and broadcaster, specialising in the music and culture of Central Europe. He has appeared on BBC Radio 3 and has recently spoken at the Royal Opera House, ENO, the CBSO, V&A, The Freud Museum, and the Neue Galerie New York. He has given a number of talks at the Southbank Centre’s ‘The Rest is Noise’ festival this year and was recently appointed commissioning editor for the English language programmes at the Salzburg Festival. www.entartetemusik.blogspot.com
Thursday Oct 10, 2013
Wagner, Freud and the End of Myth 1: Anthony Cantle - Introductory Remarks
Thursday Oct 10, 2013
Thursday Oct 10, 2013
Anthony Cantle - Introductory Remarks
Wagner, Freud and the End of Myth: Day conference, Saturday 28 September 2013
Anthony Cantle has introduced and chaired three previous Freud Museum events - on the "Therapist's Body" (2000), "Understanding Perversion" (2009) and "Mahler" (2010). He is a practising Psychoanalyst and Psychoanalytic Psychotherapist and a Fellow of The Institute of Psychoanalysis, London and its former Curator. Formerly Founder and Director of the Open Door Adolescent Consultation Service in London he has also taught on the MA in Psychotherapy at the Tavistock Clinic. He worked for many years at the St Albans College of Art & Design where he set up and offered a consultation service to postgraduate students studying Art, Dance & Drama Therapies.
In addition to his clinical practice he is currently a Training Analyst and Supervisor for the former British Association of Psychotherapists, the Lincoln Clinic for Psychotherapy and the London Centre for Psychotherapy and the Tavistock Clinic and the Tavistock Centre for Couple Relationships. He is also member of the UK Mahler Society and participated in the 2009 BBC Series “Robert Winston’s Musical Analysis” where he spoke about the marriage of Gustav and Alma Mahler. In 2010 he introduced and chaired the Freud Museum event - with Gavin Plumley as the guest speaker - and entitled "The 'Faust' Problem: Music and Madness in Mahler's Vienna. Later the same year, as part of the centenary celebrations of Mahler's death, the BBC asked Anthony Cantle and the British composer and Mahler expert David Matthews to make a programme about Gustav Mahler's meeting and four hour conversation with Sigmund Freud in the Dutch city of Leiden. Recorded on location, "Walking with Freud" was transmitted in 2010 and was repeated as the interval documentary during the 2011 BBC Proms season.
Anthony Cantle was also a contributor to the 2011 BBC Radio Four series "Soul Music" featuring the Adagietto from Mahler's 5th symphony and assisted in the BBC Wales production of the 2012 two part programme on the Finnish composer, Jean Sibelius.
Thursday Aug 01, 2013
Whistleblowers: Political and Psychological Perspectives
Thursday Aug 01, 2013
Thursday Aug 01, 2013
David Morgan and Prof Gavin MacFadyen
The Political Consequences of Dissent - Prof. Gavin MacFadyen
The Psychological Consequences of Political and Social Disclosure - David Morgan
Organisations cannot be held to account unless they are open to internal criticism, yet despite measures such as the Public Interest Disclosure Act, individuals within the UK’s institutions, public bodies and corporations are subject to severe gagging constraints. Whistleblowers are heavily penalised, both through mechanisms such as the Official Secrets Act and the Confidentiality Clauses built into employment agreements, and informally through loss of status and
Gavin MacFadyen is Director of the Centre for Investigative Journalism and has researched, directed and produced investigative programmes in numerous countries around the world. He is currently Visiting Professor at City University, London, and a founder of the broad-support lobbying group, Whistleblowers UK which was launched in 2012.
David Morgan is a Consultant Psychotherapist and Psychoanalyst.He worked for many years at the Portman Clinic is now in private practice and is consultant psychotherapist for a number of organisations including WBUK, a Whistleblowers
Thursday Aug 01, 2013
The German Soul and Psyche in The Third Reich
Thursday Aug 01, 2013
Thursday Aug 01, 2013
A lecture by Sander L. Gilman
"Against the soul-destroying glorification of the instinctual life! For the nobility of the human soul! We consign to the flames the writings of the school of Sigmund Freud..."
