Freud Museum London: Psychoanalysis Podcasts

Conference: Music & Psychoanalysis 1

Mark Berry: Freud, Psychoanalysis, and Schoenberg’s Operas

Arnold Schoenberg came to artistic maturity in that celebrated 'crucible of modernity' sometimes simply known as 'Freud's Vienna'. It was there and then that he resolved, not without regret, to break with tonality, to feel, as the Stefan Georg text to his 1908 Second String Quartet – the work within which he made that break – has it, the 'air of another planet'. In this lecture, I shall look in particular at two of his operas. Erwartung, his first, was written in 1909, to a text by Marie Pappenheim, a dermatologist with interest in psychoanalysis, and a relative of Josef Breuer’s ‘Anna O’. Its exploration, verbal and musical, of extreme psychological states has much to tell us concerning Schoenberg’s own concerns. Moses und Aron, Schoenberg’s final, unfinished opera was written considerably later, in the final years of Weimar Germany, prior to Schoenberg’s flight from the Third Reich. It will be considered in the light of Freud’s own Moses and Monotheism, and with particular respect to Schoenberg’s fears of idolatry. A relatively recent production, from the Vienna State Opera,  which treats the Orgy around the Golden Calf with images from modern advertising points to important questions concerning our desires and their fulfilment.

Our Strange Thoughts

David Adam in conversation with Oliver James

Have you ever had the sudden fear that you didn’t lock the back door? Or the disturbing thought of jumping in front of an oncoming train?

You are not alone. Most of us experience strange thoughts and compulsions that occur to us ‘out of the blue’. They can sometimes be distressing and embarassing, but they are also very common. For many people, they spiral into the living nightmare of obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD).

OCD is estimated to afflict roughly 750,000 people in the UK alone. But what exactly is it? Where do its characteristic thoughts and compulsions come from? And can a psychoanalytic approach shed light on this debilitating condition?

Join David Adam and Oliver James for an intimate exploration of the experience of OCD and its possible explanations.

David Adam is an award-winning journalist, formerly of the Guardian, and currently an editor at the science journal Nature. He is the author of The Man Who Couldn’t Stop, an intimate look at the power of intrusive thoughts, how our brain can turn against us and what it means to live with Obsessive-compulsive Disorder.

Oliver James is a clinical psychologist and psychotherapist. Since 1988, he has worked as a writer, journalist, broadcaster and television documentary producer and presenter. His books include the best-selling Affluenza, They F*** You Upand Love Bombing.

Part of a season of performances, talks, workshops and events accompanying the 'Festival of the Unconscious' exhibition, 24 June - 4 October 2015.

The Many Faces of 'Critical Psychotherapy'

An evening of dialogue and debate

Talks and discussion at the Anna Freud Centre exploring different notions of the term ‘critical psychotherapy’ and putting them into dialogue. This is a preliminary event to introduce the major conference on Saturday 13th June, 'Do we need a critical psychotherapy?'

Del Loewenthal - Introduction

Michael Rustin - Work in Contemporary Capitalism

Andrew Samuels - The Activist Client

Discussion

SPEAKERS' BIOGRAPHIES

Del Loewenthal is Professor of Psychotherapy and Counselling, and Director of the Research Centre for Therapeutic Education at the University of Roehampton, where he also convenes Doctoral programmes. He is an analytic psychotherapist, chartered psychologist and photographer and is founding editor of the European Journal of Psychotherapy and Counselling. He is chair of the Universities Psychotherapy and Counselling Association and former founding chair of the UK Council for Psychotherapy Research committee. Del also has small private practices in Wimbledon and Brighton. His most recent publications include Post-existentialism and the Psychological Therapies: Towards a Therapy without Foundations (2011),Phototherapy and Therapeutic Photography in a Digital Age(2013) and (with Andrew Samuels) Relational Psychotherapy, Psychoanalysis and Counselling: Appraisals and Reappraisals(2014).

Michael Rustin is a Professor of Sociology at the University of East London, where he was formerly Head of Department of Sociology and Dean of the Social Sciences Faculty. He is a Visiting Professor at the Tavistock Clinic, where he has contributed to the development of many university-accredited programmes in the field of psychotherapy and community mental health. He has written on the relations between psychoanalysis and various aspects of society, politics, and culture, and on other sociological and political topics. He is author of For a Pluralist Socialism, The Good Society and the Inner World, and Reason and Unreason: Psychoanalysis, Science and Politics, as well as Narratives of Love and Loss, and Mirror to Nature, with Margaret Rustin, and The Inner World of Doctor Who (2013) with Iain MacRury. Social Defences against Anxiety: Explorations in a Paradigm, co-edited with David Armstrong, will be published by Karnac Books in November 2014. He is an Associate of the British Psychoanalytical Society. He is a founding editor of Soundings, and an author/editor of the Kilburn Manifestohttp://www.lwbooks.co.uk/journals/soundings/manifesto.html

Andrew Samuels was chair of the UK Council for Psychotherapy and co-founder of both Psychotherapists and Counsellors for Social Responsibility and of the Alliance for Counselling and Psychotherapy. He co-founded the journalPsychotherapy and Politics International. He trained as a Jungian analyst and his pluralistic clinical approach blends post-Jungian, relational, psychoanalytic, and humanistic elements. He is Professor of Analytical Psychology at Essex and holds visiting professorships at New York, Goldsmiths, Roehampton and Macau Universities. His many books have been translated into 19 languages and include The Plural Psyche (1989), The Political Psyche (1993), Politics on the Couch (2001), Relational Psychotherapy, Psychoanalysis and Counselling (edited with Del Loewenthal, 2014), Persons, Passions, Psychotherapy, Politics (2014), and A New Therapy for Politics? (2015). His rants on many topics, including the state of the therapy world, are atwww.andrewsamuels.com

Ian Sinclair - London Overground: A Day's Walk Around the Ginger Line

Author's Talk

 

Acclaimed author, Iain Sinclair joins us to discuss his latest book London Overground - a living history of London told through a long day's hike around the London Overground route, by Britain's master psychogeographer.

Iain Sinclair's books include London Orbital, Hackney, That Rose-Red Empire, Downriver (which won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize and the Encore Award) Ghost Milk and American Smoke. He lives in Hackney, East London.

