Freud Museum London: Psychoanalysis Podcasts

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.

Conference: The Unconscious Today 1

Session 1: The Unconscious and the Brain

Mark Solms - The Id is Not Unconscious

Mark will present neuroscientific evidence to support his argument that the mental functions Freud called ‘id’ are not unconscious! He will discuss some implications of this argument for what psychoanalysts and psychotherapists do clinically.

Mark Solms is a psychoanalyst and neuropsychologist, widely reported to have first coined the term Neuro-Psychoanalysis, a rapidly developing field of interdisciplinary scholarship and research aiming to provide bridges between the neurosciences and psychoanalytic theory. He is Professor in Neuropsychology at the University of Cape Town (South Africa), Honorary Lecturer in Neurosurgery at St Bartholomew’s and Royal London School of Medicine, Director of the Arnold Pfeffer Center for Neuropsychoanalysis at the New York Psychoanalytic Society and Institute, and Chair of the Research Committee of the International Psychoanalytical Association. He is President of the South African Psychoanalytical Association, Associate Member of the British Psychoanalytical Society, Honorary Member of the New York Psychoanalytic Society, and Member of the South African Clinical Neuropsychology Association and of the British Neuropsychological Society. He is a Member of the Academy of Science of South Africa, and Honorary Fellow of the American College of Psychoanalysts and of the American College of Psychiatrists. He has won many prestigious awards, including the Sigourney Award, and has authored a multitude of chapters, articles and books including A moment of Transition: Two Neuroscientific Articles by Sigmund Freud (1990), The Neuropsychology of Dreams: A Clinico-Anatomical Study (1997), Clinical Studies in Neuro-Psychoanalysis (with K Kaplan-Solms, 2000) and, with Oliver Turnball, The Brain and the Inner World: An Introduction to the Neuroscience of Subjective Experience (2002). He was founding editor of the journal Neuropsychoanalysis.

The Art of Freestyle and the Unconscious Mind

Lecture and performance: 

How do ideas pop into your head? You can think about the answer to this question at a lecture and performance about the art of Freestyle Rap by Hip-Hop artist and spoken word poet, Reveal. Using recent studies in neurology and psychology, theories of memory schemata and ideas about unconscious communication, Reveal will explore the basis of his craft within the resonant environment of the Freud Museum, and in a practical demonstration will improvise a rap to words and questions called out by members of the audience. 

Reveal is a London based Iranian Hip-Hop artist, ethnomusicologist and writer. He was born in Tehran, Iran in 1983 and moved to London aged 2 with his parents, mainly to escape the Iran-Iraq war. He was raised in inner city London but continued to travel back to Tehran regularly. Having links to such contrasting urban environments has provided him with a sense of dual identity for most of his life. At a young age Reveal began performing Hip-Hop music and releasing songs under the Artist name "Reveal Poison", and at aged 16 he won the 2000 UK Freestyle Knock-out Battle Rap Championships. He went on to form the group “Poisonous Poets” who were one of the first ever UK Hip-Hop acts to be signed to a major record label, penning a deal with BMG/Arista in 2001. It was around this period that he first became aware of the emerging Persian Hip-Hop scene in Iran and he travelled back to Tehran to begin a series of collaborations with the city's artists. Reveal is currently enrolled on a Mmus Ethnomusicology programme at SOAS where he is studying part-time alongside doing youth work, touring and releasing music.

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

Do we need a Critical Psychotherapy? Exploring Talking Therapies in Neoliberal Society 1

 Session 1: INTRODUCTION

Del Lowenthal - Is there an unfortunate need for critical psychotherapy?

Respondent: Julian Lousada

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.

Lacan: In Spite of Everything

Elisabeth Roudinesco and Dany Nobus in conversation

 

Elisabeth Roudinesco is France's leading historian of psychoanalysis and biographer of the French Freud - Jacques Lacan. Briefly in London for the launch of her new book LACAN: In Spite of Everything (Verso) she reflects on Lacan's extraordinary legacy as well as aspects of his trajectory not previously confronted.

