LAST CHANCE TO BOOK - REMOTE CONTROL: PSYCHOANALYSIS AND TELEVISION
Saturday 30 October 2010
Day Conference at the Anna Freud Centre
Psychotherapists, psychoanalysts, academics, programme makers and presenters discuss the emotional function and ethics of TV in the modern world.
SATURDAY 30TH OCTOBER 9.30am - 5.00pm
Candida Yates (Introduction)
'Staging the Debate: Remote Control: Television, Media and the Inner World'
Panel 1: Television from both sides of the couch
How does TV culture infiltrate the therapeutic space, and how is psychotherapy represented on TV?
Brett Kahr: Television as Rorschach
Caroline Bainbridge: Psychotherapy on the Couch: Exploring the Fantasies of In Treatment
Chair and respondent: Dan Chambers (Independent producer and former director of Programmes for Ch 5)
Panel 2: Ethics and Therapy on TV
The ethical dilemmas of putting real lives on TV
Richard McKerrow (producer) discusses his Marchioness Documentary;
Oliver James discusses his TV programmes including Under Fives; Room 113 and Men on Violence.
Chair and Respondent: Valerie Sinason (Psychoanalyst)
Panel 3: Watercooler Moments: TV as Transitional Object
TV offers the possibility of shared cultural experiences. Does it also have therapeutic potential?
Tom Sutcliffe (presenter and journalist)
Sue Vice (Professor of English)
Carol Leader (psychotherapist; former presenter and actor)
Chair: Sara Ramsden (Consultant executive producer for the BBC)
Panel 4: Roundtable discussion
Barry Richards - summary and reflections with speakers from the day
This conference is organised in conjunction with Media and the Inner World http://www.miwnet.org/
FRIDAY 29 OCTOBER
The Saturday Conference is preceded by an 'in conversation' with award-winning television scriptwriter Laurence Marks and psychoanalyst Valerie Sinason.
Laurence Marks is a Bafta award winning writer and producer of shows and plays for stage and screen; he is well known for his collaborative writing work with Maurice Gran. His TV work includes a number of highly successful comedy sitcoms, including: Shine on Harvey Moon (1982), Birds of a Feather (1989-1998), The New Statesman (1987-1992), Goodnight Sweetheart (1993-99) and Love Hurts (1992-94). He has also written for the theatre, including the acclaimed play Dr. Freud Will See You Now Mrs. Hitler (BBC Radio 4, and Tricycle Theatre, 2007) and the West End Musical Dreamboats and Petticoats (nominated for a Lawrence Olivier Award for 'Best New Musical', 2010).
Registration:
FRIDAY EVENING: £12 or £10 for Friends of the Freud Museum
SATURDAY: £50 Full Price; £35 Students and unwaged (£5 discount for Friends)
Please click here for online booking http://www.freud.org.uk/shop/CONFERENCE__REMOTE_CONTROL__PSYCHOANALYSIS_AND_TELEVISION.html
Or please send a cheque payable to 'The Freud Museum', including your name, address, telephone number and profession.
Freud Museum
20 Maresfield Gardens, London NW3 5SX
Tel: +44 (0)20 7435 2002
www.freud.org.uk
Showing posts with label Freud. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Freud. Show all posts
Monday, 25 October 2010
Monday, 19 April 2010
Childhood and Creativity: An Apprehension of the Symbolic
Day Conference Sat. 29th May 2010
Anna Freud Centre, London, NW3
What kind of 'creative act' is required to become an adult human being? Adult desires are formed within early attachments, forged on the body, shaped by social prohibitions and articulated through words. Childhood remains not as a residue of development but as a creative force throughout life. This conference explores the theory and practice of child psychoanalysis as an aspect of all psychoanalysis, drawing on the work of two significant figures: Françoise Dolto and Donald Winnicott.
A household name in France due to her many public broadcasts on child welfare, Françoise Dolto is little known in the English speaking world, with only two of her 30 books translated. A colleague of Jacques Lacan, she worked as one of the first child analysts in France, using her highly developed intuition to work with children who might otherwise have been dismissed as untreatable.
KEYNOTE SPEAKERS
Christopher Reeves (UK)
(Psychotherapist and chair of the Squiggle Foundation)
'Let's pretend …': exploring the links between imagination, creativity, play and interpretation
Sian Morgan (UK)
(Psychotherapist and author)
Separation and Creativity: when 'lets pretend' goes wrong and transitions fail
Sharon Kivland (UK & FR)
(Artist and lecturer)
It is only the first step that counts: Desire held in check in three works of art
Tamara Landau (FR)
(Psychoanalyst and sculpture)
Creativity and the symbolic structuring of time and desire in Winnicott and Dolto
Bice Benvenuto (IT)
(Psychoanalyst)
Little Sammy's magic face and the poetics of the unconscious
Ann Marie Canu (FR)
(Psychoanalyst and child psychiatrist)
Title TBC
Joan Raphael-Leff (UK)
(Psychoanalyst and author)
'Dreamers by daylight' - some childhood sources of creativity.
CHAIR:
Isobel Urquhart
(Psychotherapist and lecturer, Homerton College Cambridge)
REGISTRATION
£60 Full Price / £45 Students and Concs
(£5 discount for Friends of The Freud Museum)
For online registration, please click HERE
Or please send a cheque payable to 'The Freud Museum'. Please include your name, address, profession and contact phone number.
The Freud Museum, 20 Maresfield Gardens, London NW3 5SX Tel: 020 7435 2002 Email: info@freud.org.uk
Freud Museum
20 Maresfield Gardens, London NW3 5SX
Tel: +44 (0)20 7435 2002
www.freud.org.uk
Anna Freud Centre, London, NW3
What kind of 'creative act' is required to become an adult human being? Adult desires are formed within early attachments, forged on the body, shaped by social prohibitions and articulated through words. Childhood remains not as a residue of development but as a creative force throughout life. This conference explores the theory and practice of child psychoanalysis as an aspect of all psychoanalysis, drawing on the work of two significant figures: Françoise Dolto and Donald Winnicott.
A household name in France due to her many public broadcasts on child welfare, Françoise Dolto is little known in the English speaking world, with only two of her 30 books translated. A colleague of Jacques Lacan, she worked as one of the first child analysts in France, using her highly developed intuition to work with children who might otherwise have been dismissed as untreatable.
What makes Dolto so interesting is that she combines a variety of different psychodynamic therapeutic perspectives to enable the understanding of children and parents, rather than remaining in a conventional, analytically bounded framework. She calls upon psychosomatic understanding, and couple, family and group therapeutic resources within her work as a child psychoanalyst. She considers the consequences of transgenerational processes, suggesting, for example, that it took three generations to create a psychotic individual.
