Freud Museum London

What does a woman want?
Sigmund Freud’s famous question was originally put to Princess Marie Bonaparte, patient, friend and analyst, the moving force behind Freud’s flight from Nazi Vienna to his final home in London, now the Freud Museum London.

Inspired by Lisa Appignanesi’s acclaimed book, Mad, Bad and Sad: Women and the Mind Doctors from 1800 to the Present, the exhibition highlights the experience of women and their relationship to those who confined, cared for and listened to them. It also shows how women today conduct their own explorations of mind and imagination in challenging works of art.

How did the mind doctors of the 1900s view their female patients? What did they make of their variously diagnosed nerves, melancholy, mania, obsession, self-mutilation, tics, possession, hysteria, desire, and rebellion and why in the early 20th century was psychoanalysis liberating for so many female authors and artists? Are some of the questions this exhibition explores.



Through intimate and revealing portraits, shown alongside original historical documents, the exhibition traces key moments in the history of ‘female maladies’ and counterpoints them with women’s boldly inventive art today.

The Women – Mary Lamb, Theroigne de Méricourt, Alice James, Anna O (Bertha Pappenheim), Dora (Ida Bauer); Augustine, Elizabeth Severn, Bryher (Annie Winifred Ellerman), HD (Hilda Doolittle), Princess Marie Bonaparte, Anna Freud, Dorothy Burlingham, Zelda Fitzgerald, Virginia Woolf, Marilyn Monroe, Sylvia Plath and Anna Kavan.

The Mind Doctors - Philipe Pinel, Jean Etienne Esquirol, Jean Martin Charcot, Alexander Morison, William James, Havelock Ellis, Josef Breuer, Sigmund Freud, Lou Andreas Salome, Sandor Ferenczi, Hanns Sachs, Princess Marie Bonaparte, Anna Freud, Dorothy Burlingham, Melanie Klein, Ruth Beuscher and Marianne Kris.

The Artists - Alice Anderson, Louise Bourgeois, Helen Chadwick, Tracey Emin, Elliott Erwitt, Jane Fradgley, Isa Genzkent, Sarah Lucas, Amie Siegel, Francis Upritchard, plus Richard Dadd and Salvador Dali.

The women’s stories are told through objects, art works, original photographs, papers, books and pictures drawn from the Freud Museum London and other international collections. This includes Salvador Dali’s portrait of Freud, Freud’s iconic ‘modernist’ chair and the couch on which he died; original paintings and photographs of Mary Lamb, Virginia Woolf and Sylvia Plath on loan from the National Portrait Gallery, London; Philipe Pinel’s death mask on loan from the University of Edinburgh/National Galleries of Scotland; paintings by Richard Dadd and Anna Kavan and restraining garments from the Bethlem Art and History Collections Trust, London.
Related Resources

The Freud Museum would like to thank the Museum Dr Guislain, Ghent, Belgium, for their support in the making of the exhibition.

The exhibition will be accompanied by a season of performances, talks, films and events. Click here for further information http://www.freud.org.uk/events/

For further inmformation please contact eventsandmedia@freud.org.uk or call the Museum on 0207 4352002

Website

http://www.freud.org.uk/exhibitions/75211/mad-bad-and-sad-women-and-the-mind-doctors-/

The first session will introduce the course and address the most important questions about the nature and status of psychoanalysis and Freud's standing at the present time. In the remaining 11 sessions we will work our way through Freud's writings - each lecture will be based on a short reading from Freud - and all the readings will be taken from: 'THE FREUD READER' edited by Peter Gay (Vintage Books 1995), which will be explained in detail and critically discussed.

No prior knowledge will be assumed and you will be guided by an experienced tutor with many years' teaching experience.

Tutor: Keith Barrett BA PhD

Book online here: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/event/7884884903

Advance booking essential

For further information contact eventsandmedia@freud.org.uk or +44 (0)20 7435 2002

Admission

£170, £140 Members of the Museum, £110 student/unemployed

Website

http://www.freud.org.uk/events/75217/introducing-freud-at-the-freud-museum/

Author Anna Kavan’s critical and popular reception since her death in 1968 has been defined by a cult of personality fuelled by revelations about her psychiatric breakdown, heroin use and adoption of her own fictional character’s name. Victoria Walker unravels some of the accumulated mythology around this writer, and examines her complex association with, and interest in, early twentieth-century psychiatry and
psychotherapy.

