Freud Museum London: Psychoanalysis Podcasts

Author's Talk: Josh Cohen The war over private life spreads inexorably. Some seek to expose, invade and steal it, others to protect, conceal and withhold it. Either way, the assumption is that privacy is a possession to be won or lost. But what if what we call private life is the one element in us that we can't possess? Could it be that we're so intent on taking hold of the privacy of others, or keeping hold of our own only because we're powerless to do either? In this ground-breaking book, Josh Cohen uses his experience as a psychoanalyst, literature professor and human being to explore the conception of private life as the presence in us of someone else, an uncanny stranger both unrecognisable and eerily familiar, who can be neither owned nor controlled. Drawing on a dizzying array of characters and concerns, from John Milton and Henry James to Katie Price and Snoopy, from philosophy and the Bible to pornography and late-night TV, The Private Life weaves a richly personal tapestry of ideas and experience. In a culture that floods our lives with light, it asks, how is it that we remain so helplessly in the dark? 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.

Giles Fraser in conversation with Adam Phillips Dr. Giles Fraser is a well known cultural commentator, priest and vicar of St Mary's Newington. He took a controversial stand on Occupy at St Paul's, resigning his post there in the process. He is also passionate about psychoanalysis. Adam Phillips is a psychoanalyst and writer, author of many celebrated books, among them Missing Out and Promises, Promises. He has just finished a biography of the young Freud, who understood religion as an illusion. Together they discuss psychoanalysis and religion.

Aaron Balick in conversation with Susie Orbach A collaboration between The Relational School and The Freud Museum London, exploring the impact that social networking has had on our society and how it is profoundly influencing our lives. Over the past decade the very nature of the way we relate to each other has been utterly transformed by online social networking and the mobile technologies that enable unfettered access to it. Our very selves have been extended into the digital world in ways previously unimagined, offering us instantaneous relating to others over a variety of platforms like Facebook and Twitter. In ‘The Psychodynamics of Social Networking’, Aaron Balick draws on his experience as a psychotherapist and cultural theorist to interrogate the unconscious motivations behind our online social networking use: powerfully arguing that social media is not just a technology, but is essentially human and deeply meaningful. 'The Psychodynamics of Social Networking' is the first book to be published in the new series "Psychoanalysis and Popular Culture" produced by the Media and the Inner World research network [MiW] and Karnac Books. Dr Aaron Balick is a UKCP registered psychotherapist, supervisor and a media and social networking consultant working in London. Aaron is also an honorary lecturer at the Centre for Psychoanalytic Studies at the University of Essex where he participates in the post-graduate MA and PhD programmes in psychoanalytic studies. He writes for both academic and lay audiences having published several academic articles and book chapters while at the same time contributing a psychological angle on national press and radio. Aaron is a media spokesperson for the UKCP and a regular contributor as the "resident psychotherapist" on BBC Radio One's phone-in show, The Surgery with Aled and Dr. Radha. Susie Orbach is a psychoanalyst, writer and social critic. She co-founded The Women's Therapy Centre in 1976, has consulted to NHS, The World Bank and other organisations. She is convenor of www.endangeredbodies.org. She is Chair of the Relational School and the author of eleven books. She was Visiting Professor at LSE and a Guardian columnist for ten years. She is a member of the Government's expert panel on body image. 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.

Author's Talk - Gohar Homayounpour introduced by M Fakhry Davids Is psychoanalysis possible in the Islamic Republic of Iran? This is the question that Gohar Homayounpour poses to herself, and to us, at the beginning of this memoir of displacement, nostalgia, love, and pain. Twenty years after leaving her country, Homayounpour, an Iranian, Western-trained psychoanalyst, returns to Tehran to establish a psychoanalytic practice. When an American colleague exclaims, "I do not think that Iranians can free-associate!" Homayounpour responds that in her opinion Iranians do nothing but. Iranian culture, she says, revolves around stories. Why wouldn't Freud's methods work, given Iranians' need to talk? Thus begins a fascinating narrative of interlocking stories that resembles--more than a little--a psychoanalytic session. Homayounpour recounts the pleasure and pain of returning to her motherland, her passion for the work of Milan Kundera, her complex relationship with Kundera's Iranian translator (her father), and her own and other Iranians' anxieties of influence and disobedience. Woven throughout the narrative are glimpses of her sometimes frustrating, always candid, sessions with patients. Ms. N, a famous artist, dreams of abandonment and sits in the analyst's chair rather than on the analysand's couch; a young chador-clad woman expresses shame because she has lost her virginity; an eloquently suicidal young man cannot kill himself. As a psychoanalyst, Homayounpour knows that behind every story told is another story that remains untold. 'Doing Psychoanalysis in Tehran' connects the stories, spoken and unspoken, that ordinary Iranians tell about their lives before their hour is up. The foreword was written by Abbas Kiorastami who is an internationally acclaimed Iranian filmmaker. His most recent film is 'Certified Copy', starring Juliette Binoche, and 'Like Someone In Love'. Gohar Homayounpour is a practicing psychoanalyst in Tehran. She trains and supervises the psychoanalysts of the Freudian Group of Tehran and is Professor of Psychology at Shahid Besheti University Tehran. M Fakhry Davids MSc (Clin Psych) F Inst Psychoanal, is a psychoanalyst and adult psychotherapist in full-time clinical practice in London. He is a Fellow of the British Psychoanalytic Society, a Member of the Tavistock Society of Psychotherapists, and a founding Board Member of PCCA (Partners in Confronting Collective Atrocities). He has held academic and clinical positions in South Africa and the UK, and is a Visiting Lecturer at the Tavistock Clinic. He has written on a number of psychoanalytic topics, and has a long-standing interest in whether psychoanalysis is able to journey beyond its Western bourgeois birthplace across boundaries of race, class and culture. His book, Internal Racism: A Psychoanalytic Approach to Race and Difference, was published by Palgrave Macmillan in 2011.

