Open Seminar schedule at Essex

Centre for Psychoanalytic Studies, University of Essex

Open Seminar Schedule – Colchester Campus

Spring Term 2011

2 February 2011: Memory, memorials, and the dynamics of the transmission of a cultural narrative: from the concentration camp to the gay pride parade
Dr Aaron Balick (Centre for Psychoanalytic Studies) and Prof. Rainer Schulze (Department of History) from University of Essex

23 February 2011: Roundtable Discussion on the State Regulation of Counselling and Psychotherapy (Colchester Campus) (Open Seminar)
Panellists: Michael Fischer, King’s College London & Consultant at South London & Maudsley NHS Trust; Malcolm Allen, Chief Executive of British Psychoanalytic Council (BPC); Andrew Samuels, University of Essex & Chair of UKCP

16 March 2011: Cyborgs and Entanglements A Psychoanalytic and Actor Network informed consultancy to a fertility clinic (Colchester Campus) (Open Seminar)
Dr Simon Western from Tavistock and Portman Clinic

The Open Seminars all take place in room 4N.6.1 from 5.00-6.30pm.

All Welcome

Centre for Psychoanalytic Studies, University of Essex
WWW: www.essex.ac.uk/centres/psycho

Open Seminar Announcement

Centre for Psychoanalytic Studies

Wednesday 8 December 2010

Open Seminar (Colchester Campus)

Reverie in psycho-social research method (Wendy Hollway, Open University)

Abstract: Social science research is underpinned by a positivist, cognitive analytic epistemology. Psychoanalysis, especially in Bion's concept of reverie, is based on a different kind of knowing which is widely seen as central to clinical technique. How does reverie translate into psycho-social research methodology, with what effects? In this talk, I use examples from my research on the identity transition involved when women become mothers for the first time; examples that pertain to reflexive field notes, psychoanalytic observation, data analysis and writing cases. The direction of these methods is discussed in terms of subjectivity, objectivity, validity and ethics in research knowing.

Wendy Hollway is Professor in Psychology at the Open University. She is interested in applying psychoanalytic principles to theorising subjectivity, to methodology and to empirical research on identity. Her current ESRC-funded Fellowship 'Maternal Identities, Care and Intersubjectivity' uses previous data derived from free association narrative interview and psychoanalytic observation methods and develops epistemological and ethical, as well as ontological, implications. She is working on a book provisionally entitled 'Mothers' Knowing/ Knowing Mothers'.

Discussant: Professor R D Hinshelwood (Centre for Psychoanalytic Studies)

The Open Seminars all take place in room 4N.6.1 from 5.00-6.30pm

All Welcome

T 01206 873640 E cpsadmin@essex.ac.uk www.essex.ac.uk/centres/psycho

Remote Control: Psychoanalysis and Television

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

Open Seminar Schedule

from the Centre for Psychoanalytic Studies, University of Essex (Colchester Campus)

27 October 2010:

Terrors of Growing Old – Ageism in Therapeutic Care with Older People (Paul Terry)

Paul Terry is a Consultant Clinical Psychologist and Specialty Lead for Older People in a Specialist Mental Health Team for Older People in Hertfordshire Partnership NHS Foundation Trust.

17 November 2010:

Found objects and mirroring forms (Dr Ken Wright)

Dr. Ken Wright is a member of the British Psychoanalytic Society, Tavistock Society of Psychotherapists and Society of Couple Psychoanalytic Psychotherapists. He is also Patron of the Squiggle Foundation.


08 December 2010:

Reverie in psycho-social research method (Wendy Hollway)

Wendy Hollway is Professor in Psychology at the Open University.




