Freud Museum London: Psychoanalysis Podcasts

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...

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 treat...

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...

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, includin...

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 thinker...

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 possibl...

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...

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. Unforb...

Session 4: The Unconscious and the Body Katerina Fotopoulou - The Embodied Relational UnconsciousThe 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 uncon...

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 UnconsciousAnouchka will respond to Salman’s talk from a contemporary Lacanian perspective, with a p...

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...

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...

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 e...

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, showin...

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...

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

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

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

 Session 1: INTRODUCTIONDel Lowenthal - Is there an unfortunate need for critical psychotherapy? Respondent: Julian Lousada

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 Spie...

Colette Soler, joined by Darian Leader Lacan’s work is often caricatured as arcane, convoluted, ‘theoretical’ and, above all, difficult. But Lacan himself engaged continually with the ideas of his contemporaries and grounded his work in analytic practice. If you have been put off reading Lacan in the past, here is a chance to see what the fuss is about, in a way that relates directly to clinical w...

Paul Verhaeghe in conversation with Lisa Appignanesi In What about Me? Paul Verhaeghe’s main concern is how social change has led to a psychic crisis and altered the way we think about ourselves. He investigates the effects of 30 years of neoliberalism, free-market forces, privatisation, and the relationship between our engineered society and individual identity. It turns out that who we are is, a...

Adam Phillips in conversation with Lisa Appignanesi Adam Phillips, one of the world’s foremost authorities on Freud discusses his strikingly original new biography of the father of psychoanalysis, Becoming Freud: The Making of a Psychoanalyst (Yale University Press 2014), with Lisa Appignanesi, former Chair of the Freud Museum London and author most recently of Trials of Passion: Crimes in the Nam...

Alasdair Hopwood: Introductory Remarks Fiona Gabbert: The Psychology of False MemoryIs it possible to develop a 'memory' for something that was not experienced? Plenty of evidence now exists to suggest that it is possible ...but how does this happen, and can we distinguish false memories from our 'real' memories? This seminar provides an overview of how psychologists investigate the phenomenon of...

Paul Coldwell (University of the Arts London) discusses his work exploring the relations between art, the archive, the uncanny and the museum. With Carol Seigel, Director of the Freud Museum. Artist Paul Coldwell’s work is centred on our relationship to objects and how meanings can be projected onto them. This exhibition is the result of visual research in the archives of the Bethlem Royal Hospita...