(from the introduction to Theory and Practice in Child Psychoanalysis: An introduction to the work of Françoise Dolto ed. Guy Hall, Françoise Hivernel, and Sian Morgan)
KEYNOTE SPEAKERS
Christopher Reeves (UK)
(Psychotherapist and chair of the Squiggle Foundation)
'Let's pretend …': exploring the links between imagination, creativity, play and interpretation
Sian Morgan (UK)
(Psychotherapist and author)
Separation and Creativity: when 'lets pretend' goes wrong and transitions fail
Sharon Kivland (UK & FR)
(Artist and lecturer)
It is only the first step that counts: Desire held in check in three works of art
Tamara Landau (FR)
(Psychoanalyst and sculpture)
Creativity and the symbolic structuring of time and desire in Winnicott and Dolto
Bice Benvenuto (IT)
(Psychoanalyst)
Little Sammy's magic face and the poetics of the unconscious
Ann Marie Canu (FR)
(Psychoanalyst and child psychiatrist)
Title TBC
Joan Raphael-Leff (UK)
(Psychoanalyst and author)
'Dreamers by daylight' - some childhood sources of creativity.
CHAIR:
Isobel Urquhart
(Psychotherapist and lecturer, Homerton College Cambridge)
REGISTRATION
£60 Full Price / £45 Students and Concs
(£5 discount for Friends of The Freud Museum)
For online registration, please click HERE
Or please send a cheque payable to 'The Freud Museum'. Please include your name, address, profession and contact phone number.
The Freud Museum, 20 Maresfield Gardens, London NW3 5SX Tel: 020 7435 2002 Email: info@freud.org.uk
Freud Museum
20 Maresfield Gardens, London NW3 5SX
Tel: +44 (0)20 7435 2002
www.freud.org.uk
Tuesday, 13 April 2010
Sarah Pucill at the Freud Museum
Film screenings and discussion
Wednesday 21st April 2010 7pm
Sarah Pucill
Taking My Skin, 2006
16mm b&w, sound 35min
Fall in Frame, 2009
16mm b&w, sound 18min
The screening will be followed by discussion between Adriana Cerne and the filmmaker, chaired by Dr Margherita Sprio from University of Essex.
I’m not aware of you taking my skin’, says the artist’s mother to the camera as it zooms in on her eye as close as the lens will allow. Taking My Skin tracks a dialogue between the artist and her mother. Their exchange ranges from narrating the filming process ‘in the moment’ to relations in an earlier time – ‘how long do you think it takes for a child to become separate?’ Throughout the journey film spaces continuously dissolve and collapse only to separate again. Formally and thematically, the film is an exploration of closeness, of synching, and the threat this poses to the self.
Freudian themes will be explored in two of Sarah Pucill’s films using psychoanalytic tropes of Projection, Surface and Screen. Inspired by feminist post Freudian writing which has challenged the phallo-centrism in Freud, Pucill’s films give pride of place to the mother-daughter and 'other' female to female relationships. The films that will be screened and discussed include the award-winning Taking My Skin (35min, 2006) as well as her most recent film Fall In Frame, (18min, 2009).
Sarah Pucill’s films have been screened and won awards at major international film festivals, have been televised and screened internationally in galleries and museums. She lives and works in London and is a Senior Lecturer at University of Westminster.
Adriana Cerne is a Doctoral candidate at the University of Leeds, researching feminist counter-cinema films and filmmaking from the 1970s to the early 1980s, with a focus on the early work of Chantal Akerman. She contributed to the book Psychoanalysis and the Image: Transdisciplinary Perspectives, which forms part of Blackwell’s New Interventions in Art History series. She teaches Visual Culture and Theory at the University of the Arts London and at the Royal College of Art.
Dr Margherita Sprio is currently a lecturer in Art History and Film in the Department of Art History and Theory at University of Essex. She is currently writing a manuscript called Contemporary Art and Film that explores the continued relationship between art and film history and it addresses how film makers such as Sarah Pucill and John Maybury, (amongst others) navigate their own practice in relation to contemporary debates about visual culture.
Tickets: £8 / £5 Friends. Please pay on the door, but phone or email to secure a place.
Tel: 020 7435 2002 Email: info@freud.org.uk
Freud Museum
20 Maresfield Gardens, London NW3 5SX
Tel: +44 (0)20 7435 2002
www.freud.org.uk
Wednesday 21st April 2010 7pm
Sarah Pucill
Taking My Skin, 2006
16mm b&w, sound 35min
Fall in Frame, 2009
16mm b&w, sound 18min
The screening will be followed by discussion between Adriana Cerne and the filmmaker, chaired by Dr Margherita Sprio from University of Essex.
I’m not aware of you taking my skin’, says the artist’s mother to the camera as it zooms in on her eye as close as the lens will allow. Taking My Skin tracks a dialogue between the artist and her mother. Their exchange ranges from narrating the filming process ‘in the moment’ to relations in an earlier time – ‘how long do you think it takes for a child to become separate?’ Throughout the journey film spaces continuously dissolve and collapse only to separate again. Formally and thematically, the film is an exploration of closeness, of synching, and the threat this poses to the self.
Freudian themes will be explored in two of Sarah Pucill’s films using psychoanalytic tropes of Projection, Surface and Screen. Inspired by feminist post Freudian writing which has challenged the phallo-centrism in Freud, Pucill’s films give pride of place to the mother-daughter and 'other' female to female relationships. The films that will be screened and discussed include the award-winning Taking My Skin (35min, 2006) as well as her most recent film Fall In Frame, (18min, 2009).
Sarah Pucill’s films have been screened and won awards at major international film festivals, have been televised and screened internationally in galleries and museums. She lives and works in London and is a Senior Lecturer at University of Westminster.
Adriana Cerne is a Doctoral candidate at the University of Leeds, researching feminist counter-cinema films and filmmaking from the 1970s to the early 1980s, with a focus on the early work of Chantal Akerman. She contributed to the book Psychoanalysis and the Image: Transdisciplinary Perspectives, which forms part of Blackwell’s New Interventions in Art History series. She teaches Visual Culture and Theory at the University of the Arts London and at the Royal College of Art.
Dr Margherita Sprio is currently a lecturer in Art History and Film in the Department of Art History and Theory at University of Essex. She is currently writing a manuscript called Contemporary Art and Film that explores the continued relationship between art and film history and it addresses how film makers such as Sarah Pucill and John Maybury, (amongst others) navigate their own practice in relation to contemporary debates about visual culture.
Tickets: £8 / £5 Friends. Please pay on the door, but phone or email to secure a place.
