Freud Museum London

Solitary Pleasures

• 18 April — 13 May 2018 *on now

Sigmund Freud famously described masturbation as the first or ‘primal’ addiction. Solitary Pleasures interrogates and investigates masturbation, and the eroticism, desire, and gratification associated with it, not just as an isolated or solitary ‘vice’, but as a pleasure that’s mutual; shared between couples, lovers, and strangers in ways that redefine desire and eroticism's possibilities.


The exhibition includes work by Shannon Bell, VALIE EXPORT, Chantal Faust, Jordan McKenzie, Annie Sprinkle and Beth Stephens, Emma Talbot, and Michelle Williams Gamaker. Together, they tell the human story, both ancient and modern, of our complex sexual, erotic, and intimate encounters with ourselves and others by way of masturbation as an all-inclusive - gay, lesbian, heterosexual, bisexual, trans, queer, + - practice.

Solitary Pleasures challenges social taboos and contributes to the arts, sex education, and sexual health and wellbeing agenda by generating original, wide-ranging dialogues on this topic central to gender, sexuality, eroticism and mental health.

Suitable for

• Not suitable for children

Admission

Website

https://freud.org.uk/exhibitions/77118/solitary-pleasures/

Fay Ballard and Judy Goldhill: Breathe

• 16 May — 18 July 2018

BREATHE presents two thought-provoking contemporary artists, Fay Ballard and Judy Goldhill, who both explore the central theme of parental loss throughout their practice.

Fay was seven when her mother, Mary, died suddenly of pneumonia, fighting for breath in the last moments of her life. She died in Spain in 1964, while the family were together on holiday. Fay never discussed her mother with her father again. However, 45 years later, the death of Fay’s father in 2009 unearthed unresolved, deep-seated feelings about her mother which she has been exploring in drawings ever since.

Judy’s father died of polio when she was one. He spent the last three months of his life encased in an iron lung. Judy has been considering unresolved questions about her father since returning to Central Saint Martin’s ten years ago, to complete an MA in Fine Art. Her dissertation was an investigation into the only building built by her architect father, addressed in relation to her own artistic practice. She has continued this theme in her artist’s books, particularly Carbon Copy.

Compelled by the spirit of place and architectural edifices, Judy has had access to the restricted portals of the nuclear industry in the UK, and later to the major astronomical observatories of North and South America, exploring the idea of making the invisible visible.

Breath, and the act of breathing, permeate the work of both artists, consciously and unconsciously, referencing not only personal loss, but also life as a creative force - Fay through drawing; Judy through photography, film and artist’s books.

This exhibition examines the work of these two captivating artists as an excavation into their traumatic losses, and considers the reparative function of personal, and wider, creativity.

Fay Ballard is visiting artist at Hammersmith hospital, helping patients in the Auchi Acute Dialysis Ward make art at their bedsides. She sits on the Arts Committee for Imperial Health Charity. Fay exhibits regularly, most recently at Charing Cross hospital and Pi Artworks (2017). Fay is invited to speak about her work at universities, art schools, and recently at Freud Museum London.

Judy Goldhill, a photographer and artist, exhibits her photographs as well as producing artist’s books, which have been acquired by major international collections. She won The Birgid Skiold Award for Excellence at the London Artist’s Book Fair held at the Whitechapel Art Gallery. Carbon Copy is a time line of her father’s life. It was recently displayed at the Tate Archive Library, and has been acquired by Tate, The British Library, Leeds College of Art and The Brotherton Library. She is currently Artist-in-Residence in the Astro-Physics department at University College London. www.judygoldhill.com

Caroline Garland is a Fellow of the British Psychoanalytical Society, a psychoanalyst who founded the Unit for the Study of Trauma and Its Aftermath in the Adult Department of the Tavistock Clinic. Caroline also initiated and curated the Tavistock’s own art collection, and is herself an award-winning and published poet (aka Beatrice Garland). In 2001, she won the National Poetry Prize. She took part in ‘Loss and Recovery: Conversation between Poets and Psychotherapists’, a symposium at Freud Museum London, 2013. Caroline has published and broadcast widely, including being one of the lead clinicians in the ground-breaking BBC television series on the Tavistock Clinic, Talking Cure.