She is in conversation with Dany Nobus, Pro Vice-Chancellor of Brunel University, psychoanalyst, and a noted commentator on Lacan's work.

This event was conducted in French with English translation.

Elisabeth Roudinesco et Dany Nobus en conversation

Elisabeth Roudinesco est la plus importante historienne de psychoanalyse de France. Deplus, elle est la biographe du «Freud français»- Jacques Lacan. Étant à Londres pour la publication de sa nouvelle oeuvre Lacan, Envers et Contre Tout, elle aborde le sujet de son héritage exceptionnel et certains aspects de sa trajectoire inexplorée auparavant.

 

Elle est en conversation avec Dany Nobus, pro vice-chancelier de l'Université de Brunel, psychoanalyste et commentateur important sur le travail de Lacan. 

 

Cet événement a eu lieu en français avec une traduction anglaise. 

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.

Psychoanalysis and Religion

Giles Fraser in conversation with Adam Phillips

Dr. Giles Fraser is a well known cultural commentator, priest and vicar of St Mary's Newington. He took a controversial stand on Occupy at St Paul's, resigning his post there in the process. He is also passionate about psychoanalysis.

Adam Phillips is a psychoanalyst and writer, author of many celebrated books, among them Missing Out and Promises, Promises. He has just finished a biography of the young Freud, who understood religion as an illusion.

Together they discuss psychoanalysis and religion.

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.

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.

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.” 

Protest Psychosis: Race, Stigma, and the Diagnosis of Schizophrenia

Misperceptions that persons with schizophrenia are violent or dangerous lie at the heart of stigmatizations of the disease.

This talk focus on how these modern-day American conceptualizations of schizophrenic patients as violent emerged during the civil-rights era of the 1950s-1970s in response to a larger set of conversations about race.  It integrates institutional, professional, and cultural discourses in order to trace shifts in popular and medical understandings of schizophrenia from a disease of white docility to one of “Negro” hostility, and from a disease that was nurtured to one that was feared.

The first section tracks the medicalization of race and schizophrenia within a particular institution, the Ionia Hospital for the Criminally Insane.  The talk’s second section contextualizes the Ionia case histories within shifting psychiatric definitions of schizophrenia.  We will explore the ways in which published case studies explicitly connected clinical presentations of African-American men with the politics of the civil rights movement in ways that treated aspirations for liberation and civil rights as symptoms of mental illness. 

Finally, the third section reads shifts in psychiatric nosology within changing American cultural concerns about black masculinity.  Triangulating the historical connections between institutional forces, psychiatric practices, and civil-rights politics helps me grapple with some of the seemingly naturalized characteristics of present-day schizophrenia discourse—characteristics that often appear denatured of their explicit connections to race.  These include cultural tropes of angry, homeless mentally ill persons, or findings demonstrating that persons with schizophrenia reside in prisons far more often than in psychiatric care facilities.

Jonathan M. Metzl, MD, PhD, is based at Vanderbilt University, Nashville, Tennessee where he is Frederick B. Rentschler II Professor of Sociology and Medicine, Health and Society; the Director of the Center for Medicine, Health, and Society; and Professor of Psychiatry. His most recent publication is Dying of Whiteness: How the Politics of Racial Resentment is Killing America’s Heartland (2019).

The Enigma of the Hour: Artist’s Talk, Jennifer Higgie in conversation with Daniel Silver and Simon Moretti

Leading art critic, writer and Editorial Director of Frieze Magazine, Jennifer Higgie, presents a talk with artist Daniel Silver and artist and curator of The Enigma of the Hour: 100 Years of Psychoanalytic Thought Simon Moretti in response to the exhibition, expanding on the themes of translation, transformation, temporality and metaphor, key to both art and psychoanalysis.

Jennifer Higgie is a writer and the editorial director of Frieze Magazine. She is the editor of The Artist’s Joke published by the MIT Press.

Part of a series of events which coincide with The Enigma of the Hour: 100 Years of Psychoanalytic Thought an exhibition marking the centenary of The International Journal of Psychoanalysis, on display from 6 June – 4 August 2019.