Tel: 020 7435 2002 Email: info@freud.org.uk
Freud Museum
20 Maresfield Gardens, London NW3 5SX
Tel: +44 (0)20 7435 2002
www.freud.org.uk
Thursday, 8 April 2010
The Freud Memorial Lecture and Reception
Thursday 6th May 2010 7pm
Leadership – Theory and Practice
Michael Brearley
How do leaders and leadership skills facilitate the functioning of a work group, a team or an organisation? How are groups constituted and what undermines them? What are the emotional bonds that bind people together in a common enterprise? And what are the functions of leadership?
These are some of the questions that Mike Brearley will address on the day of the general election in his Freud Memorial lecture, drawing on his diverse experience as former England cricket captain and (a far more dangerous undertaking) President of the British Psychoanalytical Society.
Mike Brearley is a psychoanalyst and sports journalist. He studied philosophy at Cambridge University at undergraduate and post-graduate level while pursuing a career as a County cricketer with Middlesex. As England captain he won 17 of 31 games, losing only 4, an outstanding record that has never been bettered. He was awarded the OBE in 1978 and published The Art of Captaincy in 1985. He works in private practice in London, and teaches and writes on psychoanalysis.
Venue: The Anna Freud Centre, Maresfield Gardens NW3, followed by a reception at the Freud Museum.
£25 / £20 Friends and students. Booking essential.
For online booking click here or please send a cheque payable to 'The Freud Museum London' :
The Freud Museum, 20 Maresfield Gardens, London NW3 5SX.
Please include your name and address and a contact telephone number.
This is a fundraising evening, and all proceeds from the talk will go towards the conservation, research and educational work of the Freud Museum.
Tel: +44 (0) 20 7435 2002 Email: info@freud.org.uk
Freud Museum
20 Maresfield Gardens, London NW3 5SX
Tel: +44 (0)20 7435 2002
www.freud.org.uk
Leadership – Theory and Practice
Michael Brearley
How do leaders and leadership skills facilitate the functioning of a work group, a team or an organisation? How are groups constituted and what undermines them? What are the emotional bonds that bind people together in a common enterprise? And what are the functions of leadership?
These are some of the questions that Mike Brearley will address on the day of the general election in his Freud Memorial lecture, drawing on his diverse experience as former England cricket captain and (a far more dangerous undertaking) President of the British Psychoanalytical Society.
Mike Brearley is a psychoanalyst and sports journalist. He studied philosophy at Cambridge University at undergraduate and post-graduate level while pursuing a career as a County cricketer with Middlesex. As England captain he won 17 of 31 games, losing only 4, an outstanding record that has never been bettered. He was awarded the OBE in 1978 and published The Art of Captaincy in 1985. He works in private practice in London, and teaches and writes on psychoanalysis.
Venue: The Anna Freud Centre, Maresfield Gardens NW3, followed by a reception at the Freud Museum.
£25 / £20 Friends and students. Booking essential.
For online booking click here or please send a cheque payable to 'The Freud Museum London' :
The Freud Museum, 20 Maresfield Gardens, London NW3 5SX.
Please include your name and address and a contact telephone number.
This is a fundraising evening, and all proceeds from the talk will go towards the conservation, research and educational work of the Freud Museum.
Tel: +44 (0) 20 7435 2002 Email: info@freud.org.uk
Freud Museum
20 Maresfield Gardens, London NW3 5SX
Tel: +44 (0)20 7435 2002
www.freud.org.uk
Thursday, 1 April 2010
Sigmund Freud's Dora: A case of mistaken identity - Film Screening and Discussion
Wednesday 14th April 2010, 7pm
Anthony McCall, Claire Pajaczkowska, Andrew Tyndall, Jane Weinstock and Ivan Ward
1979, 16mm colour, 40min
Screening followed by discussion with two of the film makers, Claire Pajaczkowska and Ivan Ward
30 years after it was made, the position of Sigmund Freud's Dora: A case of mistaken identity within the world of independent film is assured. In 2008 it was shown at Tate Modern for the 50th anniversary celebrations for the film theory journal Screen, and in 2009 it inaugurated the new Whitechapel Gallery film programme, screened four times with other works and public discussions. But the film is not just an 'art house' film. It is above all the reading of a text, Freud's 'Dora' case, what it shows us about Freud's work and what we can learn from it today.
In 1899, Sigmund Freud began treatment with an 18-year-old girl who was brought to him for analysis by her father after she had written a suicide note. Freud was eager to use this case to demonstrate the hypotheses laid out in his Interpretation of Dreams but after only three months of treatment the young woman walked out, without being cured.
Five years later Freud published an account of this failed treatment, calling it a “Fragment of an Analysis” and giving his patient the name Dora – that of a servant in his household.
Dora has been a focus for the appropriation of psychoanalysis by feminist theory. Questions about the exchange of women, the representation of female sexuality, and the marginal or contradictory position of women in language, have been discovered in her story.
But the descriptions Freud gives of Dora are not innocent documentary facts. Freud constructs her as a character in the structure of his “novella”, as a recollection of the words he remembers her having spoken, as an object of his scientific detective-work. Thus the presentation of her sexuality is also a function of these analytic and narrative processes.
The psychoanalytic method itself is a process of reading the language and symptoms of the patient; Freud’s written case history is a reading of that reading, which we in turn read.
The film, Sigmund Freud’s Dora starts from the position that these processes of representation are not only a factor in psychoanalytic texts. They exist no less in the conventions of film editing than they do in advertising; no less in the iconography of the mother than they do in pornography.
Claire Pajaczkowska is a senior lecturer at the Royal College of Art. She is the author of Perversion in the Ideas in Psychoanalysis series, and co-editor, with Ivan Ward, of Shame and Sexuality: Psychoanalysis and Visual Culture (2009)
Ivan Ward is director of education at the Freud Museum. He is the author of Introducing Psychoanalysis (Icon Books) and Phobia and Castration in the Ideas in Psychoanalysis series, which he edits.
Copies of the book The presentation of case material in clinical discourse (ed. Ivan Ward; Karnac Books) will be available on the night.
Tickets: £8 / £5 Friends. Please pay on the door, but phone or email to secure a place.
Tel: 020 7435 2002 Email: info@freud.org.uk
Freud Museum
20 Maresfield Gardens, London NW3 5SX
Tel: +44 (0)20 7435 2002
www.freud.org.uk
Anthony McCall, Claire Pajaczkowska, Andrew Tyndall, Jane Weinstock and Ivan Ward
1979, 16mm colour, 40min
Screening followed by discussion with two of the film makers, Claire Pajaczkowska and Ivan Ward
30 years after it was made, the position of Sigmund Freud's Dora: A case of mistaken identity within the world of independent film is assured. In 2008 it was shown at Tate Modern for the 50th anniversary celebrations for the film theory journal Screen, and in 2009 it inaugurated the new Whitechapel Gallery film programme, screened four times with other works and public discussions. But the film is not just an 'art house' film. It is above all the reading of a text, Freud's 'Dora' case, what it shows us about Freud's work and what we can learn from it today.