Echoing his journey in London Orbital over a decade ago, Iain Sinclair narrates his second circular walk around the capital. Shortly after rush-hour and accompanied by a rambling companion, Sinclair begins walking along London's Overground network, or, 'Ginger Line'. With characteristic playfulness, detours into folk history, withering assessments of the political classes and a joyful allegiance to the ordinary oddball, Sinclair guides us on a tour of London's trendiest new transport network - and shows the shifting, changing city from new and surprising angles.

‘He is incapable of writing a dull paragraph’ Scotland on Sunday

‘Sinclair breathes wondrous life into monstrous, man-made landscapes’ Times Literary Supplement

‘If you are drawn to English that doesn't just sing, but sings the blues and does scat and rocks the joint, try Sinclair. His sentences deliver a rush like no one else's’ Washington Post

‘If you're a Londoner and haven't read [London Orbital] by the end of next year, I suggest you leave’ Will Self, Evening Standard

London Overground is available in Hamish Hamilton hardback, 4 June 2015 priced £16.99 and as a simultaneous ebook.

CONFERENCE: Freud and Eros: Love, Lust and Longing

Part 4:

Emma Talbot: 'The Lovers (on love and intimacy in contemporary art)'

David Morgan: 'Sexual Phantasy, Mourning and Loss'

http://www.freud.org.uk/events/75826/freud-and-eros-love-lust-and-longing/

CONFERENCE: Freud and Eros: Love, Lust and Longing

Part 3:

Gigliola Fornari Spoto: 'Some Thoughts on Pleasure in the Analytical Session'

Luis Rodríguez de la Sierra: 'From the Cradle to the Couch: The Role of Pleasure in Psychic Development'

http://www.freud.org.uk/events/75826/freud-and-eros-love-lust-and-longing/

CONFERENCE: Freud and Eros: Love, Lust and Longing

Part 2:

Jane O'Grady: 'From Courtly to Romantic: The Ambivalences of Love'

Candida Yates: 'Masculinity and the Dilemmas of Love: Lust and Longing in Contemporary Cinema'

http://www.freud.org.uk/events/75826/freud-and-eros-love-lust-and-longing/

CONFERENCE: Freud and Eros: Love, Lust and Longing

Part 1: 

Lisa Appignanesi: ''All About Love' Revisited'

Miriam Leonard and Daniel Orrells: 'Freud and Greek Love'

http://www.freud.org.uk/events/75826/freud-and-eros-love-lust-and-longing/

'The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution' - Shulamith Firestone

Susie Orbach in conversation with Rachel Holmes

Join us for an evening marking the publication of a new edition of Shulamith Firestone’s groundbreaking work The Dialectic of Sex, (Verso, April 2015). This work by a then unknown 25 year old had an extraordinary impact on radical feminism when it first appeared in 1970.

Susie Orbach, psychotherapist, psychoanalyst, writer and social critic, is joined in conversation by Rachel Holmes, academic and author of the acclaimed Eleanor Marx: A Life. Together with Lisa Appignanesi, they co-edited the hotly-discussed Fifty Shades of Feminism (Virago).

Originally published in 1970, when Shulamith Firestone was just twenty-five years old, and going on to become a bestseller, The Dialectic of Sex was the first book of the women’s liberation movement to put forth a feminist theory of politics.

Beginning with a look at the radical and grassroots history of the first wave (with its foundation in the abolition movement of the time), Firestone documents its major victory, the granting of the vote to women in 1920, and the fifty years of ridicule that followed. She goes on to deftly synthesize the work of Freud, Marx, de Beauvoir, and Engels to create a cogent argument for feminist revolution. Identifying women as a caste, she declares that they must seize the means of reproduction—for as long as women (and only women) are required to bear and rear children, they will be singled out as inferior. Ultimately she presents feminism as the key radical ideology, the missing link between Marx and Freud, uniting their visions of the political and the personal.

“A must-have for those interested in feminist theory, both past and present. Its reappearance now, during yet another period of ‘ridicule’ towards women’s rights, is perhaps even more pertinent than its first publication.” – Kathleen Hanna, founding member of the riot grrrl movement

“Without so much as a single fanny joke or wacky dating anecdote, The Dialectic of Sex gripped and electrifed thousands of people, giving the so-called Second Wave of feminism much of its initial impetus and energy.” – New Statesman

“No one can understand how feminism has evolved without reading this radical, inflammatory second-wave landmark.” – Naomi Wolf

Psychoanalysis, Trauma and Military Mental Health - Part 4

Plenary Discussion

 

Recordings from the Museum's conference on Psychoanalysis, Trauma and Military Mental Health

Psychoanalysis, Trauma and Military Mental Health - Part 3

John Gale: 

A therapeutic community for traumatised veterans

 

Recordings from the Museum's conference on Psychoanalysis, Trauma and Military Mental Health

Psychoanalysis, Trauma and Military Mental Health - Part 2

Felicity de Zulueta: 

Psychological Effects of War

 

Emile Wijnans: 

Ten Years Down: An Army Psychologist’s Reflections

Recordings from the Museum's conference on Psychoanalysis, Trauma and Military Mental Health

Psychoanalysis, Trauma and Military Mental Health - Part 1

Michael Molnar: 

Lingering Trauma: Freud's War with Psychiatry

Tom Harrison: 

Strange Meetings at Northfield: Dilemmas of Psychiatry at War

 

Recordings from the Museum's conference on Psychoanalysis, Trauma and Military Mental Health

Love: A Guide for Amateurs

An informal and loving discussion

 

This event will be an informal and loving discussion between amateurs on the subject of love. Using different aspects of love in Greek philosophy - agápe, éros, philía, and storgē - and Freud’s conceptualisations of Eros, we will think about why it’s so difficult to love.

Download the free 'Love: a guide for amateurs' e-book here >

David Morgan will look at the profound experiences we face with intimacy, in learning deeply about ourselves.

Candida Yates will look at ‘new intimacies’ in our representations of love, jealousy and flirtation in popular culture.

Matt Gieve and Milena Stateva will think about love as the interplay between emancipation and resistance in an economic view in contemporary notions of love.

 

Steve Fuller will ask, as the sphere of human concern extends beyond Homo sapiens to other animals and even machines, is our capacity for agape, a ‘higher love’ increased as well?