Freud’s works were ritually burned by the Nazi’s in 1933, and we have the pictures to prove it. But the relationship was more complicated than that. The Third Reich Source Book will appear this summer with the University of California Press. It is the most extensive collection of primary documents on the Third Reich ever made available to English readers. It also presents for the first time primary materials on the struggle over the meaning of the psyche and the legacy of psychoanalysis under Hitler. Sander Gilman, one of its editors, will present the reader and the material on psychology and psychoanalysis under the Nazis.
Sander L. Gilman is a distinguished professor of the Liberal Arts and Sciences as well as Professor of Psychiatry at Emory University. A cultural and literary historian, he is the author or editor of over eighty books. His Obesity: The Biography appeared with Oxford University Press in 2010; his most recent edited volume, Wagner and Cinema (with Jeongwon Joe) was published in the same year. He is the author of the basic study of the visual stereotyping of the mentally ill, Seeing the Insane, published by John Wiley and Sons in 1982 (reprinted: 1996) as well as the standard study of Jewish Self-Hatred, the title of his Johns Hopkins University Press monograph of 1986. For twenty-five years he was a member of the humanities and medical faculties at Cornell University where he held the Goldwin Smith Professorship of Humane Studies. For six years he held the Henry R. Luce Distinguished Service Professorship of the Liberal Arts in Human Biology at the University of Chicago and for four years was a distinguished professor of the Liberal Arts and Medicine and creator of the Humanities Laboratory at the University of Illinois at Chicago. He has held many distinguished posts in the UK and across the world, including the Weidenfeld Visiting Professor of European Comparative Literature at Oxford University in 2004-5, and Professor at the Institute in the Humanities, Birkbeck College from 2007 to 2012. He was elected an honorary professor of the Free University in Berlin in 2000, and has been an honorary member of the American Psychoanalytic Association since 2007.
Tuesday Apr 30, 2013
Tuesday Apr 30, 2013
Consultant Child Psychotherapist Dr Graham Music and critic Dr Maria Walsh, author of 'Art and Psychoanalysis', in conversation with the artist Rebecca Fortnum. The event is is part of our current exhibition 'Self Contained' by Rebecca Fortnum.
Tuesday Apr 23, 2013
PROJECTIONS 3: Psychoanalytic interpretation of Polanski's Apartment Trilogy
Tuesday Apr 23, 2013
Tuesday Apr 23, 2013
In Repulsion (1965), Rosemary’s Baby (1968) and The Tenant (1976), Polish filmmaker Roman Polanski portrays a series of fragmented psyches confined in claustrophobic spaces. Fear objects move progressively from sexual intercourse (Carol), via pregnancy/childbirth (Rosemary), culminating in the blurring of gender identities (Trelkovsky). In her Projections lecture, Mary Wild offers a Freudian psychoanalytic interpretation of Polanski’s ‘apartment trilogy’, a genre-defining set of films with an influence as far-reaching as 2010’s Black Swan. 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. Please watch Roman Polanski’s ‘Repulsion’, ‘Rosemary’s Baby’ and ‘The Tenant’ before attending the lecture as there may be spoilers! MARY WILD, a Freudian cinephile from Montreal, is the creator of PROJECTIONS.
Monday Mar 11, 2013
Reading Anna Freud - Author's Talk:Nick Midgley
Monday Mar 11, 2013
Monday Mar 11, 2013
Filmed at the Anna Freud Centre on 7 March 2013 How should we read Anna Freud's work today? At one point her classic work, 'The Ego and the Mechanisms of Defence', was described as 'perhaps the single most widely read book in our professional literature', but today a great deal of her work is out of print and her prominence in psychoanalytic thinking (at least in the UK) has been eclipsed by the work of Klein, Bowlby, Bion, Winnicott and others. In this lecture Nick Midgley considers some ways in which Anna Freud's work can be read today, and suggest that her work is still of value for the way it uses psychoanalytic thinking - both within and beyond the clinical setting - to help us make a difference to the well-being of children and young people. Nick Midgley is a Child and Adolescent Psychotherapist at the Anna Freud Centre, London, and Course Director for the MSc in Developmental Psychology and Clinical Practice at UCL. He is the author of 'Reading Anna Freud', published by Routledge / the New Library of Psychoanalysis in 2013.
