The Freud Museum is delighted to welcome Professor Juliet Mitchell to celebrate her latest publication Fratriarchy: The Sibling Trauma and the Law of the Mother (Routledge, 2023). On stage with Juliet Mitchell is Holly Porter, an anthropologist and associate director of the Gender Studies Centre founded by Mitchell in Cambridge University; Rosemary Davies, a Fellow and Training analyst of the Institute of Psychoanalysis and founder member, Manuel Batsch , with a PhD from Juliet’s programme at UC...
Jun 30, 2020•1 hr 18 min•Ep. 228
In the wake of #MeToo, we have begun to talk more openly about the widespread harm inflicted by men on women. But little has been said about the fact that many of these men are also fathers. Join author Katherine Angel for a discussion on her latest book Daddy Issues with Josh Cohen. Bold, challenging and nuanced, Daddy Issues examines the place of fathers in contemporary culture and asks how the mixture of love and hatred we feel towards our fathers can be turned into a relationship that is gen...
Jun 30, 2020•1 hr 23 min•Season 1Ep. 167
In What is Sex? , Alenka Zupančič approaches the question of sexuality from a Lacanian perspective, considering it a properly philosophical problem for psychoanalysis. Drawing on Freud and Lacan, Zupančič argues that sexuality is at the point of a “short circuit” between ontology and epistemology. Sexuality and knowledge are structured around a fundamental negativity, which unites them at the point of the unconscious. The unconscious (as linked to sexuality) is the concept of an inherent link be...
Jun 25, 2020•1 hr 36 min•Season 1Ep. 161
...a disappointment, an ear, and a snail.
Jun 20, 2020•21 min•Season 1Ep. 158
This paper explores Freud and Dalí’s rather different ideas about censorship. Starting with their comically perplexing meeting, it will also look at the myth of the ‘crazy artist’ in the context of Freud’s ideas about the unconscious and narcissism.
Jun 15, 2020•36 min•Season 1Ep. 155
Lisa Appignanesi discusses her new book, Everyday Madness: on Grief, Anger, Loss and Love (September 2018) with Adam Phillips. ‘The small translucent bottle of shampoo outlived him. It was the kind you take home from hotels in distant places. For over a year it had sat on the shower shelf where he had left it. I looked at it every day.” After the death of her partner of thirty-two years, Lisa Appignanesi was thrust into a state striated by rage and superstition in which sanity felt elusive. The ...
Jun 10, 2020•45 min•Season 1Ep. 151
Joanna Ryan in discussion with Barry Watt What does psychoanalysis have to say about the emotional landscapes of class, the hidden injuries and disavowed privileges? How does class figure in clinical work and what part does it play in psychotherapeutic trainings? In these times of increasing inequality, Joanna Ryan will discuss aspects of her timely new book Class and Psychoanalysis: Landscapes of Inequality , exploring what can be learned about the psychic formations of class, and the class for...
Jun 05, 2020•1 hr 27 min•Season 1Ep. 82
In The Not-Two , Lorenzo Chiesa examines the treatment of logic and God in Lacan’s later work. Chiesa draws for the most part from Lacan’s Seminars of the early 1970s, as they revolve around the axiom "There is no sexual relationship." Chiesa provides both a close reading of Lacan’s effort to formalize sexual difference as incompleteness and an assessment of its broader implications for philosophical realism and materialism. Chiesa argues that "There is no sexual relationship" is for Lacan empir...
May 30, 2020•1 hr 42 min•Season 1Ep. 62
In his latest publication In Writing acclaimed psychoanalyst and writer, Adam Phillips celebrates the art of close reading and asks what it is to defend literature in a world that is increasingly devaluing language in this enjoyable collection of essays on literature. Through an exhilarating series of encounters with – and vivid readings of – writers he has loved, from Byron and Barthes to Shakespeare and Sebald, Phillips infuses the love of writing with deep insights drawn from his work as a pr...
May 25, 2020•1 hr 20 min•Season 1Ep. 61
Re-reading Freud's 1905 edition of Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality This book presentation is devoted to the newly translated and annotated English edition of Freud’s 1905 Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (Verso, 2016). Freud’s publication is one of the grounding texts of 20th-century European thinking. In it Freud develops a highly innovative theory of sexuality for which pathology serves as a model to understand human existence. Freud published this text five times during his lif...
May 20, 2020•1 hr 12 min•Season 1Ep. 1
Lacanian psychoanalyst Bruce Fink discusses his latest work, Lacan on Love . Quintessentially fascinating, love intrigues and perplexes us, and drives much of what we do in life. As wary as we may be of its illusions and disappointments, many of us fall blindly into its traps and become ensnared time and again. Deliriously mad excitement turns to disenchantment, if not deadening repetition, and we wonder how we shall ever break out of this vicious cycle. Can psychoanalysis – with ample assistanc...