 

Yiannis Gabriel will look at what happens when all love is sucked out of a community in the grip of a contagious pathogen which dissolves bonds of solidarity and trust among its members.

 

Marianna Fotaki will talk about the link between a culture of compulsive consumerism and toxic attachments and propose an ethics of relationality and compassionate care.

 

The event will be managed compassionately by Elizabeth Cotton and will include publication of an eBook and online activities #loveamateurs in the run up to the event to find out what you really want to know about love.

 

Biographies:

 

David Morgan is a consultant psychotherapist and psychoanalyst NHS and private practice. Training analyst/therapist and supervisor for the British Psychoanalytic Association and British Psychotherapy Foundation, and a Fellow of the British Psychoanalytical Society. He is Hon. Lecturer at City University, London. Director of (PiP) Public interest Psychology. He provides consultation to the public and private sector, including organisations of a political and social nature, and is a regular speaker at conferences. He enjoys lecturing and teaching and has contributed to radio programmes on Whistleblowing, Van Gogh(Radio 4) and the Political Mind(ABC). Recently he has lectured on Narcissism (London School of Economics), Poetry; Hypnotism; Louise Bourgeois (Freud Museum) Perversion (City University), Whistleblowing and Dissent, (Institute of Psychoanalysis & Wessex Training Oxford). Sleep Paralysis (Dana Centre), and War States (UCL). He has recently published in the New Internationalist. He was co-editor with Stan Ruszczynski of Lectures on Violence, Perversion, and Delinquency (Karnac, 2007).

 

Marianna Fotaki is Professor of Business Ethics at Warwick Business School, University of Warwick, and holds a visiting professorship in Manchester Business School. She is a graduate of medicine, public health, and obtained a PhD in public policy from the London School of Economics and Political Science. Before joining academia Marianna worked as EU resident adviser and as a medical doctor for Médecins Sans Frontières and Médecins Du Monde for eight years.

 

Milena Stateva is Senior Researcher and Consultant at the Tavistock Institute. She deploys rigour from social and political thought, British psychoanalysis, group relations, critical and deconstructive theory, and qualitative research in sociology. Her recent work supports those working on vulnerability and trauma across differences - understanding Roma as a trans-national minority, working with systemic blockages surrounding welcoming migrants and challenges to migration (human trafficking, mental health, detention, etc), and empowering parents. Milena's project for the year ahead is the Tavistock Institute Academia, a new professional development offer prioritising reflectivity rather than the transfer of knowledge and skills.

 

Steve Fuller is Auguste Comte Professor of Social Epistemology in the Department of Sociology at the University of Warwick. The author of twenty books, his most recent work focuses on the future of humanity. He has two new books being published this year: Knowledge: The Philosophical Quest in History (Acumen) and, with Veronika Lipinska, The Proactionary Imperative: A Foundation for Transhumanism (Palgrave).

 

Candida Yates is Professor in Communications at Bournemouth University and is a Director (with Caroline Bainbridge) of the AHRC Media and the Inner World research network. She has published widely on the themes of popular culture, psychoanalysis and emotion and is an Editor of Karnac Book Series: Psychoanalysis and Popular Culture. Her recent publications include: Television and Psychoanalysis: Psycho-Cultural Approaches (co-edited, Karnac Books, 2013); Media and the Inner World: Psycho-Cultural Approaches to Emotion, Media and Popular Culture (co-edited, Palgrave Macmillan, 2014); The Play of Political Culture, Emotion and Identity (Palgrave Macmillan, forthcoming).

 

Yiannis Gabriel is Chair of Organisation Studies at Bath University. His current research includes work on the importance of an ethic of care in health and education, the dark side of certain organizations captured in the concept of miasma, the relation between image and narrative and the exploration of the ways in which clinicians defend themselves against work-related anxieties. He writes and works with storytelling and is co-founder and co-ordinator of the Organizational Storytelling Seminar series, now in its ninth year. Most recently he has carried out research into the experiences of unemployed managers and professionals in the current economic recession.

 

Elizabeth Cotton is a Senior Lecturer at Middlesex University Business School. Her academic background is in political philosophy and current writing includes precarious work and employment relations, activism and mental health at work. She has worked as an activist and educator in over thirty countries, working with trade unions and Global Union Federations at senior level. Some of this work is reflected in her co-authored publication, Global Unions Global Business, described as “the essential guide to global trade unionism”. Elizabeth lived and worked abroad until returning to the UK in 2007 to write and start the process of training in adult psychotherapy. She is founding director of The Resilience Space and runs the Surviving Work Library, a free online resource on how to actually do it.

 

Matthew Gieve is a researcher and consultant at the Tavistock Institute of Human Relations. He graduated in politics and philosophy and holds a Masters in psychoanalytic theory from University College London. He works in applied social research across a wide range of fields, centering on issues of social exclusion with a particular focus on children and families and on mental health.

Paper with Sacred Signs: Love Letters of Sigmund Freud

Michael Molnar

All lovers reinvent love - after their fashion. Sigmund Freud and Martha Bernays were no exception. In over 1,500 love letters from 1882 to 1886 they lavishly documented their long engagement, its joys, tribulations and misunderstandings. Their newly-published correspondence paints an amazingly detailed day-to-day picture of the engaged couple’s lives and thoughts. At first sight it seems too much to take in. An encyclopaedic welter of information threatens to overwhelm us. Michael Molnar’s talk will blaze some trails through this unknown territory.

Michael Molnar worked at the Freud Museum London from its opening in 1986 until 2009, first as researcher/archivist, then as Director. He edited and translated The Diary of Sigmund Freud 1929-39 (Chatto, 1992). His latest publication is Looking through Freud's Photos (Karnac, 2014).

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

The Rest is Silence

A Staged Reading of Selected Letters between Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung - followed by a panel discussion 

 

This staged reading of selected letters between Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung is the first performance in Britain of a project which originated in the US. The project arose from a desire to foster a dialogue between Freudian and Jungian communities, and has been performed to great acclaim.

 

The text – extracts from the letters between Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung, tracing their complex, eventually doomed, relationship - will be spoken by actors.  This will be followed by a discussion between a truly distinguished panel: one of the project’s originators Margaret Klenck, the historian Sonu Shamdasani, and Christopher Hauke, Dany Nobus, and Stephen Gross, writers and analysts.