In 1899, Sigmund Freud began treatment with an 18-year-old girl who was brought to him for analysis by her father after she had written a suicide note. Freud was eager to use this case to demonstrate the hypotheses laid out in his Interpretation of Dreams but after only three months of treatment the young woman walked out, without being cured.
Five years later Freud published an account of this failed treatment, calling it a “Fragment of an Analysis” and giving his patient the name Dora – that of a servant in his household.
Dora has been a focus for the appropriation of psychoanalysis by feminist theory. Questions about the exchange of women, the representation of female sexuality, and the marginal or contradictory position of women in language, have been discovered in her story.
But the descriptions Freud gives of Dora are not innocent documentary facts. Freud constructs her as a character in the structure of his “novella”, as a recollection of the words he remembers her having spoken, as an object of his scientific detective-work. Thus the presentation of her sexuality is also a function of these analytic and narrative processes.
The psychoanalytic method itself is a process of reading the language and symptoms of the patient; Freud’s written case history is a reading of that reading, which we in turn read.
The film, Sigmund Freud’s Dora starts from the position that these processes of representation are not only a factor in psychoanalytic texts. They exist no less in the conventions of film editing than they do in advertising; no less in the iconography of the mother than they do in pornography.
Claire Pajaczkowska is a senior lecturer at the Royal College of Art. She is the author of Perversion in the Ideas in Psychoanalysis series, and co-editor, with Ivan Ward, of Shame and Sexuality: Psychoanalysis and Visual Culture (2009)
Ivan Ward is director of education at the Freud Museum. He is the author of Introducing Psychoanalysis (Icon Books) and Phobia and Castration in the Ideas in Psychoanalysis series, which he edits.
Copies of the book The presentation of case material in clinical discourse (ed. Ivan Ward; Karnac Books) will be available on the night.
Tickets: £8 / £5 Friends. Please pay on the door, but phone or email to secure a place.
Tel: 020 7435 2002 Email: info@freud.org.uk
Freud Museum
20 Maresfield Gardens, London NW3 5SX
Tel: +44 (0)20 7435 2002
www.freud.org.uk
Friday, 26 March 2010
Freud: The Secret Passion and IPA Conference
"Freud: The Secret Passion"
screening introduced by Andrea Sabbadini.
30 March 2010
6.30pm - 9.00pm
To coincide with Andreas Hofer's exhibition at the Freud Museum, which includes a series of portraits of Montgomery Clift as Freud, we are pleased to show the rarely seen 1962 John Huston film on which the portraits are based: "Freud: The Secret Passion". The film will be introduced by Andrea Sabbadini, psychoanalyst and founder of the International Psychoanalytic Film Festival.
Please note that the film is 138 mins and in black and white. Only dedicated film buffs should apply!
Suggested donation: £8 / £5 concs. Please pay at the door but phone or email to secure a place.
The Freud Museum, 20 Maresfield Gardens, London NW3 5SX
Tel: 020 7435 2002 Email: info@freud.org.uk
Stay tuned for our next film screenings!
IPA Anniversary Celebration – ‘Contemporary Perspectives on Psychoanalysis’ - March 27, 2010
Celebrating the IPA’s Centenary
The IPA is the world’s primary accrediting and regulatory body for psychoanalysis. It was created in 1910 at the 2nd International Psychoanalytical Congress in Nuremberg. Its mission is to assure the continued vigour and development of psychoanalysis for the benefit of psychoanalytic patients.
Major European event for the Centenary
The major European event for the Centenary of the IPA is in London, UK, in conjunction with the annual EPF Conference.
We invite mental health professionals, scientists and students of medicine, psychology, psychotherapy and cultural disciplines to attend.
Venue:
Sandringham Suite
Hilton London Metropole
255 Edgware Road
London W2 1JU
Participation: Participation is free, but registration is necessary.
Monday, 8 March 2010
Music, Meaning and Emotion
Tuesday 23rd March 2010 7:00pm
Three talks about what music 'means', and how and why it affects us so profoundly.
Programme:
Kalu Singh
Affects on the track: How do we find words for the meaning of music?
Almost everybody learns some basic terms to appraise literature. So why so few, for most of us, about music? Is it impossible to get past the fundamental fact that instrumental music has no nameable referent, and the emotional puzzle this generates?
Sebastian Skeaping
Music and emotion: A personal inheritance
Do you have to 'know' about music to really appreciate it? What is the importance of musical heritage in musical appreciation? Do words constrict musical feeling?
Roddy Skeaping
Music, Meaning and Emotion .... For People with Dementia
What are the 'affective meanings' and 'meaningful affects' that music articulates and evokes? How does music orchestrate emotions and sediment memories?
Presenters:
Kalu Singh is a former university counsellor: now a civil-servant and freelance writer. His first book Guilt (Icon Ideas in Psychoanalysis) was a Guardian Book of the Year. Innovative essays on Shakespeare, Keats, Dante, Solaris & Gradiva appear on his website: www.philosophykal.co.uk. Over the past decade, he has helped coordinate Freud Museum Conferences on Crying, Midwifery, The Therapist's Body, and on Matte Blanco. He joined the Talking Bob Dylan Society, Cambridge in 1986.
Sebastian Skeaping was born into a family with a rich musical heritage (Roddy Skeaping is his uncle). He obtained a PhD at Cambridge University in 2003 and now runs Thornhill Pianos. His work has taken him to all the major recording studios, concert venues and opera houses in London.
Roddy Skeaping is a performer, instrumental teacher, composer and Nordoff-Robbins music therapist currently working with people with dementia.
Tickets: £8 / £5 Friends. Please pay on the door, but phone or email to secure a place.
Tel: 020 7435 2002 Email: info@freud.org.uk
Monday, 25 January 2010
Psychoanalysis and Modern Music in Freud's Vienna
While Freud famously claimed that he could derive no pleasure from music, and was reputed to have been tone deaf and largely indifferent to the fecund musical culture surrounding him, it is nonetheless indisputable that Freud and psychoanalysis influenced the music and musicians of his Vienna. It is well known that Freud treated a number of Viennese musical luminaries, including Gustav Mahler and Bruno Walter; what is less well known and understood is that Freud's literature and pool of patients made direct and meaningful contact with the composer Arnold Schoenberg and his milieu. Schoenberg, one of the most important composers of the 20th century and the putative father of musical modernism, began to articulate what must be considered a psychoanalytic compositional ethos in the first decade of the 20th century; by 1909, he had composed the ephocal monodrama Erwartung, arguably the first psychoanalytic opera. This talk examines the extent to which Freud's early case histories--especially "Dora"--and texts like The Interpretation of Dreams shaped the advent of modern atonal music in Vienna.