Admission

Website

https://freud.org.uk/exhibitions/77119/breathe/

PROJECTIONS: Marilyn Monroe's onscreen persona

• 16 — 30 April 2018 *on now

Norma Jeane Baker transformed into Marilyn Monroe inside Hollywood’s ravenous glare. She began her entertainment career as a pinup model and soon secured her place as a bona fide international movie star. The ever-luminous Marilyn stole every scene she appeared in; many cinema scholars equate Monroe with the essence of the art form itself, due to the magic she invariably conjured up on the silver screen. She possessed an instinctive and sophisticated understanding of how to construct memorable images, and was not afraid of being vulnerable in her artistic process.

But beauty, talent and success did not diminish the pain of emotional difficulties Marilyn lived through. Abandoned in childhood by her parents, she experienced the vagaries of fame in her professional life, was bullied by powerful studio bosses, had three unsuccessful marriages and endured fertility problems, turning to alcohol and pills to cope with debilitating neuroses. Beneath the social mask of cheerful joie de vivre, Marilyn suffered enormously – and had the wherewithal to channel sorrow into her craft, evident in her interest in psychoanalysis and reliance on Method Acting to deliver authentic performances. Her untimely death at the age of 36 did not stop the ascension of her star in popular culture; quite the opposite, film experts and amateurs alike see her as a modern-day Aphrodite.

In this new PROJECTIONS series, we will examine the creation of Marilyn Monroe’s onscreen persona, and the psychological underpinnings that shaped not only how she projected herself, but also the ways in which film audiences continue to respond to her. We will consider the symbolism contained in Marilyn’s most famous film characters within three categories: the origins of her celebrity, the establishment of her icon, and a burning desire to disrupt widespread perceptions of who she was.

Advance viewing is optional, select scenes and montages will be shown during weekly sessions (see filmography below).

Week 1 – A STAR IS BORN

Ladies of the Chorus (1948), All About Eve (1950), Monkey Business (1952), Niagara (1953)

Week 2 – ICONIC PERFORMANCES

Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1953), How to Marry a Millionaire (1953), The Seven-Year Itch (1955), Some Like It Hot (1959)

Week 3 – ROCKING THE BOAT

Bus Stop (1956), The Prince and the Showgirl (1957), Let’s Make Love (1960), The Misfits (1961)

PROJECTIONS is psychoanalysis for film interpretation. PROJECTIONS empowers film spectators to express subjective associations they consider to be meaningful. Expertise in psychoanalytic theory is not necessary - the only prerequisite is the desire to enter and inhabit the imaginary world of film, which is itself a psychoanalytic act. MARY WILD, a Freudian cinephile from Montreal, is the creator of PROJECTIONS.

Admission

Website

https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/projections-marilyn-monroes-onscreen-persona-tickets-43314542964

Psychoanalysis and Philosophy

• 19 April — 5 July 2018 *on now

Freud was famously ambivalent about philosophy: on the one hand, pouring scorn on academic philosophers who dismissed the notion of the unconscious mind on the pretext that it involved a logical contradiction – while on the other, stating proudly in his autobiography that after a long detour through medicine and psychotherapy he had finally returned to the philosophical preoccupations of his youth. The course will examine the ways in which psychoanalysis and philosophy inform each other, and intersect with each other - sometimes in mutual support and sometimes in sharp conflict. We begin with the great philosophers of the past who influenced and inspired Freud and later psychoanalysts, then, in the second half of the course, turn to contemporary philosophers who have reflected on psychoanalysis, either critically, or with the aim of clarifying the nature of its contribution to the understanding of the human condition.

Tutor: Keith Barrett BA PhD - having received his PhD from the Wellcome Centre for the History of Medicine at University College London, Dr Barrett specialises in both philosophy and psychoanalysis and has taught at several leading institutions, including Imperial College and Birkbeck College.

Week 1: Introduction. Freud’s study of philosophy as an undergraduate. The deep philosophical background to the emergence of psychoanalysis: the Enlightenment vision vs Romanticism.

Week 2: Schopenhauer. The formative influence on Freud’s thinking of the philosophy of Schopenhauer. ‘The World as Will and Representation’.