 

Margaret Klenck is a Jungian Analyst in private practice in New York City.  She is a graduate from the C.G. Jung Institute of New York, and holds a Masters of Divinity from Union Theological Seminary. Margaret is the previous past President of the Jungian Psychoanalytic Association in New York, where she also teaches and supervises. She is also a member and on the faculty of the Philadelphia Association of Jungian Analysts. Margaret has lectured and taught nationally and internationally.

 

Sonu Shamdasani is an academic, author and leading Jung scholar and biographer. He is a professor at University College London, and Director of the UCL Centre for the History of Psychological Disciplines. He is the editor and co-translator of C. G. Jung’s The Red Book: Liber Novus (Norton, 2009), and has written and published many books on Jung.

 

Christopher Hauke is a Jungian analyst, a senior lecturer in psychoanalytic studies at Goldsmiths, University of London, a writer, broadcaster and film-maker. His most recent book, Visible Mind: Movies, Modernity and the Unconscious, was published in 2013.

 

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. His play, Freud's Night Visitors, has been performed twice at The Freud Museum London.

 

Dany Nobus is Professor of Psychology and Psychoanalysis, and Pro-Vice-Chancellor for Development and External Relations at Brunel University London, where he also directs the MA Programme in Psychoanalysis and Contemporary Society. He is the Chair of the Freud Museum London, and has published numerous books and papers on the history, theory and practice of psychoanalysis.

 

Sigmund Freud is performed by Gerald Davidson, actor and researcher. Gerald has written and staged several presentations at the Freud Museum, including What Little Hans Knew and Aichhorn and Anna.

Carl Gustav Jung: Avant-Garde Conservative, texts and contexts

Jay Sherry - talk followed by discussion with Gary Lachman

Carl Gustav Jung has always been a popular but never a fashionable thinker. His ground-breaking theories about dream interpretation and psychological types have often been overshadowed by charges that he was anti-Semitic and a Nazi sympathizer.

In his pioneering work on Carl Gustav Jung, author Jay Sherry took a fresh look at all aspects of his life and work, and considered the allegations against Jung in the broader context of his views on culture, politics, and race. In doing so, he provides a carefully considered, historically informed perspective on a figure whose legacy has been misunderstood by admirers and detractors alike.

Carl Gustav Jung: Avant-Garde Conservative by Jay Sherry won the Gradiva Award for Best Book from the National Association for the Advancement of Psychoanalysis in 2011

Jay Sherry is an independent historian of psychoanalysis and German intellectual history. He has lectured widely and written for a variety of psychoanalytic publications, primarily about the life and work of Carl Jung. He holds a PhD from the Freie Universität Berlin, and lives in New York.

Gary Lachman is the author of several books linking consciousness, culture, and the western esoteric tradition, including Jung the Mystic: The Esoteric Dimensions of Carl Jung's Life and Teaching (Tarcher/Penguin 2010). Lachman writes frequently for many journals in the US and UK, and lectures on his work in the US, UK, and Europe. His work has been translated into several languages.

Being Good: Aichhorn and Anna

Performance: Gerald Davidson with Helen Clapp.

To celebrate Anna Freud 's birthday and the recently renovated Anna Freud Room, actor and researcher Gerald Davidson revisits his presentation first performed at the Anna Freud Centre in 2009. Helen Clapp returns as Anna Freud.

Easter 1948, Lausanne: Reunited for the first time since 1938, Anna Freud and August Aichhorn reminisce.

'Aichhorn 's death is a kind of full stop at the end of a great chapter in psychoanalysis...'

Anna Freud, November 1949

Mildly Erotic Verse

Join the Emma Press for an evening of poetry inspired by The Emma Press Anthology of Mildly Erotic Verse. Three poets will read poems which celebrate human sexuality in all its messy, sexy glory and explore the eccentricity and diversity of eroticism, followed by a discussion about eroticism in poetry. The event will be hosted by publisher Emma Wright and the poets will be available to sign books afterwards.

This late opening event is part of a wide ranging and imaginative public programme of events, talks, films and performances accompanying the exhibition 'Freud and Eros: Love, Lust and Longing' - 22 October 2014 - 8 March 2015.

The Emma Press is an independent publisher dedicated to producing books which are sweet, funny and beautiful. It was founded by Emma Wright in 2012 and the first anthology, The Emma Press Anthology of Mildly Erotic Verse, was published in September 2013, followed by a national tour of supported by Arts Council England. The Press publishes a mixture of themed poetry anthologies (with themes including homesickness, female friendship and ageing) and single-author pamphlets, with an ongoing engagement with the works of the Roman poet Ovid.

About the poets

Ruth Wiggins lives in East London with her partner and their three sons. Her work has been commended by Alice Oswald and David Morley in recent competitions and her debut pamphlet, Myrtle, is publishing with The Emma Press in November 2014. She enjoys photography; and a book of her photographs of women dressed as super heroes, Wonder Women of America, was published in 2008. She is a member of Tideway and Forest Poets.

Stephen Sexton lives in Belfast, where he studies at the Seamus Heaney Centre for Poetry. His poems have appeared in Poetry London, The Honest Ulsterman, Poetry Ireland Review, The Ulster Tatler, and as part of the Lifeboat Series of readings based in Belfast. He was the winner of the inaugural FSNI National Poetry Competition and his first pamphlet, Oils , is publishing with The Emma Press in October 2014.

Kirsten Irving is half of the team behind collaborative poetry press Sidekick Books. Her poetry has been shortlisted for the Forward and Bridport Prizes, translated into Russian and Spanish and thrown out of a helicopter. Her pamphlet, What to Do, was published by HappenStance in 2011 and her first full collection, Never Never Never Come Back, was published by Salt in 2012.

Animal Madness: How anxious dogs, compulsive parrots, and elephants in recovery help us to understand ourselves

Author's Talk: Laurel Braitman

Charles Darwin developed his evolutionary theories by looking at physical differences in Galapagos finches and fancy pigeons. Alfred Russell Wallace investigated a range of creatures in the Malay Archipelago. Laurel Braitman got her lessons closer to home—by watching her dog. Oliver snapped at flies that only he could see, ate Ziploc bags, towels, and cartons of eggs. He suffered debilitating separation anxiety, was prone to aggression, and may even have attempted suicide. Her experience with Oliver forced Laurel to acknowledge a form of continuity between humans and other animals that, first as a biology major and later as a PhD student at MIT, she’d never been taught in school. Nonhuman animals can lose their minds. And when they do, it often looks a lot like human mental illness.