Thursday Mar 07, 2013
Self Contained :Rebecca Fortnum
Thursday Mar 07, 2013
Thursday Mar 07, 2013
Join Freud Museum Curator Sophie Leighton as she talks to Rebecca Fortnum about her exhibition "Self Contained" which is running at the Freud Museum London from 6 March 2013 - 26 May 2013. “.. only where I find a face do I encounter an exteriority and does an outside happen to me.” G. Agamben, Means without End, Notes on Politics (2000) Rebecca Fortnum’s exhibition at the Freud Museum, 'Self Contained', develops several strands of her recent work on the formation of identity, dreams and the power of the gaze. The series 'Dream' depicts children with their eyes closed in paired pencil portraits. In these small, intimate works we can look at the subjects very closely but they never look back. No blinking, no flinching; we are struck by their interiority. They shut out the intrusive viewer. The imagery responds directly to notions of the power relations of the subject’s gaze, introducing on a suggestive level the ideal of the child’s dreams and imaginings that are inaccessible to the viewer. The portraits are completed in pairs in a process developed to question the authenticity of the single image. These works will be displayed in Anna Freud’s room at the Freud Museum, along with works in silverpoint, to draw out connections with Anna Freud’s writings on the child’s relationship with the adult world. The series 'Wide Shut' includes three large paired portraits, each with a veil of colour over the image. These are of older girls, one image of each pair with open eyes. They act out the duality of proper and improper, of communication and communicability, of potentiality and action.
Thursday Mar 07, 2013
Em Cooper in Conversation with Andrea Sabbadini
Thursday Mar 07, 2013
Thursday Mar 07, 2013
A sold out event recorded at the Freud Museum London on 20 February 2013 and was a discussion following the film screening. This evening included the screening of three short films which explore the complex and chaotic world of inner experience from a psychoanalytic perspective which was followed by a discussion between the director, Em Cooper and Andrea Sabbadini. For clips of the films and more information please go to: http://www.emcooper.com/ Em Cooper is a British director and animator specializing in combining oil-painted animation with live-action footage to produce short films based around psychoanalytic themes. She is interested in experimenting with film form and especially use of subjective perspectives. Her recent films have explored subjects such as infancy, obsessive compulsive behaviour and child abuse. Em's films have been screened internationally, including at this year's Sundance Film Festival. Her work has also shown at Turner Contemporary, Margate and discussed at various psychoanalytic conferences including the European Psychoanalytic Film Festival in London and the International Ferenczi Conference in Budapest. Her film Confusion of Tongues was nominated for the 2012 British Animation Awards, Best Student Film. Em is currently working on a feature documentary for the BBC. Andrea Sabbadini, C. Psychol. is a Fellow of the British Psychoanalytical Society, its former Honorary Secretary and its current Director of Publications. He works in private practice in London, is a Senior Lecturer at UCL, a trustee of the Freud Museum, a member of the IPA Committee on Psychoanalysis and Culture, the director of the European Psychoanalytic Film Festival, and the chairman of a programme of films and discussions at the Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA). The Nest (2010) dir. Em Cooper 12mins It is seemingly just another school morning for Laura and her mother, Alice. But the differences between their two points of view leave us haunted by questions about Laura’s father. When memory and reality become confused, is it possible to understand what really happened? The Nest is a film about the transmission of trauma through the generations of a family. It is a film snapped in two, both in narrative and in technique, using oil painted animation to bring out the unconscious motives which drive a difficult family dynamic. Confusion of Tongues (2010) dir. Em Cooper 6mins Inspired by the 1932 paper by psychoanalyst Sándor Ferenczi, Confusion of Tongues takes us into the world of a woman suffering a sleepless night. Haunted by a recurring childhood memory and gripped by her fear of a window left open, she begins to recall a much deeper trauma. Combining film with oil-painted animation Confusion of Tongues vividly conjures up the tragic confusion of desire which can be a devastating effect of child abuse Laid Down (2007) dir. Em Cooper 15 mins Shot from the point of view of a newborn baby, Laid Downexplores the chaotic world of a developing infant. Set over the first few months of life, dipping in and out of animated dream sequences, we encounter the turbulent relationship between the baby's parents from the raw, emotional and preverbal perspective of the baby.