May 15, 2020•51 min•Season 1Ep. 1
Starting from the hypothesis that psychosis makes up a structure, with a precise status for the unconscious, Stijn Vanheule explores how, from a Lacanian point of view, the treatment of psychosis is organized. Special attention is paid to the specificity of the psychotic symptom, or elementary phenomenon, and to the way transference characteristically takes shape. Crucial to this approach of treatment is that the psychoanalyst aims at restoring a place for the subject in relation to the Other, w...
May 10, 2020•33 min•Season 1Ep. 1
Professor Brett Kahr in Conversation with Dan Chambers What actually happens in psychotherapy? And does it really work? Psychotherapy has become a mainstay of our emotional wellbeing, and yet, in spite of its century-long track record, many people still regard “therapy” with a certain suspicion. Is psychotherapy simply a self-indulgent exercise in navel-gazing for bored, well-heeled neurotics with too much time on their hands, or is it, in fact, an essential route to the achievement of solid men...
May 05, 2020•1 hr 32 min•Season 1Ep. 1
Discussion Only. Artist Cornelia Parker will be in conversation with Psychoanalyst and Author, Darian Leader, discussing her art and its relation to the unconscious. They will talk about transitional objects, avoiding the object on purpose, memory, and violence as a metaphor. Nominated for the Turner Prize in 1997, Cornelia Parker became well known for her installations and interventions, including Cold Dark Matter: An Exploded View 1991 (Tate Modern) where she suspended the fragments of a garde...
Apr 30, 2020•20 min•Season 1Ep. 1
Gavin Turk in conversation with Joseph Kosuth, moderated by James Putnam ‘We are asleep. Our life is like a dream. But in our better hours we wake up just enough to realise that we are dreaming.’ - Ludwig Wittgenstein Gavin Turk’s installation and intervention in Freud’s former residence, Wittgenstein’s Dream, investigates the intriguing conceptual dialogue between two enlightened Viennese thinkers of the 20th century, Sigmund Freud (1856-1939) and Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889-1951). Gavin Turk was...
Apr 25, 2020•1 hr 15 min•Season 1Ep. 1
Understanding the Socio-psychological Roots of Contemporary Right-wing Populism Samir Gandesha One of the key problems of contemporary politics is the presence and growing power of right-wing populist movements throughout the Western world from the US "Tea Party," to Britain's UKIP to Pegida in Germany and Golden Dawn in Greece. This paper poses the following question: To what extent is it possible to draw upon the social-psychological concept of the "authoritarian personality" in the work of Er...
Apr 20, 2020•1 hr 53 min•Season 1Ep. 1
Panel discussion - Jane Haberlin, Jeanette Winterson and Eleanor LongdenHearing voices has been described as everything from schizophrenic to godlike. Radical psychiatry in the 1960s contested what today are termed 'auditory hallucinations' seeing them as containing what couldn't be said. The psychology researcher Eleanor Longden isn't crazy -- and neither are many other people who hear voices in their heads. She says the psychic phenomenon is a "creative and ingenious survival strategy" that sh...
Apr 15, 2020•1 hr 16 min•Season 1Ep. 55
Adam Phillips in conversation with Deborah Levy Unforbidden Pleasures is the dazzling new book from Adam Phillips, author of Missing Out and Going Sane . Adam Phillips takes Oscar Wilde as a springboard for a deep dive into the meanings and importance of the Unforbidden, from the fall of our 'first parents' Adam and Eve to the work of the great twentieth-century psychoanalytic thinkers. Unforbidden pleasures, he argues, are always the ones we tend not to think about, yet when you look into it, i...
Apr 10, 2020•52 min•Season 1Ep. 54
Session 4: The Unconscious and the Body Katerina Fotopoulou - The Embodied Relational Unconscious The Freudian Unconscious was closely related to the mental representation of the body, and particularly the satisfaction of its biological needs. Katerina Fotopoulou will talk about 'the embodied relational unconscious', discussing certain classical and contemporary psychoanalytic insights on the unconscious that shed light on contemporary clinical and neuro-scientific findings. Among other fascinat...
Apr 05, 2020•1 hr 31 min•Season 1Ep. 52
Session 3: The Freudian Unconscious Revisited Salman Akhtar - 14 Proposals in Freud’s ‘The Unconscious' Salman will revisit some of Freud’s most central claims regarding the nature of the unconscious and examine their current status within and beyond psychoanalysis. Anouchka Grose - Language and the Unconscious Anouchka will respond to Salman’s talk from a contemporary Lacanian perspective, with a particular emphasis on the role of the language. Salman Akhtar MD, is a world-renowned psychoanalys...