‘A gem ... that can teach us much about the wildness of our own minds’ — Psychology Today

‘A lovely, big-hearted book’ — The New York Times

LAUREL BRAITMAN has written about science, animals and other topics for Cabinet, Orion, The New Inquiry and other publications. She received her PhD in history and anthropology of science from MIT and is an affiliate artist at the Headlands Center for the Arts, and a TED fellow. She lives on a houseboat in Sausalito, California.

Freud and Eros: Love, Lust and Longing - Curator's talk: Dr Janine Burke

The god of love is one of the best represented deities in Freud's impressive collection of antiquities. Join Dr Burke, the exhibition's curator, as she discusses the profound connections between classical Greek culture, the artworks collected by Freud and the development of psychoanalysis. Freud understood the god well: Eros could spark the civilizing force of love that resulted in fulfilling relationships as well as unleashing turbulent, unbridled and destructive emotions. Dr Burke will also draw on Freud's personal experience of Eros in his passionate courtship of his future wife Martha Bernays.

Dr Janine Burke is the author of The Gods of Freud: Sigmund Freud's Art Collection (2006). She is Adjunct Lecturer, School of Languages, Literatures, Cultures and Linguistics, Monash University, Melbourne.

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

Know Your Enemy: Images of the Enemy in Propaganda in the Twentieth Century - David Welch

David Welch will discuss how one of the most striking means by which different propaganda media have influenced social and political attitudes, changing or reinforcing them has been through the use of stereotypes - conventional figures that have come to be regarded as representative of particular classes, races, nations, etc. Drawing largely from the experience of war or conflict, the talk will use propaganda artefacts such as pamphlets, postcards, cartoons, film and TV.

David Welch is Professor of Modern History & Director of the Centre for the Study of War, Propaganda & Society at the University of Kent. His publications include The Third Reich: Politics, and Propaganda (Routledge, 2002), Hitler: Profile of a Dictator (Routledge, 2001), Propaganda and the German Cinema, 1933-1945 (OUP, 1983 revised edition I.B.Tauris, 2001), Propaganda and Mass Persuasion: A Historical Encyclopedia from 1500 to the Present [with D. Culbert and N. Cull] (ABC Clio, 2003), Justifying War: Propaganda, Politics and the Modern Age [with Jo Fox] (Palgrave, 2012) and he edited contributed two chapters to a festschrift for Philip Taylor, Propaganda. From World War 1 to WikiLeaks (I.B.Tauris, 2013). In 2013, he co-curated the successful British Library exhibition, ‘Propaganda: Power and Persuasion’ and authored the accompanying book of the same name (British Library, 2013) His latest book published in August is, Germany and Propaganda in World War I. Pacifism, Mobilization and Total War (I.B. Tauris, 2014). He is currently writing a history of propaganda in the Second World War, World War II Propaganda. Documents Decoded (ABC-Clio, 2015) and he has contributed to the Oxford Illustrated History of World War II (OUP, 2015).

This talk is part of a series of events accompanying the exhibition 'Why War', 6 August - 19 October 2014.

The Fog of Peace: Gabrielle Rifkind and Giandomenico Picco in conversation with John McCarthy

As part of the Museum's Why War? exhibition Gabrielle Rifkind and Giandomenico Picco the recent authors of The Fog of Peace: The Human Face of Conflict Resolution will be in conversation with journalist, writer and broadcaster, John McCarthy.

In their thought provoking and important book, the authors of The Fog of Peace stress the importance of getting into the mind of the other, however difficult that is.

In 1991 former UN official Giandomenico Picco negotiated the release of John McCarthy and others held hostage by Hezbollah in Lebanon, allowing himself to be abducted from the streets of Beirut to meet with the leadership of the kidnappers in the process. In these encounters he had a deep commitment to understanding the human mind and what motivates it, and to asking questions as to why people behave in particular ways. He understood that behind every face there was a human story, indeed more than one, there was a life and there were hopes and aspirations, fears and anger, hatred and pain.

John McCarthy says of The Fog of Peace '"This remarkable and refreshing book offers an extremely practical new approach to finding a path through the fogs of war and peace. The authors argue that using the tool of empathy and getting into the mind of the enemy is not appeasement. This book is anything but soft and cuddly, it is based on a deep understanding of politics in its most brutal forms".

The conversation will offer the opportunity to explore the difficulties and opportunities for making peace. In today’s fractured world.

Gabrielle Rifkind is the director of the Middle East programme at Oxford Research Group. She is a group analyst and specialist in conflict resolution immersed in the politics of the Middle East. Rifkind combines in-depth political and psychological expertise with many years’ experience in promoting serious analysis and discreet dialogues with groups behind the scenes.

Giandomenico Picco served as under-secretary general of the United Nations and was personal representative of the secretary general for the United Nation year of dialogue amongst civilisations. He led the task force negotiations to end the Iran-Iraq war and the freedom of Western hostages from Lebanon. Over decades he helped securing the freedom of over 100 individuals unjustly detained from 4 different countries.

John Patrick McCarthy CBE is a British journalist, writer and broadcaster, and one of the hostages in the Lebanon hostage crisis. McCarthy was Britain's longest-held hostage in Lebanon, being held for more than five years.

Shell Shock, Emotional Resilience and the Cultural Memory of the First World War: A Literary Perspective

Dr Jessica Meyer

 

Dorothy L. Sayers's 1928 novel 'The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club' is, as the title hints, a novel about war. At its centre are two brothers, George, who was gassed in the First World War and sufferers from shell shock in its aftermath, and Robert, a Regular army officer who was 'a jolly fine soldier'. Although presented as two individuals, these two characters represent two sides of the same coin, namely inverse psychological responses to the experience of war. George's shell shock is a classic flight into illness, while Robert's emotional resilience that borders on callousness. In this lecture, Dr Meyer will explore Sayers's representation of these two characters in detail, locating them in both developing understandings of war trauma and British cultural memory of the First World War.  In doing so, she hopes to shed new light on how shell shock has become the dominant symbolic wound of the war in British culture, shaping both our historical understanding of the war and our current commemorative practices.