Thursday Feb 14, 2013
Interpreting Collections Day Symposium Part 7 of 7
Thursday Feb 14, 2013
Thursday Feb 14, 2013
Part 7: Glenn Adamson - More Than a Feeling: The Museum as Research Institution. This one-day symposium recorded at the Anna Freud Centre on 26 January 2013 was timed to accompany the exhibition DreamWork by artist and researcher Christie Brown. It considered the relationship between ceramic art practice and museum collections within the broader context of contemporary visual culture. The symposium address key areas of inspiration for artists within this context, by focussing on the dialogue between the concept, the collection and the specific nature of the site. Papers will feature a subjective response to Freud’s archaic figurative collection, the uncanny notion of the inner life in inanimate objects and the private house as museum, broadening out to raise curatorial and theoretical questions around the nature of this art practice within post modern culture and ideology. The symposium forms part of the research project Ceramics in the Expanded Field (www.ceramics-in-the-expanded-field.com) funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council through the University of Westminster in London. Researchers Christie Brown, Julian Stair and Clare Twomey and PhD student Laura Breen form the team for this project and the exhibition DreamWork is a key element in the dissemination of the outcomes. The major objective of the project is to investigate the ways in which contemporary ceramic artists have used ceramic practice to initiate new ways of working and new dialogues within the context of museums. Speaker Biographies & Abstracts Glenn Adamson is Head of Research at the Victoria and Albert Museum. Dr. Adamson is co-editor of the triannual Journal of ModernCraft, and the author of Thinking Through Craft (Berg Publishers/V&APublications), an anthology entitled The Craft Reader (Berg, 2010), and theforthcoming book The Invention of Craft (Berg, 2013). His other publications include the co-edited volume GlobalDesign History (Routledge, 2011). He was the co-curator for the exhibitionPostmodernism: Style and Subversion, 1970 to 1990, which was on view at theV&A from September 2011 to January 2012. Abstract: Museums are many things: spaces of entertainment, places to meet friends, repositories of objects. But of course they are also structures built on expertise. In this talk, Glenn Adamson will speak from his experience as Head of Research at the V&A. After a brief description of the way that research operates at this museum, he will address strategic priorities and opportunities for object-led research in the 21st century. Among the topics covered will be research in a digital space; issues of intellectual property; the relationship between academic and commercial content; and transformations in the nature of curatorial work and expertise.
Thursday Feb 14, 2013
Interpreting Collections Day Symposium Part 6 of 7
Thursday Feb 14, 2013
Thursday Feb 14, 2013
Part 6: Andrew Renton - Deposits and withdrawals at the ‘collective memory bank’: ceramic artists and the National Museum of Wales. This one-day symposium recorded at the Anna Freud Centre on 26 January 2013 was timed to accompany the exhibition DreamWork by artist and researcher Christie Brown. It considered the relationship between ceramic art practice and museum collections within the broader context of contemporary visual culture. The symposium address key areas of inspiration for artists within this context, by focussing on the dialogue between the concept, the collection and the specific nature of the site. Papers will feature a subjective response to Freud’s archaic figurative collection, the uncanny notion of the inner life in inanimate objects and the private house as museum, broadening out to raise curatorial and theoretical questions around the nature of this art practice within post modern culture and ideology. The symposium forms part of the research project Ceramics in the Expanded Field (www.ceramics-in-the-expanded-field.com) funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council through the University of Westminster in London. Researchers Christie Brown, Julian Stair and Clare Twomey and PhD student Laura Breen form the team for this project and the exhibition DreamWork is a key element in the dissemination of the outcomes. The major objective of the project is to investigate the ways in which contemporary ceramic artists have used ceramic practice to initiate new ways of working and new dialogues within the context of museums. Speaker Biographies & Abstracts Andrew Renton is Head of Applied Art at Amgueddfa Cymru – National Museum Wales. Since joining the Museum in 1999, he has emphasised the development of the Museum’s collection of contemporary applied art, seeking to work with artists and to use collections creatively as part of an active and ambitious acquisition strategy. He has curated exhibitions at the National Museum in Cardiff in collaboration with Edmund de Waal (Arcanum: mapping European porcelain, 2005) and Elizabeth Fritsch (Dynamic Structures: Painted Vessels by Elizabeth Fritsch, 2010). His other priorities have included research into and acquisitions for the full range of post-mediaeval applied art collections, in particular Welsh ceramics and historic silver. Prior to moving to Cardiff, he worked for six years at National Museums Liverpool as a curator of applied art, including three years at the Lady Lever Art Gallery. Abstract: The first ‘intervention’ by a contemporary ceramic artist at the National Museum of Wales took place a century ago, thanks to Bernard Leach’s close relationship with his uncle who also happened to be the Museum’s founding director. However, it is only in the last two decades that the National Museum has engaged with ceramic artists in a sustained and strategic way. This survey of the Museum’s experience of this engagement will reflect on the interaction between curatorial and artistic practices, on the inspirational role of the Museum and its collections, and on the implications for the profile of contemporary ceramics within the Museum’s multidisciplinary context.