This is the first of three evening talks about music and psychoanalysis. Further information forthcoming.
Tickets: £8 / £5 Friends. Please pay on the door but phone or email to secure a place.
Freud Museum
20 Maresfield Gardens, London NW3 5SX
Tel: +44 (0)20 7435 2002
www.freud.org.uk
This is the first of three evening talks about music and psychoanalysis. Further information forthcoming.
Tickets: £8 / £5 Friends. Please pay on the door but phone or email to secure a place.
Freud Museum
20 Maresfield Gardens, London NW3 5SX
Tel: +44 (0)20 7435 2002
www.freud.org.uk
Thursday, 14 January 2010
Win Hearts and Minds at the Freud Museum
Love is in the air...
With Valentine's Day hoving in to view and fluffy teddies and spangly cards popping up at every turn, we recommend you escape the naff and the nauseous and make your way to the Freud Museum to explore love through a Freudian lens!
With music and games in Freud's extraordinary house, you never know, you just might meet someone interesting...
The event on 11 February will be the first in the series, Lessons in Love, marking the 100th anniversary of Freud's 'Contributions to the Psychology of Love'.
This event has been produced in collaboration with Past Caring, an innovative partnership of museums, archives, and higher education organisations. Follow the link to find out about other mind-expanding events across London.
BOOKING INFORMATION for HEARTS & MINDS
Date: 11 Febuary 2010
Time: 7.30pm - 10.30pm
Venue: Freud Museum, 20 Maresfield Gardens, London, NW3 5SX
Tickets: £10 to include a drink on arrival.
Discount: Friends of the Museum and group bookings of 3 or more: £8
To book: email marion@freud.org.uk, or call ++44 (0)20 7435 2002
With Valentine's Day hoving in to view and fluffy teddies and spangly cards popping up at every turn, we recommend you escape the naff and the nauseous and make your way to the Freud Museum to explore love through a Freudian lens!
With music and games in Freud's extraordinary house, you never know, you just might meet someone interesting...
The event on 11 February will be the first in the series, Lessons in Love, marking the 100th anniversary of Freud's 'Contributions to the Psychology of Love'.
This event has been produced in collaboration with Past Caring, an innovative partnership of museums, archives, and higher education organisations. Follow the link to find out about other mind-expanding events across London.
BOOKING INFORMATION for HEARTS & MINDS
Date: 11 Febuary 2010
Time: 7.30pm - 10.30pm
Venue: Freud Museum, 20 Maresfield Gardens, London, NW3 5SX
Tickets: £10 to include a drink on arrival.
Discount: Friends of the Museum and group bookings of 3 or more: £8
To book: email marion@freud.org.uk, or call ++44 (0)20 7435 2002
Monday, 2 November 2009
Exhibit at the Freud Museum
MAT COLLISHAW - HYSTERIA
7 October - 13 December
Curated by James Putnam
HYSTERIA is an extraordinary exhibition of new works by British-born artist Mat Collishaw. The title relates to the print above Freud’s iconic psychoanalytic couch, depicting the French neurologist Jean Martin Charcot showing his students a woman in a hysterical fit. Charcot (1825-1893) used hypnotism to study hysteria and other abnormal mental conditions and he had a profound influence on the young Freud. Collishaw has made a new anamorphosis work inspired by this picture and a series of ghostly projections based on Charcot’s original photographic case studies.
In the room of Anna Freud, the founder of child psychoanalysis, he has installed a new zoetrope sculpture with animated figures of implike boys smashing eggs, spearing snails and tormenting butterflies. Both Freud and his daughter Anna investigated the development of cruelty in childhood, and its link to sexuality in children’s ‘beating phantasies’.
In Freud’s study Collishaw has installed a series of intriguing tree stump sculptures that incorporate record decks emitting evocative birdsongs. The ‘outside world’ enters Freud’s study, and in doing so alludes to theories of repression, loss and the nature of memory developed by Freud himself. The exhibition is completed by the enormous, beautiful and ultimately disturbing ‘insecticide’ photographs in the stairwell and balcony.
Mat Collishaw (b. Nottingham, 1966) lives and works in London and has exhibited widely internationally. In 1986-7 he attended Goldsmiths College alongside Damien Hirst, Sarah Lucas and Tracey Emin, among others, participating in the now legendary shows Freeze (1989) and Sensation (1997). Collishaw has developed a distinctive practice using digitally modified photography and video often combining 19th century illusionistic devices with contemporary technologies. His work is characterized by appropriating imagery that is often shocking yet strangely beautiful.
HYSTERIA is the latest in the critically acclaimed ongoing series of Freud Museum exhibitions curated by James Putnam that have included projects by Sophie Calle, Sarah Lucas, Ellen Gallagher, Tim Noble & Sue Webster and Oliver Clegg. The exhibition also coincides with the launch of Collishaw’s new publication entitled ‘Insecticides’.
Freud Museum
20 Maresfield Gardens, London NW3 5SX
Tel: +44 (0)20 7435 2002
www.freud.org.uk
7 October - 13 December
Curated by James Putnam
HYSTERIA is an extraordinary exhibition of new works by British-born artist Mat Collishaw. The title relates to the print above Freud’s iconic psychoanalytic couch, depicting the French neurologist Jean Martin Charcot showing his students a woman in a hysterical fit. Charcot (1825-1893) used hypnotism to study hysteria and other abnormal mental conditions and he had a profound influence on the young Freud. Collishaw has made a new anamorphosis work inspired by this picture and a series of ghostly projections based on Charcot’s original photographic case studies.
In the room of Anna Freud, the founder of child psychoanalysis, he has installed a new zoetrope sculpture with animated figures of implike boys smashing eggs, spearing snails and tormenting butterflies. Both Freud and his daughter Anna investigated the development of cruelty in childhood, and its link to sexuality in children’s ‘beating phantasies’.
In Freud’s study Collishaw has installed a series of intriguing tree stump sculptures that incorporate record decks emitting evocative birdsongs. The ‘outside world’ enters Freud’s study, and in doing so alludes to theories of repression, loss and the nature of memory developed by Freud himself. The exhibition is completed by the enormous, beautiful and ultimately disturbing ‘insecticide’ photographs in the stairwell and balcony.
Mat Collishaw (b. Nottingham, 1966) lives and works in London and has exhibited widely internationally. In 1986-7 he attended Goldsmiths College alongside Damien Hirst, Sarah Lucas and Tracey Emin, among others, participating in the now legendary shows Freeze (1989) and Sensation (1997). Collishaw has developed a distinctive practice using digitally modified photography and video often combining 19th century illusionistic devices with contemporary technologies. His work is characterized by appropriating imagery that is often shocking yet strangely beautiful.