Week 3: Nietzsche. Anticipations of psychoanalysis in the philosophy of Nietzsche. Freud and Jung and their different relationships to Nietzsche. Psychoanalysing philosophy.

Week 4: Plato. ‘Eros’ in Plato and Freud. Freud’s view of homosexuality and Plato’s philosophy. Plato’s ‘Symposium’. Freud between Plato and Nietzsche.

Week 5: Spinoza. Sometimes referred to as ‘the philosopher of psychoanalysis’, we will examine Spinoza’s understanding of the mind/body relationship, and his views on freedom and happiness. Spinoza’s ‘Ethics’

Week 6: Popper and Grunbaum. The 20th century debate over the scientific status of psychoanalysis. Grunbaum’s ‘The Philosophical Foundations of Psychoanalysis’

Week 7: Ricoeur and Habermas. The debate over the interpretation of psychoanalysis as hermeneutics. Ricoeur’s ‘Freud and Philosophy’

Week 8: Levinas and Buber. Psychoanalysis and the philosophy of the ethical relation to the other. Levinas’ ‘Totality and Infinity’ and Buber’s ‘I and Thou’

Week 9: Marcuse and Girard. Philosophical responses to Freud’s analysis of society. Marcuse’s ‘Eros and Civilisation’ and Girard’s ‘Violence and the Sacred’. Freud and violence.

Week 10: Foucault. Foucault’s earlier view of psychoanalysis in ‘Madness and Civilisation’, and his later view in ‘History of Sexuality, vol 1’.

Week 11: Lacan. Lacan’s appropriation of philosophy for the ends of psychoanalysis. Hegel, Heidegger and Freud, according to Lacan.

Week 12: Derrida. Derrida’s relation to psychoanalysis. Derrida vs Lacan. Derrida in the Freud archives: ‘Archive Fever’

RECOMMENDED READING

Gomez, L. ‘The Freud Wars: an introduction to the philosophy of psychoanalysis’ (Routledge 2005)

Ricoeur, P. ‘On Psychoanalysis’ (Polity 2012)

Orange, D.M. ‘Thinking for clinicians: philosophical resources for contemporary psychoanalysis and the humanistic psychotherapies’ (Routledge 2010)

Braddock, L. ‘The academic face of psychoanalysis: papers in philosophy, the & Lacewing, M. (Eds) the humanities and the British clinical tradition’ (Routledge 2007)

Cavell, M. ‘Becoming a subject: reflections in philosophy and psychoanalysis’ (Oxford UP 2006)

Tauber, A. ‘Freud, the reluctant philosopher’ (Princeton U.P. 2010)

Seung, T.K. ‘Nietzsche’s epic of the soul: Thus Spoke Zarathustra’ (Lexington Books 2005)

Chapelle, D. Nietzsche and psychoanalysis’ (SUNY Press 1993)

Della Rocca, M. ‘Spinoza’ (Routledge 2008)

Janaway, C. ‘Schopenhauer’ (Oxford U.P. 1994)

Beck, M.C. ‘The quest for wisdom in Plato and Carl Jung: a comparative study of the healers of the soul’ (Edwin Mellen Press 2008)

Grunbaum, A. ‘The Foundations of psychoanalysis: A philosophical Critique’ (U of California P 1984)

Habermas, J. ‘Knowledge and Human Interests’ (Heineman 1972)

Mills, J. (Ed) ‘Rereading Freud: psychoanalysis through philosophy’ (SUNY Press 2004)

Frie, R. ‘Subjectivity and intersubjectivity in modern philosophy and psychoanalysis: a study of Sartre, Binswanger, Lacan and Habermas’ (Rowman & Littlefield 1997)

Admission

Website

https://freud.org.uk/events/77083/psychoanalysis-and-philosophy/

The Psychoanalytic Organization and the Lacanian School

• 25 April 2018 7-8:30pm

This talk will consider the history of psychoanalytic organizations and the Lacanian school as an organization, beginning with a review of Lacan’s trajectory in attempting to develop a new psychoanalytic organization consistent with the discourse of the analyst. Lacan was interested in alternative organizations in which hierarchical authority is balanced against a circular structure composed of communal, libertarian, and solidaristic forms of symbolic exchange.