Thursday Feb 14, 2013
Interpreting Collections Day Symposium Part 5 of 7
Thursday Feb 14, 2013
Thursday Feb 14, 2013
Part 5: Calum Storrie - Turning Around/Going Back. This one-day symposium recorded at the Anna Freud Centre on 26 January 2013 was timed to accompany the exhibition DreamWork by artist and researcher Christie Brown. It considered the relationship between ceramic art practice and museum collections within the broader context of contemporary visual culture. The symposium address key areas of inspiration for artists within this context, by focussing on the dialogue between the concept, the collection and the specific nature of the site. Papers will feature a subjective response to Freud’s archaic figurative collection, the uncanny notion of the inner life in inanimate objects and the private house as museum, broadening out to raise curatorial and theoretical questions around the nature of this art practice within post modern culture and ideology. The symposium forms part of the research project Ceramics in the Expanded Field (www.ceramics-in-the-expanded-field.com) funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council through the University of Westminster in London. Researchers Christie Brown, Julian Stair and Clare Twomey and PhD student Laura Breen form the team for this project and the exhibition DreamWork is a key element in the dissemination of the outcomes. The major objective of the project is to investigate the ways in which contemporary ceramic artists have used ceramic practice to initiate new ways of working and new dialogues within the context of museums. Speaker Biographies & Abstracts Calum Storrie has designed exhibitions for many of London’s major public galleries including the Royal Academy, the National Portrait Gallery, the Wellcome Collection and the National Gallery. He has worked in the museum sector since 1986 and has worked as part of an exhibition design office, been an in-house designer at the British Museum and now runs his own micro-studio (i.e. he works alone in a basement). As well as teaching on interior design and museum studies courses he has written the book The Delirious Museum; A Journey from the Louvre to Las Vegas - published in 2007. www.calumstorrie.com Abstract: In this talk I would like to examine the allure of immersion as exemplified by the visit to the museum/shrine/home of the famous. To what extent does this ‘immersion’ depend on the illusion of an unmediated environment? What are the dangers of travelling in time and space? How can artists or designers find room to operate within these hermetic spaces? The pilgrim’s reading of the shrine can be disrupted in a number of ways…by intervention in the form of adding content (artwork, labels, vitrines and any number of museological knick-knacks) or by the displacement and removal of treasured objects. My usual rôle as an exhibition designer is to conspire in the removal of objects from one context (the collection) into another (the exhibition). So I would also like to look at the process of migration of objects between spaces and discuss what this does to them.