 

Freud in Prison - Pamela Windham Stewart and Kelly

This discussion aims to consider the connection between sexual abuse, offending behaviour and the vitality of psychotherapy.

In November 2015, George Osbourne announced the closure of the largest women’s prison in Europe, HMP Holloway. The recently published book, The End of the Sentence, Psychotherapy with Female Offenders, edited by Pamela Windham Stewart and Jessica Collier is part of the Forensic Psychotherapy Monograph Series edited by Brett Kahr. The End of the Sentence records the rich and varied therapeutic interventions provided over 25 years at HMP Holloway.

The Freud in Prison conversation continues thinking about current forensic psychotherapy described in The End of the Sentence. A key part of the discussion will explore the correlation between the high number of inmates who are victims of childhood sexual abuse (estimated at 65% of offenders have been sexually abused). The other aspect for discussion, and related to the first, is the creative power of psychotherapy in a forensic setting.

This conversation is between psychotherapist Pamela Windham Stewart and Kelly. While a former inmate, Kelly attended weekly psychotherapy as well as participating in weekly Managing Emotions Groups facilitated by Professor Gill McGauley and Pamela. From this experience Kelly has devised a 10-week group for women who were abused as children which she will discuss.

Can psychotherapy have a bigger, more vocal role to play in prisons and in society as a whole? Is psychotherapy a creative process which should take up a larger political role? And can we also consider what it is about child sexual abuse that is a mental prison for individuals, institutions and society at large?

…And may also have been a prison for Freud? 

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.

Narcissus, Oedipus and the Persistence of Memory

Why does the myth of Narcissus continue to fascinate and provoke the contemporary artistic imagination?

In what ways does classical mythology in general hold up a mirror to the anxieties and aspirations of the here-and-now?

This lecture will address these and other questions relating to the enduring power of ancient myth – above all, the tales of metamorphosis contained in Ovid’s Metamorphoses. Writer and academic James Cahill will discuss how these stories have continued to infiltrate and inspire the art of the last hundred years, both overtly and in more oblique or unexpected ways, while also giving fundamental shape to modern literature and psychoanalysis. He will argue that Salvador Dalí’s iconic reimagining of the Narcissus myth stands at the crux between different modes of ‘response’ to the classical, looking simultaneously backwards (to the mythologizing paintings of the Renaissance, for instance) and forwards to the experiments of conceptual art and postmodernism – at once an illustration of the ancient myth and an enactment of its subliminal themes.

Part of an exciting series of talks and events which coincide with ‘Freud, Dali and the Metamorphosis of Narcissus’ on display at the museum from 3 October 2018 – 24 February 2019.

James Cahill is a writer based in London. He is the lead author of Flying Too Close to the Sun, a major new survey of classical myth in western art published by Phaidon in 2018. His book Ways of Being, an anthology of artists’ statements, was published this summer by Laurence King. In 2017 he completed a PhD at Cambridge University examining the relationship between contemporary British art and the classical tradition. He previously studied at the Courtauld Institute of Art and Oxford University. His writing has appeared in publications including Apollo, The Burlington Magazine, Elephant, The Erotic Review, Frieze, The Los Angeles Review of Books, The London Review of Books, and The Times Literary Supplement. He has authored or co-authored books on artists including Angus Fairhurst, Maggi Hambling and Richard Patterson, and has curated exhibitions at King’s College London and the Museum of Classical Archaeology, Cambridge. His PhD research led to a postdoctoral fellowship (2017-18) at King’s College London, where he helped to set up Modern Classicisms, a multidimensional research project exploring the connections between antiquity and modern art.

Flying Too Close to the Sun, by Phaidon Editors, with an introduction by James Cahill
is available from the Freud Museum Shop.

 

Curator's talk: Dawn Ades in conversation with Darian Leader

Join distinguished art historian and curator, Dawn Ades as she discusses her latest exhibition ‘Freud, Dali and the Metamorphosis of Narcissus’ with psychoanalyst Darian Leader.