The examination of Lacan’s innovations with respect to the psychoanalytic organization will be considered within the context of his contributions to psychoanalysis and how they address the current predicaments of the psychoanalytic field. Along the way we will show how Lacan’s work on the psychoanalytic organization is indebted to Bion’s work groups.

We will continue with a critical appraisal of what worked and what didn’t work in Lacan’s organization that resulted in Lacan’s dissolution of his school. Finally, we will consider the conditions under which after Lacan, a Lacanian school has been established in the US within the context of the current state of the larger international Lacanian movement. In fact, Lacan’s efforts never actually deviated from the three functions that Eitingon (1922-1925) originally assigned to a psychoanalytic clinic: therapeutic, formative, and research.

Raul Moncayo, Ph.D.
Supervising analyst of the Lacanian School of Psychoanalysis of the San Francisco, Bay Area in California. Private practice of psychoanalysis, control analysis, and consultation. Dr. Moncayo teaches a year-long Seminar at the Lacan School, has been adjunct faculty in several local universities over the years, still supervises doctoral dissertations, and has also been a visiting professor at North American, European, and South American universities. Dr. Moncayo is the author of five books, and this year’s presentation at the Freud Museum will draw from a chapter (co-authored with Dany Nobus) from a new book to be released by Palgrave Mcmillan in 2018.

Dany Nobus, Ph.D.
Psychoanalyst, Chair of Psychoanalysis at Brunel University London, and Chair of the Freud Museum London. He is the author of Jacques Lacan and the Freudian Practice of Psychoanalysis (Routledge, 2000), Knowing Nothing, Staying Stupid: Elements for a Psychoanalytic Epistemology (with Malcolm Quinn) (Routledge, 2005), and The Law of Desire: On Lacan's "Kant with Sade" (Palgrave, 2017). He has also contributed numerous papers on the history, theory and practice of psychoanalysis to academic and professional journals.

Admission

Website

https://freud.org.uk/events/77117/the-psychoanalytic-organization-and-the-lacanian-school/

SOLITARY PLEASURES in art and psychoanalysis

• 28 April 2018 9:30am-5:30pm

A day-long conference to accompany Solitary Pleasures, a group exhibition that investigates a significant topic in the psychology of sexuality and eroticism: masturbation.

The conference explores the history of masturbation, both explicitly and implicitly, in which this ‘solitary pleasure’ has been considered as a disorder, as ‘unnatural’, ‘unhealthy’, and as a violation of a moral law; yet conversely it has been seen as a vital force, as a creative and magical act, and as ‘normal’ and ‘healthy’.

The conference, like the exhibition, reveals masturbation as a topic that can transform our understanding of human subjectivity and sexuality. Perhaps the most common form of human eroticism, it is also one of the least theorised. The conference will explore our complex sexual, erotic, and intimate encounters with ourselves and one another by viewing masturbation as an all-inclusive practice – gay, lesbian, heterosexual, bisexual, trans, queer, +. We hope to investigate masturbation as a ‘solitary pleasure’ as opposed to a ‘solitary vice’, as a pleasure that is universal and particular, collective and individual, and that’s also potentially mutual; a shared exchange and an intimate encounter between couples, lovers and strangers in ways that redefine desires and eroticism’s possibilities.

CONFERENCE THEMES:
Making – masturbation in creativity and art practice
Educating – masturbation in sexual health and wellbeing
Talking – masturbation in clinical practice

Contributors include
Professor David Bennett (U. of Melbourne), Dr Sean Curran (Sutton House), Dr Chantal Faust (artist, RCA), Sarah Forbes (former Curator of the Sex Museum), Professor Johnny Golding (RCA), Natika Halil (Chief Executive, Family Planning Association), Jordan McKenzie (artist, UAL), David Morgan (clinician), Professor Michael Newman (Goldsmiths), Professor Adrian Rifkin (CSM), Florence Schechter (The Vagina Museum), Dr Marquard Smith (UCL IoE), and Dr Esther Teichmann (LCC).