Thursday Feb 14, 2013
Interpreting Collections Day Symposium Part 4 of 7
Thursday Feb 14, 2013
Thursday Feb 14, 2013
Part 4: Janice West - Serious Toys. This one-day symposium recorded at the Anna Freud Centre on 26 January 2013 was timed to accompany the exhibition DreamWork by artist and researcher Christie Brown. It considered the relationship between ceramic art practice and museum collections within the broader context of contemporary visual culture. The symposium address key areas of inspiration for artists within this context, by focussing on the dialogue between the concept, the collection and the specific nature of the site. Papers will feature a subjective response to Freud’s archaic figurative collection, the uncanny notion of the inner life in inanimate objects and the private house as museum, broadening out to raise curatorial and theoretical questions around the nature of this art practice within post modern culture and ideology. The symposium forms part of the research project Ceramics in the Expanded Field (www.ceramics-in-the-expanded-field.com) funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council through the University of Westminster in London. Researchers Christie Brown, Julian Stair and Clare Twomey and PhD student Laura Breen form the team for this project and the exhibition DreamWork is a key element in the dissemination of the outcomes. The major objective of the project is to investigate the ways in which contemporary ceramic artists have used ceramic practice to initiate new ways of working and new dialogues within the context of museums. Speaker Biographies & Abstracts Janice West is a London-based independent researcher and curator. With Tessa Peters she has created a number of exhibitions: The Uncanny Room,( 2002) at Pizthanger Manor, Ealing and re-staged at the Bowes Museum, County Durham;, The Secret Life of the Office (2008) Arts and Business, London, The House of Words (2009) Dr Johnson House, London and Memoranda, 2011 Crafts Study Centre, University of the Creative Arts, Farnham. Each exhibition was accompanied by a publication edited by the curators. She has curated and organized other exhibitions: Made to wear: Creativity in Contemporary Jewellery (1998) Central Saint Martin’s College of Art and Design, London and wrote the accompanying book; and The Era: A hundred years of London Theatre (2008) for the City of Westminster Archives Centre. She has written essays for exhibition catalogues and books, notably Christie Brown: The cast of characters (1995) University of Westminster; Maud Cotter : Mute displacement(1995) Galerie Schlossgoart, Luxembourg, and Footnotes: On shoes Rutgers University Press,(2001). Abstract: Freud’s 1919 essay The Uncanny he notes the uncanny effect produced by “...waxwork figures, ingeniously constructed dolls and automata”. and discusses the paradoxical feelings that they produce in the viewer. The contradictions of an object that appears to be alive and autonomous but is created and controlled by man and often built for human enjoyment are acutely pertinent in a world where AI departments are working on ideal cyberhumans. The conflicted desire these creations brings are freighted with fear and anxiety as well as pleasure and will be discussed in this paper with examples from John Joseph Merlin to Hiroshi Ishiguro via Burne-Jones and Bladerunner.
Thursday Feb 14, 2013
Interpreting Collections Day Symposium Part 3 of 7
Thursday Feb 14, 2013
Thursday Feb 14, 2013
Part 3: Esther Leslie - Houses of the Future Perfect: Freud, Benjamin and Schwitters’ Domestic Collections. This one-day symposium recorded at the Anna Freud Centre on 26 January 2013 was timed to accompany the exhibition DreamWork by artist and researcher Christie Brown. It considered the relationship between ceramic art practice and museum collections within the broader context of contemporary visual culture. The symposium address key areas of inspiration for artists within this context, by focussing on the dialogue between the concept, the collection and the specific nature of the site. Papers will feature a subjective response to Freud’s archaic figurative collection, the uncanny notion of the inner life in inanimate objects and the private house as museum, broadening out to raise curatorial and theoretical questions around the nature of this art practice within post modern culture and ideology. The symposium forms part of the research project Ceramics in the Expanded Field (www.ceramics-in-the-expanded-field.com) funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council through the University of Westminster in London. Researchers Christie Brown, Julian Stair and Clare Twomey and PhD student Laura Breen form the team for this project and the exhibition DreamWork is a key element in the dissemination of the outcomes. The major objective of the project is to investigate the ways in which contemporary ceramic artists have used ceramic practice to initiate new ways of working and new dialogues within the context of museums. Speaker Biographies & Abstracts Esther Leslie is Professor of Political Aesthetics at Birkbeck, University of London. Her first book was Walter Benjamin: Overpowering Conformism (Pluto, 2000). She has also authored a biography of Benjamin (Reaktion, 2007). In 2002 she published Hollywood Flatlands: Animation, Critical Theory, and the Avant Garde (Verso). It excavated the historical relationships between critical theory, European intellectuals and animation, in its avant garde and commercial varieties. Since then she has published and lectured extensively on all types of animation. A subsequent book, Synthetic Worlds: Art, Nature and the