This talk is part of a series of events accompanying the exhibition 'Why War',  6 August - 19 October 2014.

Michelangelo's Moses-Idol: "Renaissance" as Return of the Repressed

Nathanael Price

 

“Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image, or any likeness of any thing [...] Thou shalt not bow down thyself to them, nor serve them: for I the lord thy God am a jealous God.” Exodus, 20:4-5

“And well may the Jews go, as they do each Sabbath […] to visit and adore [the Moses of Michelangelo], since it is not something human, but divine that they adore.”

Giorgio Vasari, Vita di Michelangelo Buonarroti, 1550

“No piece of statuary has ever made a stronger impression on me than this.”

Sigmund Freud, The Moses of Michelangelo, 1914

In Vasari’s account of Michelangelo’s famous Moses, he describes how the contemporary Roman Jews abandoned their religious observances to “visit and adore” the statue of their own iconoclastic lawgiver on the tomb of Pope Julius II. The circumstances of this (imaginary) conversion – wherein the Jews establish their own image-cult of Moses – seems to epitomise the Freudian concept of the return of the repressed; the “inexorable” rule by which repressed psychic or cultural material (in this case idolatrous worship) re-emerges through the very agent of repression; here, the forbidding figure of Moses, destroyer of the Golden Calf.

Vasari’s story might be a fiction, but he recognised something inherent in Michelangelo’s statue; something that Freud himself would not admit when, four centuries later, he retraced the steps of the imaginary Jewish pilgrims. The idea of this talk – a centenary response to Freud’s essay, “The Moses of Michelangelo” – is that his concept of repression has unexploited potential as a tool for understanding not only the Moses, but Renaissance art and culture in more general terms. There is evidence, moreover, that Michelangelo and his contemporaries were as conscious of the cultural mechanisms of repression and recurrence as was Freud himself.

Nathanael Price is an academic art historian, now working on an AHRC-funded doctoral research project at University College London. His general research interest is in the historical interpretation and cultural legacy of the Mosaic image prohibition, and in particular the intersection between Jewish and Christian visual cultures in Renaissance Italy; areas in which he finds Freudian psychoanalytic theory has unexploited potential.

Psychoanalytic Poetry Festival 2015: Memory and Memorialisation

Sam Willetts 

'Time Present and Time Past'*

In conversation with Ellie Roberts, discussing poetry and transgenerational transmission of trauma, nameless dread, and the presence of an absent object.

*TS Eliot, Burnt Norton

Psychoanalytic Poetry Festival 2015: Memory and Memorialisation

Five distinguished poets explore themes of memory and memorialisation in their work through talks, readings and conversations with psychoanalysts and psychotherapists.

Denise Riley 

'Stopped Time and Rhyme'

I will say something, and read a couple of poems, about rhyme’s relation to temporality, and how this links to that feeling of ‘time stopped’ that you might inhabit after someone’s unexpected death.

 

John Glenday

The Lost Boy

The history of the First World War has been a subject of ongoing fascination for Glenday. He will offer personal perspectives on how poetry can redeem people from history, and perform new poems inspired by the conflict, including ‘The Big Push’, and ‘The Lost Boy’ which tells the true story of his Uncle Alexander, who departed for war aged only 15, and who died in the Battle of the Sambre on November 4th 1918, the same battle as Wilfred Owen.

Psychoanalytic Poetry Festival 2015: Memory and Memorialisation

Five distinguished poets explore themes of memory and memorialisation in their work through talks, readings and conversations with psychoanalysts and psychotherapists.

David Constantine

'So many without memento...'*

in conversation Gerry Byrne

*David Jones from In Parenthesis

Psychoanalytic Poetry Festival 2015: Memory and Memorialisation

Five distinguished poets explore themes of memory and memorialisation in their work through talks, readings and conversations with psychoanalysts and psychotherapists.

Stephen Wilson

Re-membering Isaac Rosenberg

 

Deryn Rees-Jones

Remembering and imagining: The Case of Helen Thomas

Helen Thomas, the wife of the poet Edward Thomas, wrote two memoirs after her husband's death in 1917. Deryn Rees-Jones explores her own response to Helen's life, marriage and widowhood in discussion with Judith Palmer. There will also be a showing of the animation 'And You, Helen', made by the artist Charlotte Hodes to accompany Edward Thomas's poem, and the book of the same name by the artist and Deryn Rees-Jones, published by Seren Books.

Contemporary Art at the Freud Museum

Dr Joanne Morra 

Part of Inside Out Festival 2014

The Freud Museum London is internationally recognized as one of the most important sites for the history of psychoanalysis. Perhaps less well-known is the fact that over the past 25 years it has hosted over 70 contemporary art exhibitions by celebrated artists such as Louise Bourgeois, Sophie Calle, Matt Collishaw, Vera Frenkel and Sarah Lucas.

What is the purpose of these exhibitions? How do these artistic interventions animate the Museum? What can they tell us about psychoanalysis and contemporary art? Looking at selected previous exhibitions, as well as the forthcoming ‘Freud and Eros: Love, Lust and Longing’, this talk will address these questions and others.

Dr Joanne Morra is Reader in Art History and Theory at Central Saint Martins and a Founding Principal Editor of Journal of Visual Culture. Joanne has published widely on modern and contemporary art, critical theory and psychoanalytic theory and practice. Recently she curated the exhibition Saying It, with work by Mieke Bal & Michelle Williams Gamaker, and Renate Ferro at the Freud Museum, London (2012). Joanne is presently completing the book Inside the Freud Museums: Art, Curating and Site-Responsivity (I.B. Tauris, 2015).

This lecture is part of Inside Out Festival 2014 and one of a wide ranging and imaginative public programme of events, talks, films and performances which accompanies the exhibition 'Freud and Eros: Love, Lust and Longing', 22 October - 22 February 2015. 

Every cloud has a silver lining: Renata Salecl in conversation with Patrizio Di Massimo

Di Massimo and Salecl analyse recent projects of Di Massimo's art practice such as ‘The Lustful Turk’ (2012/13), ‘Me Mum Mister Mad’ (2014) and his recent show at Rowing. The discussion will explore these projects under the lens of Salecl’s psychoanalytic approach, especially focusing on her essay ‘Love and Sexual Difference’ published in Sexuation (2000), a book of essays on Lacan's theories of sexual difference. The conversation will then evolve towards Salecl's last books, On Anxiety (2004) and Tyranny of Choice (2010), discussing the different approaches these works give rise to in contemporary artistic practice today.