Speakers’ Biographies

Prof. David Bennett is professorial fellow in the School of Culture and Communication at the University of Melbourne and has been Visiting Professor at Birkbeck University of London, the London Consortium, Durban University, and Essex University. He has published many books and articles on the history and politics of psychoanalysis, sexuality, censorship and cultural theory, including The Currency of Desire: Libidinal Economy, Psychoanalysis and Sexual Revolution (2016)

Dr Sean Curran is Community Learning Manager at Sutton House, The National Trust. A Heritage Educator, Curator, and LGBTQ culture(s) enthusiast, they teache on the MA Museums & Galleries in Education at UCL Institute of Education.

Dr Chantal Faust is an artist, writer, and Senior Tutor in the School of Arts and Humanities at the Royal College of Art. Interested in eroticism and haptic technology, her photographic, painting, video, and installation works have been exhibited in the UK, Australia, and North America.

Sarah Forbes is author of Sex in the Museum: My Unlikely Career at New York’s Most Provocative Museum (2016), a book about her time as Curator at the Sex Museum in New York. She is a sexual culturalist, writer, and Curator-in-Residence at Kindred Studios.

Prof. Johnny Golding is Professor of Philosophy & Fine Art at the RCA where she leads the PhD Research Group ‘Entanglement’. Internationally renowned for her philosophy-poetic enactments and sound-scape exhibitions, her research covers the entangled dimensionalities of Radical Matter, an intra-disciplinary arena of art, philosophy and the wild sciences.

Natika Halil is Chief Executive of the sexual health charity Family Planning Association.

Jordan McKenzie has presented performances, films, drawings and installations both nationally and internationally, including ‘Shame Chorus’, an uplifting project developed with the London Gay Men’s Choir and commissioned by the Freud Museum London. He is Lecturer in Drawing at Camberwell College of Arts, University of the Arts London.

David Morgan is a Psychoanalyst at the BPAS and a Training Analyst at the BPA. He is the organiser of the Political Minds seminars at the British Psychoanalytic Society and hosts the 'Frontier Psychoanalyst' podcasts. He is co-editor with Stan Ruszczynski of Sexuality Delinquency and Violence, published by Karnac Books. He has worked as a consultant psychotherapist in the NHS for 25 years at Camden Psychotherapy Unit and the Portman Clinic, regularly contributes to radio and television programmes, and lectures nationally and internationally.

Prof. Michael Newman is Professor of Art Writing in the Department of Art at Goldsmiths. His current research circles around the erotic, shame, and shamelessness, and has written books on Richard Prince, Jeff Wall and Seth Price.

Prof. Adrian Rifkin is a visiting professor at CSM, UNIVERSITY OF THE ARTS. He has written extensively on queer and gay sexualties amongst other things. His latest publication is Communards and Other Cultural Histories (Haymarket, 2018), a collection of essays edited by Steve Edwards.

Florence Schechter is a Science Communicator and Director of The Vagina Museum.

Dr Marquard Smith is Programme Leader of the MA Museums & Galleries in Education, UCL Institute of Education, Editor-in-Chief of Journal of Visual Culture, and curator of ‘Solitary Pleasures’ at the Freud Museum London

Dr Esther Teichmann is an artist interested in fantasy and desire, and has recently had solo and group exhibitions in Cleveland, Manchester, and Mannheim. Currently Senior Lecturer in Photography at LCC, in April she begins a new role at the RCA.

Suitable for

• Not suitable for children

Admission

Website

https://freud.org.uk/events/77122/solitary-pleasures/

Sigmund Freud & Arthur Schnitzler: A Doppelgänger Relationship?

• 6 May 2018 2pm-2:45am

A daytime talk by Dr Marie Kolkenbrock (University of Cambridge)

For Sigmund Freud's 162nd birthday, join us for a talk about his relationship with the writer whom Freud referred to as his literary doppelgänger.

The Austrian doctor-writer Arthur Schnitzler (1862-1931) was one of the most central figures of Viennese modernism, living and working in the Habsburg metropolis at the same time as Sigmund Freud. Although his work has inspired Stanley Kubrick's Eyes Wide Shut, David Hare's The Blue Room and Tom Stoppard's Dalliance, he is still relatively unknown in the English-speaking world.

