Tuesday 13 October 2009 7.15pm
Gerald Davidson
Being Good: Aichhorn and Anna - A performance presentationActor and researcher Gerald Davidson returns to the Freud Museum after his brilliant presentations on Otto Gross and Herbert Graf ('Little Hans'), to commemorate the 60th anniversary of the death of August Aichhorn, Austrian educator and pioneering psychoanalyst in work with delinquent and troubled adolescents.
“Aichhorn’s death is a kind of full stop at the end of a great chapter in psychoanalysis...” Anna Freud, November 1949.
Tickets: £8 / £5 Friends.(Pay on the door but phone or email to secure a place)
Please join us for a pre-performance glass of wine from 6.30pm.
Aichhorn and Anna"The re-educator's double allegiance and identification with society on the one hand and the world of the delinquent on the other hand, is a fascinating problem, Mr Aichhorn..."
"In the original intake at the home for delinquent boys that I founded in the devastation of an abandoned refugee camp as our old Imperial world fell apart I was confronted with twelve adolescents who were considered completely beyond the pale. Even the majority of my idealistic co-workers felt these lads could be brought to heel only by the strictest discipline and the hardest physical labour. So I decided to take charge of these boys myself and I proceeded to allow their aggression full reign..."
"The Austrian Psychoanalytic Society was officially dissolved on August 25,1938. There was officially now only a study group and a training group affiliated to the Goring Institute in Berlin. My son,Thomas had been detained in Dachau for anti-German activity. And my wife was unwell. So I stayed on, alone..."
"I don't know if you have realised, Miss Freud, that since you left Vienna and I stayed on alone, all my activities were dedicated to your father..."
August Aichhorn and Anna Freud, reunited in Lausanne in 1948.
Freud Museum
20 Maresfield Gardens, London NW3 5SX
Tel: +44 (0)20 7435 2002
www.freud.org.uk