As well as being treated in private asylums and nursing homes, Kavan underwent a short analysis at the Tavistock Clinic, experienced Ludwig Binswanger’s method of existential psychotherapy at the Bellevue Sanatorium, and had a close personal relationship with her longtime psychiatrist Karl Bluth. Kavan promoted a radical politics of madness, giving voice to the disenfranchised and marginalized psychiatric patient and presaging the anti-psychiatry movement.

Dr Victoria Walker’s research focuses on twentieth-century women writers and fictional representations of psychiatric treatment. She wrote the introduction to the recent edition of Kavan’s 'I Am Lazarus'. She teaches at King’s College, London and administers the Anna Kavan Society.

Part of a season of performances, talks, films and events accompanying the exhibition 'Mad, Bad and Sad: Women and the Mind Doctors', 10 October 2013 - 2 February 2014.

Suitable for

• Any age

Where

The Freud Museum
20 Maresfield Gardens
London
NW3 5SX

Admission

£10/£7 Concessions and Museum Members

Website

http://freud.org.uk/events/75250/-anna-kavan-and-the-politics-of-madness/

In her study of women and the mind doctors 'Mad, Bad and Sad' and in her belle époque novel, 'Paris Requiem', Lisa Appignanesi draws on the same historical sources of inspiration. The Salpetriere Asylum in Paris, hysteria, as well as understandings of psychiatry and psychoanalysis inform her work across the genres, even her family memoir 'Losing the Dead'. In several of her works - the novel 'Where the Serpent Lives', the conservation memoir 'Tigers in Red Weather', and the poems, 'The Mara Crossing' - poet and writer, Ruth Padel also explores the same fount of material. What is it that so fascinates them about their subjects that they leave a residue to be treated in different forms of writing? And how does genre and form affect the way the 'real' is understood.

Part of a season of performances, talks, films and events accompanying the exhibition 'Mad, Bad and Sad: Women and the Mind Doctors', 10 October 2013 - 2 February 2014.

Suitable for

• Any age

Where

The Freud Museum
20 Maresfield Gardens
London
NW3 5SX

Admission

£10/£7 Concessions and Museum Members

Website

http://freud.org.uk/events/75274/a-writers-conversation/

"What does it mean to be a woman?" "What does a woman want?" An exploration of female desire provides dynamically elusive answers to these eternal questions. Originating in ancient Greek notions of the 'wandering womb', hysteria was Sigmund Freud’s 'splendid child’, defined in his landmark Dora case study.
At the core of hysteria is a twisted fascination with beauty, so closely bound up with femininity that it runs the risk of replacing it. Through her identification with the male gaze, the hysteric becomes a tragic seductress, desiring the desire of the other. Exaggerated womanliness is the theme of this 'masquerade': the ultimate woman might be an imaginary one, a metaphysical alien-goddess, dreamed up by the male animal. "The woman does not exist," so said Lacan, and pandemonium ensued. But becoming a woman implies extraordinary transformation, at the very least.

PROJECTIONS: CINEMA HYSTERIA is a three-part course by MARY WILD examining the central role of hysteria within different film genres (e.g., erotica/romance, horror/melodrama, fantasy/sci-fi). The mystery of femininity will be investigated psychoanalytically via the unconscious connection between the body and language. So rather than the wandering womb, it is in fact the exiled signifier that roams, creeping, searching for a mode of expression among possessed images on the cinema screen.

Important note: films will not be screened, so advance viewing would be an advantage.

Suitable for

• Any age

Where

Freud Museum London
20 Maresfield Gardens
London
NW3 5SX

Admission

Full course £35/£30 Concessions/Members of the Museum

A limited number of tickets are available for individual talks at £14/£12

Website

http://www.freud.org.uk/events/75291/-projections-cinema-hysteria/

Griselda Pollock discusses some of the cases from her virtual feminist museum's exhibition on Trauma and Aesthetic Transformation in the aftermath of the publication of 'After-affects I After-Images: Trauma and Aesthetic Transformation in the Virtual Feminist Museum' (Manchester University Press, 2013). Part of a season of performances, talks, films and events accompanying the exhibition 'Mad, Bad and Sad: Women and the Mind Doctors', 10 October 2013 to 2 February 2014.

Suitable for

• Any age
• Family friendly

Admission

£10.00; £7.00 Concessions/Members of the Museum.