The talk will introduce the audience to the productive, but also extremely ambivalent intellectual and personal relationship between Freud and this literary writer. In a famous letter to Schnitzler, Freud admitted to the so-called ‘doppelganger anxiety’ he felt towards the other man. “I have gained the impression”, Freud wrote, “that you have learnt through intuition – though actually as a result of sensitive introspection – everything that I have had to unearth by laborious work on other persons.”

We find in Freud’s texts several references to Schnitzler’s work as literary illustrations for his psychoanalytic theories. A medical doctor himself, Schnitzler remained skeptical about some of the key assumptions of psychoanalysis. However, his literary writings have been read as case studies that subtly illuminate the complex pitfall of human relationships.

We will explore how his work and psychoanalysis intersect and will discuss how literature can become a source of psychoanalytic insight.

This talk coincides with the exhibition Austrian by Training: The Viennese Modernist Arthur Schnitzler During World War I at the National State Archive of Austria in Grillparzerhaus, Vienna, on display until 12 June 2018.

Dr Marie Kolkenbrock is a Research Associate and Affiliated Lecturer Department of German and Dutch University of Cambridge.

Admission

Website

https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/sigmund-freud-arthur-schnitzler-a-doppelganger-relationship-tickets-43881991217

Art Macabre: Solitary Pleasures Sketching Salon

• 9 May 2018 7-9pm

Explore and draw the theme of masturbation, eroticism, desire and fantasy after hours within the Freud Museum. Nude figures will pose throughout the museum's domestic settings, celebrating and challenging our perceptions of the theme of self-pleasure, diverse sexualities and sexual health. Art Macabre invites you to examine, through your illustrations and mark making, our complex sexual, erotic and intimate encounters with ourselves. Capture unique snapshots of intimate moments as our model tableaux give playful private moments a public platform to be observed and sketched.

There will be the opportunity to also enjoy the Solitary Pleasures exhibition featuring work by artists Shannon Bell, VALIE EXPORT, Chantal Faust, Antony Gormley, Jordan McKenzie, Annie Sprinkle and Beth Stephens, Emma Talbot, and Michelle Williams Gamaker.

This life drawing salon is suitable for all levels of experience..

All paper and drawing materials included.
Please note: this event is for adults over 18.

Suitable for

• 18+

Admission

Website

https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/art-macabre-solitary-pleasures-sketching-salon-tickets-43828609551

Freud's Fabrics: Curator's Tour of the Freud Museum's Textiles

• 10 May 2018 6:30-8pm

London Craft Week (9-13 May 2018) is an annual event that showcases exceptional craftsmanship through a journey-of-discovery programme featuring hidden workshops and unknown makers alongside celebrated masters, famous studios, galleries, shops and luxury brands.

As part of this year's London Craft Week, Freud Museum curator, Bryony Davies will be taking an exclusive tour of the significant textile pieces of the collection, including Freud's coat, Anna Freud's weaving loom, and the famous Freudian psychoanalytic couch and the q'ashqai rug that rests upon it. The evening will also include an introduction to the Freud Museum by director, Carol Seigel.

The Freud Museum's participation offers an interesting and unique contribution to the London Craft Week agenda, delving into this one-of-a-kind collection, and the life and work of Sigmund Freud, founder of the psychoanalysis, and his daugher Anna Freud, a pioneer in child psychoanalysis - both former residents of 20 Maresfield Gardens.

A glass of wine will be available for all attendees upon arrival.

Admission

Website

https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/freuds-fabrics-curators-tour-of-the-freud-museums-textiles-tickets-43886479642

Sex, politics and men with grey/white beards

• 12 May 2018 2-2:50pm

Join us on the final weekend of the Solitary Pleasures exhibition for a psychoanalysts hour of comedy.

Liz Bentley 'psychotherapist by day/comedian by night' has tailored her latest show to the theme of solitary pleasures. It wasn't difficult because she is addicted to solitaire.

"Like a cross between Tracey Emin and Josie Long" The Scotsman

"Simply hilarious" The Londonist

Admission

Website

https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/comedy-performance-sex-politics-and-men-with-greywhite-beards-tickets-43393036741

Guys & Dolls: Intimacy in a Technological Age

• 18 May 2018 7-8:30pm

What is it that makes a doll the ideal woman in a man’s eyes? Why would a man prefer a doll to a real woman? The Pygmalion myth, in which a man creates the woman of his dreams, indicates that the appeal of a man-made woman reaches far back in time.