The Construction of Memory 3: Dany Nobus & Sharon Kivland

Dany Nobus: It's a Poor Sort of Memory that Only Works Backwards

In this paper, I will argue that the controversial issue concerning the truth value of human memories is in itself a false debate. With reference to the reality of the event that is being recalled, memories are always by definition false. In terms of the subjective experience of the one who is remembering, they are always by definition true. Hence, from a psychoanalytic perspective memories are always simultaneously objectively false and subjectively true, and this can be the starting point for a re-evaluation of Freud's significance for contemporary 'scientific' discussions on the substance and function of memory.

 

Sharon Kivland: Last Year

I am trying to remember a film. It is film about the construction of memory (I think), as it might take place during a psychoanalysis, though I have only half an hour today rather than several years. I have watched the film, as I have done many times before, since 1970 in fact; this time, for a week, trying not to fall asleep at the point I have fallen asleep in it for the last forty-three years. Each time I have awoken, I have tried to remember what I saw last, before I slept. This is a film reconstructed through memory. This is a screen memory. In a series of flashbacks, I try to go back to a founding moment – I do not believe this to be true, but it still works.

 

Alasdair Hopwood: Closing Remarks

 

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

The Construction of Memory 2: Martin Conway & Chris French

Martin Conway: False Memories in the Remembering-Imaging System

What do memories represent? At best they represent some fragments derived from our experience of a past event. That ‘experience’ may have intersected with ‘reality’ to some degree. So the fragments preserved in memory derive from our experience of reality, also to some degree. The brain non-consciously and automatically ‘fills in’, by making unconscious inferences, much of the detail of a ‘memory’. Memories are constructed in the remembering-imaging system (RIS), where future events are also imagined, as well alternative pasts. In this paper I consider how errors and false memories can arise in the RIS for past and future events.

 

Chris French: Memory for Trauma

This talk will present an overview of research investigating the nature of memory for traumatic events with a particular focus upon examining the Freudian notion of repression. The idea that the experience of trauma often results in the automatic and involuntary repression of memories into the unconscious mind is critically assessed and the risk that the search for such memories can result in the production of false memories is discussed.

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

The Psychic Home: Psychoanalysis, Consciousness and the Human Soul

Author's Talk: Roger Kennedy with Josh Cohen

Roger Kennedy, psychoanalyst, former president of The British Psychoanalytical Society and author of Twelve books including The Many Voices of Psychoanalysis (Routledge, 2007), discusses his latest publication The Psychic Home: Psychoanalysis of Consciousness and the Human Soul (Routledge, 2014) with Josh Cohen, psychoanalyst, Professor of Modern Literary Theory at Goldsmiths University of London and author of the acclaimed The Private Life: Why We Remain in the Dark (Granta, 2013).

The Psychic Home: Psychoanalysis of Consciousness and the Human Soul develops, from a number of different viewpoints, the significance of home in our lives. Roger Kennedy puts forward the central role of what he has termed a ‘psychic home’ as a vital psychic structure, which gathers together a number of different human functions. Kennedy questions what we mean by the powerfully evocative notion of the human soul, which has important links to the notion of home and he suggests that what makes us human is that we allow a home for the soul.

Insightful, enlightening and broad reaching, The Psychic Home brings the concept of the soul centre stage as an entity that is elemental, an essence, irreducible, and what makes us human as subjects of experience. Essential reading for psychoanalysts, psychotherapists, neuroscientists, philosophers and those interested in spirituality and religion.

Not Gentle Creatures: Psychoanalysis and the Legacy of the Third Reich

Emily A. Kuriloff 

During the 1930s and 1940s, European psychoanalysts held fast to their professional identities despite a profoundly destabilizing reality. From Budapest to Paris the Nazis disrupted the work of this group and threatened their very lives. That psychoanalysis endured, and even flourished in postwar Europe and the Americas, is itself remarkable. And yet, in the end, the 20th century belonged as much to Freud as it did to Hitler.

In her recent book Psychoanalysis and the Legacy of the Third Reich Emily Kuriloff explores the myriad ways in which theory and praxis – and thus the course of psychoanalysis – has been and continues to be influenced by this history. In tonight’s talk she will focus particularly on the British experience before and after the Second World War.

Kuriloff’s work leans heavily on personal interviews conducted with analysts who lived during the period, and who frequented the Freud house in Hampstead, consulting and commiserating with their displaced leader and his daughter and heir apparent, Anna. Their narratives bring an immediacy and nuance to a terrible and auspicious time.

Emily A. Kuriloff is a Psychologist and Psychoanalyst. She is in private practice in New York City and she is Training and Supervising Psychoanalyst at the William Alanson White Institute, New York.

At Home with Ernst Freud, architect son of Sigmund Freud

Volker M. Welter 

Freud. The name is synonymous with psychoanalysis. Lesser known, however, is Ernst Freud, the architect son of Sigmund who designed modern homes for mainly bourgeois clients. Freud attended Adolf Loos’s private Bauschule in Vienna, practiced in Berlin after the Great War, and, from 1933 onwards, in London. The talk will focus on Freud’s modern architecture in London, which will be compared with examples from his time in Berlin. The talk will also present Ernst Freud’s designs of psychoanalytic consulting rooms and couches; the son of the founder of psychoanalysis was one of the first architects to design this type of professional space.

Volker M. Welter is an architectural historian who has lived, studied, and worked in Germany, Scotland, and England, and is now a Professor for Californian and European modern architectural history and theory at the Department of the History of Art and Architecture, University of California at Santa Barbara. His publications include Biopolis—Patrick Geddes and the City of Life (Cambridge, Ma.: MIT Press, 2002), Ernst L. Freud, Architect: The Case of the Modern Bourgeois Home (Oxford/New York: Berghahn, 2012). He is currently working on a book entitled Tremaine Houses: A Study in mid-twentieth-century Patronage of Modern American Architecture.