HYSTERIA is the latest in the critically acclaimed ongoing series of Freud Museum exhibitions curated by James Putnam that have included projects by Sophie Calle, Sarah Lucas, Ellen Gallagher, Tim Noble & Sue Webster and Oliver Clegg. The exhibition also coincides with the launch of Collishaw’s new publication entitled ‘Insecticides’.
Freud Museum
20 Maresfield Gardens, London NW3 5SX
Tel: +44 (0)20 7435 2002
www.freud.org.uk
Saturday, 31 October 2009
Buy Freud!
The long-awaited FREUD MUSEUM 2010 CALENDAR is now hot off the press! The new calendar brings you an English Freud. Follow him month by month through his love of English science and literature. This colourful new calendar is illustrated by photos from his family albums and documented by books from his own library. We see Freud at each stage of his life, encountering Shakespeare or Byron, Darwin or Dickens, Virginia Woolf or H.G. Wells.
Don't miss our Calendar Offer of 15% off online orders until 15 November! (Usual price: £8.50).
Thursday, 15 October 2009
Freud and Detective Fiction
Tuesday 20 October 7pm
Frank Tallis
The Interpretation of Screams: Freud and Detective Fiction
Freud was an avid reader of Sherlock Holmes (his daughter read Dorothy Sayers) and the work of psychoanalysis has often been compared to the process of detection. Post-Freud crime writers and film directors enthusiastically adopted the ideas of psychoanalysis. In this evening talk at the Freud Museum, detective fiction writer and clinical psychologist Frank Tallis examines the enduring appeal of the genre and discusses his own novels.
Dr. Frank Tallis is an award winning writer and clinical psychologist who has held posts in clinical psychology and neuroscience at the Institute of Psychiatry and King’s College, London. He has written many books on psychology and over thirty academic papers. His novels are: KILLING TIME, SENSING OTHERS, MORTAL MISCHIEF, VIENNA BLOOD, FATAL LIES, and DARKNESS RISING. DEADLY COMMUNION, the fifth volume of the Liebermann Papers, set in Freud’s Vienna, will be published in 2010.
Tickets: £8 / £5 Friends.
(Pay on the door but phone or email to secure a place)
Freud Museum
20 Maresfield Gardens, London NW3 5SX
Tel: +44 (0)20 7435 2002
www.freud.org.uk
Frank Tallis
The Interpretation of Screams: Freud and Detective Fiction
Freud was an avid reader of Sherlock Holmes (his daughter read Dorothy Sayers) and the work of psychoanalysis has often been compared to the process of detection. Post-Freud crime writers and film directors enthusiastically adopted the ideas of psychoanalysis. In this evening talk at the Freud Museum, detective fiction writer and clinical psychologist Frank Tallis examines the enduring appeal of the genre and discusses his own novels.
Dr. Frank Tallis is an award winning writer and clinical psychologist who has held posts in clinical psychology and neuroscience at the Institute of Psychiatry and King’s College, London. He has written many books on psychology and over thirty academic papers. His novels are: KILLING TIME, SENSING OTHERS, MORTAL MISCHIEF, VIENNA BLOOD, FATAL LIES, and DARKNESS RISING. DEADLY COMMUNION, the fifth volume of the Liebermann Papers, set in Freud’s Vienna, will be published in 2010.
Tickets: £8 / £5 Friends.
(Pay on the door but phone or email to secure a place)
Freud Museum
20 Maresfield Gardens, London NW3 5SX
Tel: +44 (0)20 7435 2002
www.freud.org.uk
Thursday, 8 October 2009
Evening Performance at The Freud Museum
Tuesday 13 October 2009 7.15pm
Gerald Davidson
Being Good: Aichhorn and Anna - A performance presentation
Actor 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
Gerald Davidson
Being Good: Aichhorn and Anna - A performance presentation
Actor 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
Thursday, 16 July 2009
Lecture Announcement
Curator's Talk
Resonance: Overlay: Interweave
What has Bracha Ettinger created in the Freudian Space of Memory and Migration?
2.30-4.00pm Sunday 26 July
(No charge or booking)
Why install art in the Freud Museum already so rich with artefacts and images?
Why place the works of this artist in this museum of psychoanalysis?
Is it an exhibition in the museum, or an installation that is in dialogue with the memories held in this space?
This talk will explore what the painter Bracha Ettinger has 'done' by creating a unique, multi-faceted installation which is much more than a mere exhibition in these spaces. It will ask: what is brought to light in this encounter between the varied works of a contemporary artist who is herself so deeply engaged with psychoanalysis and the freighted spaces the last home and archives of the exiles a father and his daughter, one a collector of antiquities, the other a weaver.
Bracha Ettinger has created an installation that weaves many strings between her own history and memory and the world from which the Freuds fled. It treats of European pasts and present struggles for futures despite the freight of traumatic memory. Through allusion and translation into artworking, Ettinger's work explores aspects of Freud's own practice and theory especially in relation to the feminine and the obscured mother.
Another contribution to the tradition of the many extraordinary exhibitions by contemporary artists at the museum, Bracha Ettinger's work, however, holds a special place because this was an installation waiting to happen: in both her own artwork between aesthetics, psychoanalysis and history and in the museum's own relations through images and things, objects and books to history, memory and above all, the family.
The curator, distinguished art historian and cultural theorist, Griselda Pollock will present a double reading of the exhibition as a conversation between both Anna and Sigmund Freud and Bracha Ettinger's work, linking Freud's last great work Moses and Monothesism (1939) and his own diary (1929-39) with Ettinger's notebooks and those of her father (1942-45), Freud's objects and her mother's spoon, the Freudian family albums and hers, Freud's texts and hers. As the exhibition closes, this is a last chance of engage with the materiality, affects and insights created in the installation as poetic event.
Freud Museum
20 Maresfield Gardens, London NW3 5SX
Tel: +44 (0)20 7435 2002
www.freud.org.uk
Thursday, 9 July 2009
Conference Announcement: Psychoanalysis, Money and the Economy
Psychoanalysis, Money and the Economy
a conference convened for the London Freud Museum
by Prof. David Bennett and Dr. Ivan Ward
2nd-4th July, 2010.