We are living in an age of unprecedented technological advances. These changes are influencing what it means to be human and how we relate to each other and to inanimate objects. The subculture of men whose desire is directed at high-end love dolls is discussed. Jack, who called himself an "iDollator," was living happily with his doll, Maya for 2 years. Eventually, he sought therapy.

This lecture discusses how both he and Dr. Knafo changed in the process. It also raises questions regarding the future of relational life.


Danielle Knafo, Ph.D. is a professor in the clinical psychology doctoral program at Long Island University and a supervisor and faculty member at NYU’s Postdoctoral Program in Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis. She has written eight books and dozens of articles and lectured internationally on the topics of psychoanalysis, creativity, gender, trauma, psychosis, and technology. Her most recent books are Dancing with the Unconscious: The Art of Psychoanalysis and the Psychoanalysis of Art and The Age of Perversion: Desire and Technology in Psychoanalysis and Culture.

https://freud.org.uk/events/77149/guys-dolls-intimacy-in-a-technological-age/

Suitable for

• 18+

Admission

Website

https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/guys-dolls-intimacy-in-a-technological-age-tickets-44141032015

Freud/Lynch: Behind the Curtain

• 26 — 27 May 2018 9am-5pm

The films of David Lynch are sometimes said to be unintelligible. They confront us with strange dreamscapes populated with bizarre characters, obscure symbols and an infuriating lack of narrative consistency. Yet despite their opacity, they hold us transfixed.

Lynch, who once told an interviewer “I love dream logic,” would surely agree with Sigmund Freud’s famous claim that “before the problem of the creative artist, psychoanalysis must lay down its arms.” But what else do the two agree on?

Freud/Lynch: Behind the Curtain takes as its point of departure that Lynch’s work is not so much unintelligible as ‘uncanny,’ revealing what Todd McGowan has termed “the bizarre nature of normality” – and the everydayness of what we take to be strange.

This conference invites psychoanalysts, scholars and cinephiles to reflect on these Lynchian enigmas. What do we mean by ‘Lynchian’? Beyond the apparent incoherence of his films, are there hidden logics at play? Are Lynch and Freud in alignment? And what light can psychoanalysis shed on the Lynchian uncanny?

Admission

Website

https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/freudlynch-behind-the-curtain-tickets-43714320710

Drawing Workshop for the Bereaved

• 27 May 2018 9:15am-12:30pm

A 'Breathe' Exhibition Event

In collaboration with Grief Encounter, this workshop has been specifically devised for the adult bereaved. Led by Grief Encounter, Fay Ballard and Judy Goldhill will introduce their work, and then participants will be encouraged to draw a personal belonging which they have brought along with them.

All materials will be provided. Participants are requested to bring a personal object with them.

The workshop will be for 12 adults, so early booking is advised.

This workshop is part of a series of events coinciding with Breathe, an exhibition by Fay Ballard and Judy Goldhill on display at the Freud Museum London 16 May - 18 July 2018

Admission

Website

https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/drawing-workshop-for-the-bereaved-tickets-44254778233

'Two Artists and Traumatic Loss', with Caroline Garland

• 5 June 2018 7-9pm

Breathe - Talks Series: On Loss and Creativity

The works in the Breathe exhibition are by two women, each of whom lost a parent - a crucial figure - at a very early age. Those losses, and their sequelae, form the focus of the works we have together chosen to exhibit. It is an appropriate choice for the Freud Museum, since intimate relationships, and the exigencies of their loss are central to Freud’s work, and to the subsequent development of psychoanalysis. In this talk, Caroline Garland will explore how the work shown in the exhibition and the topic of traumatic loss can be understood from a psychoanalytic point of view; how the psychological capacity involved in making art is connected with loss and the mourning of that loss.