Dalí was a passionate admirer of the father of psychoanalysis and finally met him in London on July 19th 1938. This year marks the 80th anniversary of this event. A new exhibition at the Freud Museum will explore the connection between the two men, starting from their one meeting, to which Dalí brought his recently completed painting The Metamorphosis of Narcissus.

The painting, on loan from the Tate, will be the central point in the exhibition for an exploration of the extensive influence of Freud on Dalí and on Surrealism. Also considered will be Freud’s own attitude to painting, illuminated by his response to this encounter with Dalí.

Part of an exciting series of talks and events which coincide with ‘Freud, Dali and the Metamorphosis of Narcissus’ on display the Museum from 3 October 2018 – 24 February 2019.

Dawn Ades is Professor Emerita of the History and Theory of Art at the University of Essex, Professor of the History of Art at the Royal Academy, a former trustee of Tate (1995-2005) and of the National Gallery (2000-2005) and a Fellow of the British Academy. In 2013 she was appointed CBE for services to higher education.

The many exhibitions she has organized or co-curated, in the UK and abroad, include Dada and Surrealism Reviewed (1978); Art in Latin America: the Modern Era 1820-1980 (1989); Dalí’s Optical Illusions (2000); Salvador Dalí: the Centenary Exhibition (2004); Undercover Surrealism: Georges Bataille and Documents (2006); Close-Up: Proximity and Defamiliarisation in Art, Photography and Film (2008); and Dalí/Duchamp, (Royal Academy and the Dalí Museum 2017-18).

Darian Leader is a psychoanalyst working in London and a member of the Centre for Freudian Analysis and Research and of The College of Psychoanalysts-UK. He is the author of several books including: ‘Why do women write more letters than they post?’; ‘Freud’s Footnotes’; ‘Stealing the Mona Lisa: What Art Stops Us From Seeing’; ‘Why do people get ill?’ (with David Corfield) , ‘The New Black: Mourning, Melancholia and Depression’, ‘What is Madness?’ , ‘Strictly Bipolar’ and ‘Hands’, and frequently about contemporary art.

Freud's Women Lisa Appignanesi in conversation with Susie Orbach

Despite Freud’s traditional views on women, psychoanalysis was one of the first professions to open its doors to them. Feminists past and present may have contested Freud’s ever-changing understandings of femininity. They have also elaborated on them. 

In this discussion, Lisa Appignanesi co-author of the now classic Freud’s Women and psychoanalyst Susie Orbach, founder of the Women’s Therapy Centre and author of that perennial bestseller Fat is A Feminist Issue explore what women past and present have contributed to psychoanalysis.

Freud's Women is held in conjunction with the Freud Museum London's winter exhibition, So This is the Strong Sex, Early Women Psychoanalysts.

ABOUT THE SPEAKERS
Lisa Appignanesi is Chair of the Royal Society of Literature and the Man Booker International Prize. Her many books include Mad, Bad and Sad: A History of Women and the Mind Doctors and Trials of Passion: Crimes in the Name of Love and Madness.

Susie Orbach is a leading psychoanalyst. Amongst her many books are Bodies and In Therapy. Founder of the Women's Therapy Centre and the Women's Therapy Centre Institute, Susie has recently received the first ever Lifetime Achievement Award from the British Psychoanalytic Council.

Conference: Solitary Pleasures in art and psychoanalysis- Open discussion end of session 4

Open Discussion 

Solitary Pleasures in art and psychoanalysis is a day-long conference to accompany Solitary Pleasures, a group exhibition at the Freud Museum.

The conference, like the exhibition, reveals masturbation as a topic that can transform our understanding of human subjectivity and sexuality. Perhaps the most common form of human eroticism, it is also one of the least theorised. The conference will explore our complex sexual, erotic, and intimate encounters with ourselves and one another by viewing masturbation as an all-inclusive practice – gay, lesbian, heterosexual, bisexual, trans, queer, +, offering possibilities of a shared exchange and an intimate encounter between couples, lovers and strangers in ways that redefine desires and eroticism’s possibilities.

Conference themes:

History – the cultural history of masturbation
Talking – masturbation in clinical practice and literature
Educating – masturbation in sexual health and wellbeing
Making – masturbation in creativity and art practice