Freud once warned his fellow analysts that there were two subjects that “civilized people” will always treat “with the same inconsistency, prudishness and hypocrisy” and about which psychoanalysts must insist on speaking with “the same matter-of-fact frankness”, namely: “money matters” and “sexual matters”. Yet the psychoanalytic profession has often followed Freud’s own example in decoding “money matters” as symbolic displacements of “sexual matters”. What would speaking “frankly” about money and psychoanalysis entail? This conference, and the volume of essays that will result from it, aims to explore all aspects of the nexus between psychoanalysis, money and the economy, including, but not limited to:
• psychoanalytic interpretations of economic behaviour, including the psychology of financial risk-taking and gambling, stock-market booms and busts, the ‘highs’ and ‘depressions’ of economies, financial traders and investors
• the roles of money and economic models in psychoanalytic theory and case histories
• the history of attempts to fuse psychoanalytic with economic explanations of social and cultural processes, as in the Freudo-Marxist tradition and its critiques of liberal economics’ theories of ‘Homo oeconomicus’
• the roles of money in the analyst–analysand relationship, or the psychotherapeutic encounter.
• psychoanalytic interpretations of monetary transactions and relationships in fantasy, fiction and film
• histories, theories and practices of libidinal economy, including sexual-economic revolutionary theories and movements
• how psychoanalysis as a profession and set of practices and theories is articulated wth specific economic conditions and trends, regionally, nationally and/or internationally
The conference will include a number of invited keynote speakers but there will also be opportunities for unsolicited papers to be presented. Proposals for 20-minute papers on any aspect of the conference theme will be welcome; they should include an explanatory title and a 600-word abstract, and should be sent simultaneously to David Bennett d.b@unimelb.edu.au and Ivan Ward ivan@freud.org.uk.
a conference convened for the London Freud Museum
by Prof. David Bennett and Dr. Ivan Ward
2nd-4th July, 2010.
Freud once warned his fellow analysts that there were two subjects that “civilized people” will always treat “with the same inconsistency, prudishness and hypocrisy” and about which psychoanalysts must insist on speaking with “the same matter-of-fact frankness”, namely: “money matters” and “sexual matters”. Yet the psychoanalytic profession has often followed Freud’s own example in decoding “money matters” as symbolic displacements of “sexual matters”. What would speaking “frankly” about money and psychoanalysis entail? This conference, and the volume of essays that will result from it, aims to explore all aspects of the nexus between psychoanalysis, money and the economy, including, but not limited to:
• psychoanalytic interpretations of economic behaviour, including the psychology of financial risk-taking and gambling, stock-market booms and busts, the ‘highs’ and ‘depressions’ of economies, financial traders and investors
• the roles of money and economic models in psychoanalytic theory and case histories
• the history of attempts to fuse psychoanalytic with economic explanations of social and cultural processes, as in the Freudo-Marxist tradition and its critiques of liberal economics’ theories of ‘Homo oeconomicus’
• the roles of money in the analyst–analysand relationship, or the psychotherapeutic encounter.
• psychoanalytic interpretations of monetary transactions and relationships in fantasy, fiction and film
• histories, theories and practices of libidinal economy, including sexual-economic revolutionary theories and movements
• how psychoanalysis as a profession and set of practices and theories is articulated wth specific economic conditions and trends, regionally, nationally and/or internationally
The conference will include a number of invited keynote speakers but there will also be opportunities for unsolicited papers to be presented. Proposals for 20-minute papers on any aspect of the conference theme will be welcome; they should include an explanatory title and a 600-word abstract, and should be sent simultaneously to David Bennett d.b@unimelb.edu.au and Ivan Ward ivan@freud.org.uk.
Friday, 19 June 2009
In Your Dreams?
I thought that this most recent announcement from the Freud Museum was much too delicious not to share:
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.
In Your Dreams! Singles nights with a twist at the Freud MuseumI think the Freud Museum has stumbled on to a winner here! Good luck to everyone. I hope the couch will be very busy.
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!
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.
Saturday, 20 September 2008
Oh! My Winnipeg!
A couple of weeks ago, your Psycho-Babble On... team went to the lovely Showroom cinema in Sheffield to enjoy an evening of Guy Maddin's dramamentary, tragic love letter and noir homage, My Winnipeg. It was decided, by virtue of me being Canadian and the more strictly psychoanalytically-inclined, that I should be charged with the task of offering to you, our loyal reader (notice the singular -- I assume nothing), thorough analyses and commentary on this artistic endeavour. (Plus, it was my turn after a long holiday to add something to the blog.)Well, let me start with the proviso that I've never been to Winnipeg, and while it is 'close' it is still a 25 hour drive from my hometown of Toronto. I did, however, get most of the ice hockey references, and yes, I've had my nose freeze shut when out walking in December (though that was in Montreal).
The problem with trying to write about a film like My Winnipeg is that it is so relentlessly and unrepentantly intelligent, and knowing, that it renders any analysis by critical hacks (almost) pointless. It's like reading Angela Carter: you start thinking to yourself, 'I know what this is! I know what this is! This is a panopticon she's describing here!' and when you turn the page your enthusiasm crashes to the bottom of your stomach when you read, 'It is a panopticon that I am describing here' -- and neither with Carter's novels nor with Maddin's film does this necessarily inhibit your appreciation or enjoyment of the offering, but it does crush the pretensions of we critics that think artists can't say anything without our explanations.
SO, what can I say about My Winnipeg? Or, what can I say about My Winnipeg that Maddin hasn't already? It is a brilliant examination of and play with Oedipus, even if I though there was one too many shots of Maddin's mother's naked lap to make the point. But the association of home with the mother, and how both are simultaneously longer-for and loathed, is brilliantly portrayed. Winnipeg's unique situation, as a city of slumbering numbness at a mythical junction of two rivers, inciting both passion and contempt, makes it a northern Thebes, and Maddin himself a winking (pre-eye gouging, obviously) Oedipus.
And these Oedipal pictures are drawn in neat black-and-white, the noir style both lovingly and satirically presented, but the overall effect is to heighten the tragedy, since noir is itself so steeped in the Freudian melodrama. Hitchcock, too, looms large, not only stylistically, but with small but overt links to Psycho, Vertigo and -- I think -- The Birds. Maybe others, too -- I'd have to watch it again, which I'll be more than happy to do one day.
Maddin's mother -- or, I should say, 'Maddin's' 'mother', because really I'm taking about the representation of her here, not the woman herself (who I've never met, even though, yes, we're both from Canada) -- is fantastically rendered: she is not only Jocasta, but also Freud himself -- the relentlessly interogator who pushes through the snowbanks of denial ('snowbanks of denial'? -- it works, watch the film) to expose those truths that her children would hide from her; but, more akin to Melanie Klein, she is a menace, a monstrous figure that haunts every unconscious frame.
My Winnipeg deserves a place on the psychoanaytic cultural shelf, right up along there with the Theban plays, The Oresteia, Hamlet et al. Go and see it.