The Open Seminars all take place in room 4N.6.1 from 5.00-6.30pm

All Welcome

T 01206 873640 E cpsadmin@essex.ac.uk www.essex.ac.uk/centres/psycho

Conference Announcement

The Centre for Psychoanalytic Studies
University of Essex, Colchester

Presents a One-day Conference

Why the Mainstream Needs its Margins: The Function
of the Marginalised in Psyche and Society

Saturday, 13 November 2010

For decades sociologists, politicians, historians and identity theorists have been concerned to reintegrate invisible and discarded groups from the margins of society. We have learned to listen for voices beyond the boundaries of dominant groupings – regarding ethnic or gender identities; the criminalised and disenfranchised; the migrant and the underclass. But the margins are at the same time some of the most highly visible aspects of society. Daily the media turn their lens on immigrants, on anti-social youths, on gays, on ethnic minorities, and on the mentally ill. The engendering of moral panic over those who exist on the margins is central to the way non-marginal and mainstream identities function. This one-day conference brings together sociological, historical and psychoanalytic perspectives to examine the margins as a symptom of so-called ‘normal’ identity. What do we project onto the margins, how are they identified with, how do they operate as part of the psychic economy of the mainstream? Could a centre exist without its margins?

Panels on:

What Happened to Deviance?
Immigration: Fantasies and Realities
Panic, Trauma and Making Enemies
Marginalising the Fear of Madness

Speakers include:

Simon Clarke (UwE), Colin Samson (Essex), Karl Figlio (Essex), Jeffrey Murer (St Andrews), Eamonn Carrabine (Essex), Tim Dartington (Tavistock Institute), Joan Busfield (Essex), Aaron Balick (Essex)

Cost: £55 for the day (£35 students/unwaged)

For booking and registration see attached booking form, or contact Debbie Stewart: Centre for Psychoanalytic Studies, University of Essex, Wivenhoe Park, Colchester C04 3SQ Tel: 01206 873640; Fax: 01206 872746; cpsadmin@essex.ac.uk

Open Seminar

Centre for Psychoanalytic Studies
University of Essex

Wednesday 2nd June 2010

Room 4N.6.1

5.00pm – 6:30pm

Dr Leon Burnett

‘The Construction of a Fantasia: Dostoevsky’s Meek Girl and Two Russian Suicides’

Dr Leon Burnett is a Reader in Literature and Dean of the Faculty of Humanities and Comparative Studies at the University of Essex. His publications are mainly in Comparative Literature. Research areas of particular interest include modern European poetry, literary translation, myth in modern culture, and Russian literature. He has edited F. M. Dostoevsky (1821-1881): A Centenary Collection (1981) and Word in Time: Poetry, Narrative, Translation (1997), and is currently co-editing The Art of Accommodation: Literary Translation in Russia (publication expected later this year). From 1992 to 2000 he was the main editor of New Comparison: a Journal of Comparative and General Literary Studies.

Abstract: In A Writer’s Diary (October, 1876), Dostoevsky juxtaposed two reports of recent and contrasting female suicides, concluding with the question “which of these two souls bore more torment on earth”? The next instalment of the journal (November, 1876) contained a single piece of writing, “The Meek Girl: A Fantastic Story”, clearly based on the second of the two contemporary cases. The suicides served to bring together in Dostoevsky’s mind concepts that he had previously treated separately and, in his view, unsuccessfully: effacement (in The Double) and enigma (in The Idiot). Stimulated by a desire to comprehend the “psychological sequence” of events leading up to the act of suicide, Dostoevsky returned in “The Meek Girl” to these concepts, transferring the focus from male protagonists to an unnamed female character. I shall be looking at how, in this late work, he took up the challenge of finding an appropriate form to express an impenetrable theme.

ALL WELCOME

Details of all our Open Seminars can be found at:

http://www.essex.ac.uk/centres/psycho/news_and_seminars/seminars.aspx

For further information, or if you are interested in presenting an Open Seminar, please contact:

Tel: 01206 873075 / Email: cpsadmin@essex.ac.uk

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

Lecturer Post

The Centre for Psychoanalytic Studies is seeking to appoint a Lecturer/ Senior Lecturer/ Reader to teach on and play a major role in the development of its new Foundation Degree (and BA Hons) in Therapeutic Communication and Therapeutic Organisations aimed at those working with troubled, challenging, or vulnerable adults. The successful applicant will take an active part in teaching and developing this programme working closely with the team staffing a parallel programme for those working with children.

Applicants must be a member of the BPC, UKCP, or equivalent, must have a relevant MA/MSc or equivalent professional qualification, and must have experience of working with adults in a therapeutic or caring context. Experience in relevant teaching or demonstrable potential to achieve this is applicable for Lecturer level appointments. For senior lecturer appointments substantial experience in teaching and academic leadership is essential. The post is available either full-time or half-time (with proportionate duties) to suit the needs of different applicants; we aim to appoint the strongest applicant on whichever basis. This post will be worked between both the Colchester and the Southend campuses.

