Open Seminar Announcement

Centre for Psychoanalytic Studies
University of Essex

Wednesday 12th May 2010
Room 4N.6.1
5.00pm – 6:30pm

Dr Julia Borossa

‘The Extensibility of Psychoanalysis: colonialism, post-colonialism and hospitality’

Dr Julia Borossa is Principal Lecturer and Director of the Centre for Psychoanalysis at Middlesex University. She has published widely on the history of the psychoanalytic movement and on the politics and cultures of psychoanalysis. Most recently, she has edited (with Ivan Ward), a special issue of the journal Psychoanalysis and History entitled Psychoanalysis, Fascism, Fundamentalism (Edinburgh: Edinburgh U.P. 2009).

Abstract: Using a theoretical framework informed by both post-colonial theory and psychoanalysis, this paper will attempt to partially address the question as to whether or not psychoanalysis is promoting a form of subjectivity that is in line with certain political formations, and whether this is linked to its theoretical foundations or to its institutions. In this respect, a central theme of the paper will be the vicissitudes of the deployment of psychoanalysis beyond a Western context by specifically asking who, and what, is marginalised within the movement and why. What are the limits of the hospitality and the extensibility of psychoanalysis?

To illustrate these concerns, the paper will turn to the figure of the psychoanalyst Masud Khan, who emigrated to London from the Indian subcontinent in 1946 and became an important albeit controversial figure within the British Psychoanalytic Society. Khan is the subject of two recent biographies, and a widely discussed memoir by a former patient, the Cambridge economist Wynn Godley. His life and transgressive career, as well as the stories generated about him within the context of British psychoanalytic culture, will be used to raise the question of psychoanalysis’ theoretical difficulties in containing racial and cultural otherness.

ALL WELCOME

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

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

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.

Click here for the invitation.

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

A Note on the Concept of the Unconscious

Though the concept of the unconscious is fundamental in Freudian psychoanalysis, its hardly identifiable and controllable nature brings a kind of uncertainty to the psychoanalytic discourse. This uncertainty has extremely valuable effects on scientific discourse since it provides dynamism, flexibility and openness which is always desirable in a science with such a diverse object as the human soul.

To complicate matters, the concept of the unconscious is heterogeneous itself. The Freudian definition differs a lot from the definition of the disciples, not to mention modern and postmodern psychoanalysis. The concept of the unconscious was full of contradictions from the beginning; beyond psychoanalysis it was much more problematic. Taking everything into account, two different interpretations emerged in the early history of psychology:

The unconscious is part of the whole personality and it is much more significant than the conscious part (e. g. Freud).

The unconscious is another personality and it is much more significant than the conscious part (e. g. Morton Prince, Frederic Myers).

In the latter sense the unconscious functions as a co-consciousness. Supposedly, it is no accident that the idea of co-consciousness has been associated with mediumistic phenomena (and its scientific investigation) – in these states the co-conscious was especially spectacular:

As shown in the photograph (taken by Sir William Crookes) the medium Florence Cook is in trans-state while her co-conscious, the spirit Katie King, is materializing in the background. Convincing, isn’t it?

Of course, Freud denied the existence of such co-consciousness. Taken into account the evidences of co-consciousness, I share his opinion. The “so-called” multiple personalities should find themselves a more evidence-based diagnostic category…