Tuesday, 20 May 2008
Freud Memorial Lecture
Of interest to those of you in easy reach of London:
Please apply online at www.freud.org.uk/order1.htm using the secure order form, or phone the museum to secure a place.
20 Maresfield Gardens
020 7435 2002
info@freud.org.uk
Freud Memorial Lecture 2008
Thursday 26 June 7.30pm at The Conway Hall, WC1
Adam Phillips
Freud’s Helplessness
Adam Phillips is a child and adult psychotherapist and acclaimed author. His books include: On Kissing, Tickling and Being Bored (1993); Terrors and Experts (1995), The Beast in the Nursery (1998), Promises, Promises (2000), Houdini’s Box (2001), Equals: On Inhibition, Mockery, Hierarchy and the Pleasures of Democracy (2002), and Going Sane (2005).
“Phillips has virtually invented the essay as a suitable form for penetrating psychological enquiry” Frank Kermode
Registration: £12 or £10 for Friends of the Freud MuseumThursday 26 June 7.30pm at The Conway Hall, WC1
Adam Phillips
Freud’s Helplessness
Adam Phillips is a child and adult psychotherapist and acclaimed author. His books include: On Kissing, Tickling and Being Bored (1993); Terrors and Experts (1995), The Beast in the Nursery (1998), Promises, Promises (2000), Houdini’s Box (2001), Equals: On Inhibition, Mockery, Hierarchy and the Pleasures of Democracy (2002), and Going Sane (2005).
“Phillips has virtually invented the essay as a suitable form for penetrating psychological enquiry” Frank Kermode
Please apply online at www.freud.org.uk/order1.htm using the secure order form, or phone the museum to secure a place.
20 Maresfield Gardens
020 7435 2002
info@freud.org.uk
Tuesday, 1 April 2008
The Importance of Sublimation
All of this talk of jokes reminds me of another clip you might be interested in. This time, from the BBC sketch comedy show Mitchell and Webb:
This illustrates the fundamental importance of repression and sublimation: No repression, no comedy. Not in the 1970s, anyhow. Imagine how boring the world world would be if a sausage was really just a sausage, and not a lewd invitation! We'd get nothing done, ever.
Of course anyone who reads early Freud doesn't need to be reminded of this: For Freud, repression and sublimation really are at the very heart of Civilisation. It's worth remembering that without repression, we'd spend our whole lives under the sheets, pleasuring and being pleasured. All cultural, social life are just the final resting place of energies that otherwise would have been spent in sexual rapture, if society (in the persona of the internalised Father) hadn't stepped in to spoil things.
Well, psychoanalysis has naturally moved on from these initial formulations. But knowing this about Freud explains a lot, I think, about where psychoanalysis went when sexual 'repression' wasn't so obvious. (Again, as Foucault would say, we were never really sexually repressed anyway, but it's about appearances in this case, really.)
It also answers a question I long wondered about. Well, not really a question, but it was something friends and I went around asking people when we undergraduates, to show everyone how clever and witty -- in a post-Wildean way, I suppose -- we could be:
The answer, of course, as I now know, is 'Yes'. Obviously.
This illustrates the fundamental importance of repression and sublimation: No repression, no comedy. Not in the 1970s, anyhow. Imagine how boring the world world would be if a sausage was really just a sausage, and not a lewd invitation! We'd get nothing done, ever.
Of course anyone who reads early Freud doesn't need to be reminded of this: For Freud, repression and sublimation really are at the very heart of Civilisation. It's worth remembering that without repression, we'd spend our whole lives under the sheets, pleasuring and being pleasured. All cultural, social life are just the final resting place of energies that otherwise would have been spent in sexual rapture, if society (in the persona of the internalised Father) hadn't stepped in to spoil things.
Well, psychoanalysis has naturally moved on from these initial formulations. But knowing this about Freud explains a lot, I think, about where psychoanalysis went when sexual 'repression' wasn't so obvious. (Again, as Foucault would say, we were never really sexually repressed anyway, but it's about appearances in this case, really.)
It also answers a question I long wondered about. Well, not really a question, but it was something friends and I went around asking people when we undergraduates, to show everyone how clever and witty -- in a post-Wildean way, I suppose -- we could be:
Do you think that dogs would have evolved to a higher level of civilisation if they hadn't been distracted by their ability to lick themselves?
The answer, of course, as I now know, is 'Yes'. Obviously.
Monday, 24 March 2008
Freudian humour, and my woeful failure...
A little diversion, if I might: Nate at 'What in the Hell...' has posted a list of the Best Lightbulb Jokes, which included this little gem...
I'm still laughing. (But the real highlight are the Trotskyist pick-up lines Adam W. posted in the comments. “Hey baby, If I said you had a peasantry capable of being led by a tiny working class would you hold it against me?” Beautiful...)
So I thought I'd come up with the first Psycho-Babble On Compendium of Psychoanalytic and Psychotherapeutic Lightbulb Jokes... but alas, all I could come up with was
Q: How many Winnicottians does is take to change a lightbulb?
A: None. It all depends on the mother.
which is obviously rubbish so I can't be trusted to ever do this again. So rather than a 'compendium', I'm hoping for an Psycho-Babble On Occasional Series of Psychoanalytic and Psychotherapeutic Jokes of Any Sort, Really, because I think that's the best I can hope for. And of course I'll have to poach them, as my woeful effort (see above) amply demonstrates, so if you have any good ideas, please do send them to us.
(And by the way, if you like cartoons, and we know there are a lot of good psychoanalytic/therapeutic cartoons out there, do check out Prozacville in our links section.)
Q: How many Freudians does it take to change a lightbulb?
A: Two. One to change the lightbulb and another to hold the penis – uh, I mean, the ladder!
I'm still laughing. (But the real highlight are the Trotskyist pick-up lines Adam W. posted in the comments. “Hey baby, If I said you had a peasantry capable of being led by a tiny working class would you hold it against me?” Beautiful...)
So I thought I'd come up with the first Psycho-Babble On Compendium of Psychoanalytic and Psychotherapeutic Lightbulb Jokes... but alas, all I could come up with was
Q: How many Winnicottians does is take to change a lightbulb?
A: None. It all depends on the mother.
which is obviously rubbish so I can't be trusted to ever do this again. So rather than a 'compendium', I'm hoping for an Psycho-Babble On Occasional Series of Psychoanalytic and Psychotherapeutic Jokes of Any Sort, Really, because I think that's the best I can hope for. And of course I'll have to poach them, as my woeful effort (see above) amply demonstrates, so if you have any good ideas, please do send them to us.
(And by the way, if you like cartoons, and we know there are a lot of good psychoanalytic/therapeutic cartoons out there, do check out Prozacville in our links section.)
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