Fairbairn and the Object Relations Tradition 9: Closing Group Discussion

Co-chairs: Graham Clarke, Ivan Ward and David Scharff

Fairbairn and the Object Relations Tradition 8: Groups, Social Issues and the Social Unconscious

Chairs: David Scharff and Earl Hopper

Julian Lousada: Psychoanalysis Goes to Market?

Stephen Frosh: What Passes, Passes By: Why the Psychosocial is not (Just) Relational

Ron Aviram: The Large Group in Mind (With Special Reference to Prejudice, War and Terrorism)

Fairbairn and the Object Relations Tradition 7

Chair: James Poulton

Ruben Basili: Recent Work from Argentina's Espacio Fairbairn

Recording: Reflections on Fairbairn from Otto Kernberg and John Sutherland

Hilary Beattie: Fairbairn and Homosexuality: Personal Struggles amid Psychoanalytic Controversy

Discussion

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

Fairbairn and the Object Relations Tradition 6

Chair: Graham Clarke

Eleanore Armstrong-Perlman: The Zealots and the Blind: Sexual Abuse Scandals from Freud to Fairbairn

Carlos Rodriquez-Still: Fairbairn's Contribution to Understanding Personality Disorders

Valerie Sinason: Abuse, Trauma and Multiplicity

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

Fairbairn and the Object Relations Tradition 5: Psychic Growth

Chair: Jill Scharff

Lesley Caldwell: Being at Home with One's Self: The Condition of Psychic Aliveness?

Anne Alvarez: Paranoid-Schizoid Position or Paranoid and Schizoid Positions?

Graham Clarke: Psychic Growth and Creativity

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

Fairbairn and the Object Relations Tradition 4

Chair: Carlos Rodriguez-Sutil

Joseph Schwartz: Fairbairn and the Good Object: A bone of contention

Molly Ludlam: Fairbairn and the Couple: Still a Creative Threesome?

Jill Scharff: Fairbairn's Clinical Theory (edited)

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

Fairbairn and the Object Relations Tradition 3

Chair: David Scharff

Steven Levine: Fairbairn's Theory of the Visual Arts and its Influence

Jonathan Sklar: Discussion of Steven Levine's Presentation

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

Fairbairn and the Object Relations Tradition 2

Chair: Lea Sutton

Marie Hoffman: Fairbairn and Religion

James Poulton: Philosophical Foundations of Fairbairn

Gal Gerson: Hegelian Themes in Fairbairn's Work

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

Fairbairn and the Object Relations Tradition 1: Internalization and the Status of Internal Objects

Chair: Aleksandar Dimitrijevic

 

Norka Malberg: On Being Recognized

Viviane Green: Internal Objects: Fantasy, Experience and History Intersecting?

David Scharff: Internal Objects and Internal Experience

 

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

Miroslaw Balka and James Putnam in conversation

DIE TRAUMDEUTUNG 75,32m AMSL

Artist Miroslaw Balka discusses his exhibition DIE TRAUMDEUTUNG 75,32m AMSL with exhibition Curator, James Putnam.

DIE TRAUMDEUTUNG 75,32m AMSL, is an exhibition of new site-specific works by Polish artist Miroslaw Balka. The exhibition title is a reference in German to Freud's key work The Interpretation of Dreams (1899), while the measurement in metres refers to the exact geographical height above mean sea level of The Freud Museum.

The exhibition is the latest in the critically acclaimed ongoing series of Freud Museum exhibitions curated by James Putnam that have included projects by Sophie Calle, Mat Collishaw, Sarah Lucas, Ellen Gallagher, Tim Noble & Sue Webster and Oliver Clegg.

DIE TRAUMDEUTUNG 75,32m AMSL will run concurrently with DIE TRAUMDEUTUNG 25,31m AMSL, at White Cube Mason's Yard.

The exhibition is kindly supported by White Cube and The Polish Cultural Institute.

Making Sense of Dementia 2: Making a present of the past

PENNY GARNER is Founder and Clinical Director at Contented Dementia Trust. Penny’s work began as a direct result of her earlier experience gained whilst caring for her mother Dorothy, who was suffering from dementia. She then launched SPECAL as an independent charity based in the old community hospital in 2002, with the aim of promoting lifelong well-being for people with dementia. Penny has developed and refined a dedicated method of managing dementia called SPECAL, underpinned by the Photograph Album – an accessible tool to explain how memory works, the impact of ageing and a significant change introduced by dementia. It is described in detail in Contented Dementia, the best-selling book by Oliver James. Penny now lectures both at home and abroad and is currently developing a full Practitioner Training Programme to ensure her knowledge, skills and experience are passed onto others for the future.

Making Sense of Dementia 1: Preservation of emotion-based learning despite profound amnesia

OLIVER TURNBULL is a neuropsychologist and a clinical psychologist, Professor at the Centre for Cognitive Neuroscience, and Pro Vice-Chancellor at Bangor University. He is the immediate past Editor of the Journal Neuropsychoanalysis, as well as Secretary of the International Neuropsychoanalysis Society, founded with the aim of reconciling psychoanalytic and neuroscientific perspectives on the mind. He was the recipient of the Clifford Yorke Prize in 2004. With Mark Solms, he wrote a book The Brain and the Inner World: An Introduction to the Neuroscience of Subjective Experience (2002) published by Karnac and was a contributing editor to From the Couch to the Lab: Trends in Psychodynamic Neuroscience (2012) published by Oxford University Press.

A Writers' Conversation: Lisa Appignanesi and Ruth Padel

In her study of women and the mind doctors 'Mad, Bad and Sad' and in her belle époque novel, 'Paris Requiem', Lisa Appignanesi draws on the same historical sources of inspiration. The Salpetriere Asylum in Paris, hysteria, as well as understandings of psychiatry and psychoanalysis inform her work across the genres, even her family memoir 'Losing the Dead'. In several of her works - the novel 'Where the Serpent Lives', the conservation memoir 'Tigers in Red Weather', and the poems, 'The Mara Crossing' - poet and writer, Ruth Padel also explores the same fount of material. What is it that so fascinates them about their subjects that they leave a residue to be treated in different forms of writing? And how does genre and form affect the way the 'real' is understood. 

The audio on this file was salvaged from a faulty recording. Because of this, the sound quality is lower than usual.

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.

The Madness of Medea: Meike Ziervogel and Lisa Dwan

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.