In Your Dreams?

I thought that this most recent announcement from the Freud Museum was much too delicious not to share:

In Your Dreams! Singles nights with a twist at the Freud Museum

The Freud Museum is proud to present a couple of lively evenings of mind-expanding games and flirtatious banter with London's brightest and best (that's you by the way, don't let us down!).

As the father of psychoanalysis, Freud is best known for his theory that everything we do is driven by unconscious thoughts and feelings. So let your unconscious guide you to the Museum where a night to remember will unfold.

We can't guarantee to reveal the innermost workings of the mind, but we can promise an intriguing evening where dreams will be interpreted, free associations made and doubtless repressed feelings liberated!

Plus, there'll be plenty of time to enjoy a drink in the garden, admire Freud's couch and of course your fellow guests!

I think the Freud Museum has stumbled on to a winner here! Good luck to everyone. I hope the couch will be very busy.

As a happily married man -- and someone for whom the prospect of dating, letting alone Freudian dating, always seemed a terrifying prospect -- I, alas, will not be attending, so I would be most grateful if any Psycho-Babble On... reader who intends to brave what promises to be at the very least a most intriguing evening would offer a report on the event.

I look forward to your correspondence.

Book announcement: Jeffrey Berman, Death in the Classroom

I heard Jeffrey Berman speak at a conference a couple of years ago on this and was impressed with his intelligent and moving ideas. Here, now, is announcement for the book, published with SUNY press. You can read the first chapter here.

Jeffrey Berman, Death in the Classroom

Shows how death education can be brought from the healing professions to the literature classroom.

In Death in the Classroom, Jeffrey Berman writes about Love and Loss, the course that he designed and taught two years after his wife’s death, in which he explored with his students the literature of bereavement. Berman, building on his previous courses that emphasized self-disclosing writing, shows how his students wrote about their own experiences with love and loss, how their writing affected classmates and teacher alike, and how writing about death can lead to educational and psychological breakthroughs. In an age in which eighty percent of Americans die not in their homes but in institutions, and in which, consequently, the living are separated from the dying, Death in the Classroom reveals how reading, writing, and speaking about death can play a vital role in a student’s education.

“Death in the Classroom deals with an extremely important topic—our attitudes toward death and grieving and the possibility of helping students, through reading, writing, and classroom discussion, to reflect on death and grieving in their own and others’ lives. I like the book’s clarity and the vigor of its argument for death education in the university classroom. This is a book for teachers, especially teachers of literature and life writing who are committed to teaching literature from an ethical and experiential perspective, and it will also appeal to those interested in death education and attitudes toward death and dying, particularly in North America.” — Hilary Clark, editor of Depression and Narrative: Telling the Dark

Jeffrey Berman is Distinguished Teaching Professor of English at the University at Albany, State University of New York. His previous books include Dying to Teach: A Memoir of Love, Loss, and Learning, also published by SUNY Press; Cutting and the Pedagogy of Self-Disclosure; Empathic Teaching: Education for Life; and Risky Writing: Self-Disclosure and Self-Transformation in the Classroom.

Lecture Announcement

BRACHA ETTINGER: Aesthetics/Ethics/Politics

Evening Symposium with JUDITH BUTLER

Wednesday 3 June 2009 6.00pm – 9.00pm
Christopher Ingold Auditorium, University College London, Gordon Street, London WC1H 0AY

Organised by Griselda Pollock (CentreCATH, University of Leeds)
Penny Florence (Slade School of Art)
The Freud Museum, London

SPEAKERS
Judith Butler (University of California, Berkeley)
Catherine de Zegher (Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto)
Griselda Pollock (CentreCATH, University of Leeds)
Concluding Remarks: Bracha Ettinger

Tickets; £25 / £15 from The Freud Museum Tel: 020 7435 2002 or online at www.freud.org.uk

On the occasion of the exhibition BRACHA ETTINGER Resonance/Overlay/Interweave in the Freudian Space of Memory and Migration 3 June–26 July AT The Freud Museum

Freud Museum
20 Maresfield Gardens, London NW3 5SX
Tel: +44 (0)20 7435 2002
www.freud.org.uk