Apr 05, 2020•1 hr 20 min•Season 1Ep. 51
Session 2: The Unconscious and the Psychopathology of Everyday Life David Tuckett - Conviction Narrative Theory: Bringing Modern Psychoanalysis into the Heart of Economics and Decision Science David Tuckett will take us on a fascinating journey through modern psychopathology of everyday life, demonstrating the paramount importance of the unconscious processes in problem-solving and decision-making, with a particular emphasis on the psychology of financial behaviour. Arguing that the human mind w...
Apr 05, 2020•1 hr 11 min•Season 1Ep. 1
Session 1: The Unconscious and the Brain Mark Solms - The Id is Not Unconscious Mark will present neuroscientific evidence to support his argument that the mental functions Freud called ‘id’ are not unconscious! He will discuss some implications of this argument for what psychoanalysts and psychotherapists do clinically. Mark Solms is a psychoanalyst and neuropsychologist, widely reported to have first coined the term Neuro-Psychoanalysis, a rapidly developing field of interdisciplinary scholars...
Apr 05, 2020•1 hr 35 min•Season 1Ep. 1
Lecture and performance: How do ideas pop into your head? You can think about the answer to this question at a lecture and performance about the art of Freestyle Rap by Hip-Hop artist and spoken word poet, Reveal. Using recent studies in neurology and psychology, theories of memory schemata and ideas about unconscious communication, Reveal will explore the basis of his craft within the resonant environment of the Freud Museum, and in a practical demonstration will improvise a rap to words and qu...
Mar 30, 2020•1 hr•Season 1Ep. 1
While the contents of the unconscious might be obscure and perplexing, when Freud spoke about 'the unconscious' he meant something very precise. This talk will look at Freud's 'discovery' of the unconscious, and at his conceptualisation of it. It will also deal with the peculiar logic of symptom formation. From there, it will go on to look at Lacan's notion of the language-like unconscious, showing how this was developed in accordance with Freud's ideas. Anouchka Grose is a psychoanalyst and wri...
Mar 25, 2020•1 hr 9 min•Season 1Ep. 1
Civilization and its Discontents: A Marathon Reading The Centre for Creative and Critical Thought at the University of Sussex together with the Freud Museum London are pleased to announce a marathon reading of Sigmund Freud’s classic text, Civilization and its Discontents, at the Freud Museum on Sunday 14 June. Civilization and Its Discontents, written in 1929, remains the definitive text on human destructiveness. As news of wars around the globe, appalling brutality, religious conflict and sexu...
Mar 20, 2020•4 hr 7 min•Season 1Ep. 1
Session 4: USERS' AND EDUCATORS' PERSPECTIVES Tom Cotton and Del Lowenthal - Personal versus medical meanings in breakdown, treatment and recovery from ‘schizophrenia’Jay Watts - Systemic means to subversive ends: maintaining the therapeutic space as a unique encounter Respondent: Rai Waddingham
Mar 10, 2020•1 hr 21 min•Season 1Ep. 1
Session 3: EXTERNAL CRITIQUES Adrian Cocking - When Love Is Not All We Want: Queers, Singles and the Therapeutic Cult of RelationalityAnastasios Gaitanidis - Critical theory and psychotherapy Respondent: Julie Walsh
Mar 10, 2020•1 hr 17 min•Season 1Ep. 1
Session 2: WHAT CAN WE LEARN FROM CRITICAL PSYCHOLOGY AND CRITICAL PSYCHIATRY?Ian Parker - Toward critical psychotherapy and counselling: what can we learn from critical psychology (and political economy)?Hugh Middleton - The Medical Model: What is it, where did it come from and how long has it got?Respondent: David Morgan
Mar 10, 2020•1 hr 25 min•Season 1Ep. 1
Session 1: INTRODUCTIONDel Lowenthal - Is there an unfortunate need for critical psychotherapy?Respondent: Julian Lousada
Mar 10, 2020•1 hr 19 min•Season 1Ep. 1
Author's Talk: John Launer with Dr Graham Music Who was Sabina Spielrein? Her dramatic life story is most famous for her notorious affair with Carl Jung, dramatised in the film A Dangerous Method starring Keira Knightley. Yet she was a woman who overcame family and psychiatric abuse to become an original thinker in the field of sexual psychotherapy. Drawing on thorough and novel research into Spielrein’s diaries, professional papers and correspondence, Sex Versus Survival is the first biography ...
Mar 05, 2020•1 hr 24 min•Season 1Ep. 1