Caroline Garland is a Fellow of the British Psychoanalytical Society, and founder of the Unit for the Study of Trauma and Its Aftermath in the Adult Department of the Tavistock Clinic. Caroline also initiated and curated the Tavistock’s own art collection. She is herself an award-winning and published poet (aka Beatrice Garland). In 2001, she won the National Poetry Prize. She took part in ‘Loss and Recovery: Conversation between Poets and Psychotherapists’, a symposium at the Freud Museum held in 2013. Caroline has published and broadcast widely, including being one of the lead clinicians in the ground-breaking BBC television series on the Tavistock Clinic, ‘Talking Cure’.

The series will be chaired by Jon Stokes, Clinical Psychologist and Psychotherapist, Senior Fellow Oxford University; former Chair, Adult Department Tavistock Clinic.

Admission

Website

https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/two-artists-and-traumatic-loss-caroline-garland-tickets-43831746935

Drawing Workshop for the Bereaved: Children & Young People

• 10 June 2018 9:30am-12:30pm

A 'Breathe' Exhibition Event

In collaboration with Grief Encounter, this workshop has been specifically devised for bereaved children & young people. Led by child grief specialist Shelley Gilbert, artists Fay Ballard and Judy Goldhill will introduce their work, and then participants will be encouraged to draw a personal belonging which they have brought along with them.

The workshop will be for 12 children, with an accompanying adult who is also encouraged to participate.

All materials will be provided. Participants are requested to bring a personal object with them.

This workshop is part of a series of events which coincide with Breathe, an exhibition by Fay Ballard and Judy Goldhill on display at the Freud Museum London 16 May - 18 July 2018

Suitable for

• Family friendly

Admission

Website

https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/drawing-workshop-for-the-bereaved-children-young-people-tickets-44262486288?aff=es2

'I saw the Spring Return: on Wordsworth and Loss' with Ronald Britton

• 12 June 2018 9:30am-12:30pm

Breathe - Talks Series: On Loss and Creativity

This is the second in the series of talks 'On Loss and Creativity', which coincide with the exhibition Breathe by artists Fay Ballard and Judy Goldhill.

Ronald Britton's work is characterised by his preoccupation with truth; with what is real, and how we know this. His answer follows Keats, ‘nothing ever becomes real till it is experienced’ and his contributions follow from this. In his book ‘Belief and Imagination’ he examines the relationship between psychic reality and fictional writing, and the ways in which belief, imagination and reality are explored in the works of Wordsworth, Rilke, Milton and Blake. He explores questions such as the status of phantasies in an individual’s mind - are they facts or possibilities? How the notions of objectivity and subjectivity are interrelated and have their origins in the Oedipal triangle. How phantasies which are held to be products of the imagination, can be accounted for in psychoanalytic terms.

Ronald Britton is a training and supervising analyst with the British Psychoanalytical Society. He first trained as a doctor, and as a child psychiatrist was Chair of the Department of Children and Parents at the Tavistock Clinic, where he was involved in treatment of deprived children and their parents. This experience was influential to his psychoanalytic thinking where he maintains the importance of ‘childhood’ as a formative experience. His theoretical background is that of Freud, Klein and post-Kleinians. Additionally, he brings his own wide interests, including philosophy, theology, science, and particularly, his passion for poetry, which he uses as a basis for psychological understanding. Arguably, it is from the last that his most original contribution was inspired, namely his psychoanalytic understanding of the source of inspiration: the imagination.

The series will be chaired by Jon Stokes, Clinical Psychologist and Psychotherapist, Senior Fellow Oxford University; former Chair, Adult Department Tavistock Clinic.

Admission

Website

https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/i-saw-the-spring-return-on-wordsworth-and-loss-ron-britten-tickets-43846300465

On the Couch: A Repressed History of the Analytic Couch from Plato to Freud

• 20 June 2018 7-8:30pm

The Freud Museum London's most iconic item is undoubtedly Freud's famous psychoanalytic couch, but where did the couch originate? And why did it play such an important role in the history of psychoanalysis? Author and Clinical Professor of Psychiatry, Nathan Kravis will explore these themes alongside a panel of academics as they discuss his latest publication, “On the Couch: A Repressed History of the Analytic Couch from Plato to Freud” (2017).

Suitable for

• 18+

Admission

Website

https://freud.org.uk/events/77140/on-the-couch-a-repressed-history-of-the-analytic-couch-from-plato-to-freud/