Chemical Industry (Reaktion, 2005), investigated the industrial manufacture of colour and its impact on conceptions of nature and aesthetics. She runs a website together with Ben Watson, www.militantesthetix.co.uk Abstract: This talk considers the notion of the home-museum through three figures - Freud, Walter Benjamin and Kurt Schwitters. These three inhabitants prove to lodge in various ways with each other. For one, under the influence of Freud's dream analysis, Benjamin writes down a dream about Goethe's house, which he has visited before and in whose visitor's book he finds his name 'already entered in big, unruly, childish scrawl’ and at whose dinner table he finds places set for his relatives, ancestors and descendants. This will lead him to exclaim: when the ‘house of our life…is under assault and enemy bombs are taking their toll, what enervated, perverse antiquities do they not lay bare in the foundations!’. Benjamin's other homes, his exile homes, real and those imaged - such as the cave-like arcades - are considered as repositories of 'perverse antiquities'. These homes are set alongside those of a fellow exile, Kurt Schwitters, who built for himself three 'Merzbau' home-museums, each one as incomplete as Benjamin's Arcades Project, each one wrecked by war, like that project too. Freud lodges now and again in these houses, and his own house-museum is considered as a practical instantiation of the project of realising memories objectively.
Thursday Feb 14, 2013
Interpreting Collections Day Symposium Part 2 of 7
Thursday Feb 14, 2013
Thursday Feb 14, 2013
Part 2: Christie Brown Dreaming and Working. This one-day symposium recorded at the Anna Freud Centre on 26 January 2013 was timed to accompany the exhibition DreamWork by artist and researcher Christie Brown. It considered the relationship between ceramic art practice and museum collections within the broader context of contemporary visual culture. The symposium address key areas of inspiration for artists within this context, by focussing on the dialogue between the concept, the collection and the specific nature of the site. Papers will feature a subjective response to Freud’s archaic figurative collection, the uncanny notion of the inner life in inanimate objects and the private house as museum, broadening out to raise curatorial and theoretical questions around the nature of this art practice within post modern culture and ideology. The symposium forms part of the research project Ceramics in the Expanded Field (www.ceramics-in-the-expanded-field.com) funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council through the University of Westminster in London. Researchers Christie Brown, Julian Stair and Clare Twomey and PhD student Laura Breen form the team for this project and the exhibition DreamWork is a key element in the dissemination of the outcomes. The major objective of the project is to investigate the ways in which contemporary ceramic artists have used ceramic practice to initiate new ways of working and new dialogues within the context of museums. Speaker Biographies & Abstracts Christie Brown is a practising artist based in north London and Professor of Ceramics at the University of Westminster. She graduated from Harrow School of Art in 1982 and her work is featured in several private and public collections in Europe and the USA. Abstract: The parallel disciplines of archaeology and psychoanalysis have inspired my art practice over many years and the ceramic medium is a key presence in museum collections, offering insights into the lives of human beings over time. As a figurative artist I am drawn to Freud’s collection of antiquities which inspired his use of the archaeology metaphor. The figure is especially powerful as a recipient for human emotion and projection giving rise to a rich cultural history of myths of origin and animated beings. In this talk I will present the ideas behind of my exhibition DreamWork and illustrate the development of my practice through figuration, narrative and installation.
Thursday Feb 14, 2013
Interpreting Collections Day Symposium Part 1 of 7
Thursday Feb 14, 2013
Thursday Feb 14, 2013
Part 1: Clare Twomey introduction to Ceramics in the Expanded Field This one-day symposium recorded at the Anna Freud Centre on 26 January 2013 was timed to accompany the exhibition DreamWork by artist and researcher Christie Brown. It considered the relationship between ceramic art practice and museum collections within the broader context of contemporary visual culture. The symposium address key areas of inspiration for artists within this context, by focussing on the dialogue between the concept, the collection and the specific nature of the site. Papers will feature a subjective response to Freud’s archaic figurative collection, the uncanny notion of the inner life in inanimate objects and the private house as museum, broadening out to raise curatorial and theoretical questions around the nature of this art practice within post modern culture and ideology. The symposium forms part of the research project Ceramics in the Expanded Field (www.ceramics-in-the-expanded-field.com) funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council through the University of Westminster in London. Researchers Christie Brown, Julian Stair and Clare Twomey and PhD student Laura Breen form the team for this project and the exhibition DreamWork is a key element in the dissemination of the outcomes. The major objective of the project is to investigate the ways in which contemporary ceramic artists have used ceramic practice to initiate new ways of working and new dialogues within the context of museums.