Website

http://www.freud.org.uk/events/75275/can-artists-teach-the-mind-doctors-can-artworks-be-a-case-study/

Psychoanalysis after Freud
6.30 - 8.30pm Thursdays 9 Jan - 27 Mar
12 week evening course

The course will offer an overview of the main developments in psychoanalysis since Freud, including Jung, Klein, Winnicott and Lacan. We will examine how the most creative figures in psychoanalysis changed and developed Freud's ideas and methods, and discuss their criticisms of his work.

No prior knowledge will be assumed and you will be guided by an experienced tutor with many years' teaching experience.

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.

Suitable for

• Any age

Admission

Adults £170, Members of the Museum £140, students/unwaged £110

Website

http://www.freud.org.uk/events/75356/psychoanalysis-after-freud/

One of the 20th century’s greatest writers and with her husband, Leonard, Freud’s publisher in Britain, Virginia Woolf also struggled with mental illness and the doctors who ‘treated’ her. Prof Susan Sellers discusses aspects of Woolf’s life and work.

Susan Sellers, author, translator, editor and novelist, is Professor of English and Related Literature at the University of St Andrews and co-General Editor of the Cambridge University Press edition of the writings of Virginia Woolf. Sellers’ first novel Vanessa and Virginia is in part a fictional biography of Virginia Woolf.

Part of a season of performances, talks, films and events accompanying the exhibition 'Mad, Bad and Sad: Women and the Mind Doctors', 10 October 2013 - 2 February 2014.

Suitable for

• Any age

Admission

£10/£7 Concessions/Members of the Museum

Website

http://www.freud.org.uk/events/75286/virginia-woolf-and-the-perils-of-hindsight-/

What do Women Bring to Therapy Today?
Susie Orbach in conversation with Jane Haberlin
22 January 2014
7.30pm - exhibition viewing from 6.30pm

Susie Orbach is a psychotherapist, psychoanalyst, social critic and author of many celebrated books, amongst them 'Bodies' and 'On Eating', and recently co-edited 'Fifty Shades of Feminism', with Lisa Appignanesi and Rachel Holmes. Jane Haberlin trained with Arbours as a psychoanalytic psychotherapist. She has worked at The Arbours Crisis Centre and The Women's Therapy Centre. She currently works as a therapist and supervisor in private practice and provides consultancy to organisations. Both are founder members of The Relational School. Together they discuss 'what do women bring to therapy today?'

The Relational School is dedicated to understanding the therapeutic relationship and the uses of the inter-subjective space that is co-created within the therapeutic dyad. Our activities aim to create forums for further conversations around relationality coming from a variety of therapeutic disciplines as well as a formal association to disseminate the work.

Part of a season of talks and events accompanying the exhibition 'Mad, Bad and Sad: Women and the Mind Doctors', 10 October 2013 - 2 February 2014.

Suitable for

• Any age

Admission

£10/7 Concessions and Museum Members

Website

http://www.freud.org.uk/events/75281/what-do-women-bring-to-therapy-today/

The Madness of Medea: Meike Ziervogel and Lisa Dwan in conversation
Chaired by Dr Estela Welldon
23 January 2014
7pm - exhibition viewing from 6pm

Are women who kill their children monsters? Actress Lisa Dwan has performed, to wide critical acclaim, French author Veronique Olmi’s play 'Beside the Sea', about a woman who kills her two children. Meike Ziervogel in her novel 'Magda' enters the head of the Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbel’s wife, who killed her six children. In association with Peirene Press.

The talk will be chaired by Dr Estela Welldon, psychoanalytical psychotherapist and author of 'Mother, Madonna, Whore: The Idealisation and Denigration of Motherhood' (1988) and 'Playing with Dynamite: A Personal Approach to the Psychoanalytic Understanding of Perversions, Violence, and Criminality' (2011).

Part of a season of performances, talks, films and events accompanying the 'Mad, Bad and Sad: Women and the Mind Doctors' exhibition 10 October 2013 - 2 February 2014.

Suitable for

• Any age

Admission

£10/£7 Concessions/Members of the Museum

Website

http://www.freud.org.uk/events/75307/the-madness-of-medea-meike-ziervogel-and-lisa-dwan-in-conversation/

To conclude the 'Mad, Bad and Sad: Women and the Mind Doctors' season, Prof Jacqueline Rose, Prof Sally Alexander and Dr Lisa Appignanesi explore the complex history of hysteria and psychoanalysis in its relationship to women.

Suitable for

• Any age

Admission

£10/£7 Concessions/Members of the Museum

Website

http://www.freud.org.uk/events/75308/mad-bad-and-sad/