Please use the link below for a full job description, person specification and further information relating to this post. Please read this information carefully before applying for this post as it contains details of documents that must be attached to your application. Applications should be made on-line, but if you would like advice or help in making an application, or need information in a different format, please telephone (01206 874588/873521).

Applications can be made via the University HR website http://www.essex.ac.uk/vacancies/.

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.

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

Postgraduate Conference - Psychoanalysis, Culture and Society

CALL FOR PAPERS

PSYCHOANALYSIS, CULTURE AND SOCIETY

A POSTGRADUATE CONFERENCE

CENTRE FOR PSYCHOANALYSIS
MIDDLESEX UNIVERSITY
LONDON

Saturday, 5TH June, 2010


We are pleased to announce Psychoanalysis, Culture and Society: A
Postgraduate Conference.

We invite postgraduate students and research fellows to submit proposals for papers on psychoanalysis or psychoanalytically informed research. Papers may be from any academic discipline, including psychology, sociology, cultural studies, psychosocial studies, history, literature, art, religious studies or philosophy.

This one-day conference is designed to give postgraduate students from all disciplines who are interested in psychoanalysis an opportunity to present and discuss their research in an informal and intellectually stimulating setting.

The conference takes place at the Hendon Campus of Middlesex University (30 minutes from central London) between 9:30 and 5:30 on Saturday, 5th June, 2009. Tea, coffee and a light lunch will be provided. The conference fee is £30 for presenters and attendees.

Submitting an abstract

Abstracts of 300 words (maximum) should include a title, the name of your university or institution and a telephone number. Papers should be no more than 20 minutes long. A further 10 minutes will be allowed for discussion. Sessions of 1½ hours will have space for three
papers. There will be concurrent panels to accommodate as many papers as possible. The day will end with a plenary.

The deadline for submission of abstracts is Friday, 25th May, 2009. Early submission is appreciated. Abstracts and queries should be sent to: David Henderson, d.henderson@mdx.ac.uk

Centre for Psychoanalysis
Psychology Department
Middlesex University
The Burroughs
Hendon
London
NW4 4BT

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

Call For Papers

JEP - European Journal of Psychoanalysis, a semiannual journal (www.psychomedia.it/jep), is planning a future issue on the topic

THE END

We welcome papers from a psychoanalytic perspective, although we will consider contributions from other fields that can enlighten the topic. We can consider papers submitted in French, Italian or German, however, once accepted for publication, it will be the responsibility of the author to provide the text of the paper in English.

We are especially interested in receiving contributions on:

- End as ethics
- End as a limit, and End as an aim
- Death, death-drive, Eros & Thanatos
- Emergence of death issues during the analytic cure
- Limits, borders, "terms" (both as words and time limits)
- Eschatological end

All submitted papers will be peer reviewed.

JEP editors
Sergio Benvenuto
Cristiana Cimino
Antonello Correale

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

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

Open Seminar Announcement

at the University of Essex, Centre for Psychoanalytic Studies

28th October 2009

Lisa Ruddick: Academic Cool and the Shaming of the Inner World

Lisa Ruddick is Associate Professor of English at the University of Chicago. She is the author of Reading Gertrude Stein: Body, Text, Gnosis (Cornell, 1990), and has published articles on the intellectual life of the humanities in the United States. This is the subject of her book in progress, Intuition and Brutality in Academic Life.

Abstract: Since the 1980s, U.S. literary scholarship has been guided by poststructuralist theories that cast doubt on the value of the "self" and the "inner life." As practicing psychoanalysts on both sides of the Atlantic know, these are not the only sophisticated theories available for describing subjectivity. Why, then, have they enjoyed such dominance in the milieu of higher learning? The theories are valued because they serve to enforce group discipline in what has become an insular and paranoid academic subculture. They chip away at member’s faith in their own inner worlds, capturing them for the profession itself and its agendas.

For more details on this and future seminars, see the Centre for Psychoanalytic Studies website.

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

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.

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.