Saturday Feb 09, 2013
Freud in Zion: Psychoanalysis and the Making of Modern Jewish Identity
Saturday Feb 09, 2013
Saturday Feb 09, 2013
Few episodes in the history of psychoanalysis are as densely packed with trans-cultural, ideological, institutional and ethical issues as the arrival of psychoanalysis in pre-state Israel in the early 20th century. 'Freud in Zion' is the first work to explore this encounter between psychoanalytic expertise, Judaism, Modern Hebrew culture and the Zionist revolution. It offers a look at the relationship between psychoanalysis and a wider community, and follows the life and work of Jewish psychoanalysts during World War II. As such, it makes an important contribution to a central concern of psychoanalytic studies today, the interplay of psychoanalysis, culture, ideology and politics. Can psychoanalysis as a psychological-critical theory and Zionism as an ideology and consciousness really live together? Did historical reality and the new Hebrew culture play a role in shaping local psychoanalytic practice and ethics? The coming of Freudian psychoanalysis to pre-state Israel, where it rapidly penetrated the discourse of pedagogy, literature, medicine, and politics, becoming a popular therapeutic discipline, could thus be regarded as an integral part of a Jewish immigrant society’s struggle to establish its identity in the face of its manifold European pasts and its conflict-ridden Middle Eastern present.Eran J. Rolnik, MD, PhD. Trained in psychiatry, psychoanalysis and history and is a member of the Israel Psychoanalytic Society. He is the author of several papers on the evolution of Freud's thought and on the history of psychoanalysis. He is also the Hebrew translator and editor of several volumes of Freud's papers. He teaches at Tel-Aviv University and works in private practice. 'Freud in Zion: Psychoanalysis and the Making of Modern Jewish Identity' is published by Karnac Books.
Friday Feb 01, 2013
Friday Feb 01, 2013
A sold out event recorded at the Anna Freud Centre Library on 30 January 2013. 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. As her mother slipped into the darkness of old age, authorLisa Appignanesi began to realise how little she knew of the reality behind the tales she had heard from her Jewish parents of wartime Poland. With vivid intelligence and without piety, 'Losing the Dead' brings to life what she discovered. At the same time the memoir considers the workings of individual and collective memory and charts the legacy of war and immigration as these rumble through the generations of a family. Novelist and poet, Blake Morrison's, moving memoir 'When Did You Last See Your Father?' was made into a film (with Jim Broadbent and Juliet Stevenson) and takes us into the heart of a family as a father lies dying. It plumbs father- son relations and family secrets: in the process understanding grows. With Psychotherapist Jane Haberlin, the two writers explore the possible links between memoir writing and couch memories. Jane Haberlin trained with Arbours as a Psychoanalytic Psychotherapist. She has worked at The Arbours Crisis Centre and The Women’s Therapy Centre. She is a founder member of The Relational School in London. She currently works as a therapist and supervisor in private practice and provides consultancy to organisations.
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.
Monday Sep 24, 2012
Monday Sep 24, 2012
A live event recorded at the Freud Museum on 19 September 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. Eva Hoffman Lost in Translation: Life in a New Language Sathnam Sanghera The Boy with the Topknot: A Memoir of Love, Secrets and Lies in Wolverhampton Eva Hoffman is a writer and academic. She has been a professor of literature and creative writing at several high profile American universities as well as editor for The New York Times Book Review. Sathnam Sanghera is a feature writer and columnist for The Times. ‘Boy with the Topknot' is an acclaimed best seller and won 'The Mind Book of the Year' in 2009. Both have written powerful memoirs of living in and between two very different cultures and of the impact of this experience on their identity and psyche. Sue Cowan-Jenssen is a founder member of the Relational School. She is an integrative psychotherapist and EMDR Consultant.