The Formative Influence of Shakespeare on Freud and the Development of Psychoanalysis. A sold out event recorded at the Anna Freud Centre Library on 16 January 2013. Behind Sigmund Freud’s desk chair in the Freud Museum London sits the central section of his library, his volumes of Shakespeare and Goethe. Shakespeare’s plays occupied a significant place on Sigmund Freud’s bookshelf for most of his life. He began reading Shakespeare when he was eight years old and quoted from the plays in letters to his friends, his colleagues and his beloved. He used lines from the plays to help him grasp difficult issues in his life such as failure and death. Most significantly, Shakespeare’s plays are part of the raw material from which Freud constructed psychoanalysis. Themes, images, plots, and lines from the plays are woven throughout the foundational texts of psychoanalysis in a way that suggests their formative influence. Freud’s intertextual relationship with Shakespeare took many forms including quotation, allusion and literary interpretation. Some of the allusions are deeply embedded in Freud’s texts in a manner that even Freud may not have been aware of.  This talk will explore the influence of Shakespeare on Freud and on the development of psychoanalysis. Christian Smith has recently completed his doctoral studies at the University of Warwick in the Department of English and Comparative Literary Studies. His thesis explores the formative influence of Shakespeare on Marxism, psychoanalysis and Frankfurt School Critical Theory.

Daniel Smyth (Brent Centre for Young People).  Recorded at the Freud Museum London on 6 December 2012. A discussion about the use of football as a means of working with adolescent boys expressing emotional and behavioural difficulties. Daniel Smyth (Brent Centre for Young People) will talk about his project “Sport and Thought”, which was designed to enable adolescent boys to think about themselves as emotional beings and bring about behavioural change through the use of self-reflection and therapeutic interventions during coaching sessions. The project is inspired by the idea that an individual’s reaction within a sporting context will mirror his reactions at school, home and on the streets. The talk will centre on a year-long project in Harlesden, north west London, the work that was undertaken, and the remarkable outcomes achieved by those who took part. Daniel Smyth has worked at the Brent Adolescent Centre for the past 7 years. He is a Psychodynamic Counsellor. Daniel started off working as a youth worker in the Sommers town area of Kings Cross with young homeless adolescents, before working on the Caledonian Road area of Islington with young people removed from school due to severe emotional and behavioural difficulties. His work at the Brent Adolescent centre is very much out-reach based, working in a number of schools across the borough, working with young people at risk of school exclusion due to behavioural difficulties. Daniel created the Sport and Thought project as a response to the need to work with adolescent boys in a therapeutic way, boys who would never agree to enter the consulting room. Daniel’s work with hard to reach adolescents has been recognised at governmental level on two occasions via awards from the Home Office.

'Missing Out' Author's Talk: Adam Phillips with Lisa Appignanesi A sold old event filmed at the Freud Museum on 24 October 2012. In his latest book, 'Missing Out' (Hamish Hamilton), acclaimed psychoanalyst and writer Adam Phillips probes another intriguing feature of the human condition: the 'unlived life'. So much of our mental life is about the lives we are not living, the lives we are missing out on', he notes. But is frustration a necessary part of the good life? He discusses missing out, frustration, satisfaction and the many wishes and wants inbetween with Lisa Appignanesi, author of 'All About Love' (Virago) and Chair of the Freud Museum.

Author's Talk: Alison Bancroft A sold out event recorded live at the Freud Museum London on 24 September 2012. There is an increasing trend within both the study of visual culture and fashion itself to restore fashion to an aesthetic role - one that moves beyond its commercial success as a global industry and places fashion within a nexus of art, the body, and femininity. This emphasis aims to separate fashion from mere clothing, and illustrate its cultural power as an integral aspect of modern life. In this innovative new book, Alison Bancroft re-examines significant moments in twentieth century fashion history through the focal lens of psychoanalytic theory. Her discussion centres on studies of fashion photography, haute couture, queer dressing, and fashion/art in an attempt to shed new light on these key issues. According to Bancroft, problems of subjectivity are played out through fashion, in the public arena, and not just in the dark, unknowable unconscious mind. The question of what can be said, and what can only be experienced, and how these two issues may be reconciled, become questions that fashion addresses on an almost daily basis. By interpreting fashion within a psychoanalytic frame, Bancroft illustrates how fashion articulates some of the essential, and sometimes frightening, truths about the body, femininity and the self. Alison Bancroft is a writer and cultural critic. She specialises in interdisciplinary approaches to modern and contemporary art and visual culture, and is committed to working across all media and contexts. Her research interests include visual culture and theory, psychoanalytic thought, and sexualities. She was awarded her PhD by the University of London in 2010. FASHION AND PSYCHOANALYSIS: Styling the Self is published by I.B Tauris

Part of the launch of Granta 120: Medicine How do writers make sense of the mind in fact and fiction? Join Granta at the Freud Museum for an evening of readings and conversation that probe the wild and unpredictable landscapes of the mind. Suzanne Rivecca (Death Is Not an Option) examines addiction, lost girls and the families they split from in a tender story that explores two opposing perspectives and that connect in a startling way. Chloe Aridjis (Book of Clouds) reports on the mental health care of Soviet astronauts when they return from space. This event was part of the launch of Granta 120: Medicine, the latest edition of the magazine of new writing.

All About Love - what can psychoanalysis tell us? Lisa Appignanesi in conversation with Susie Orbach.  A sold out event recorded at the Freud Museum London on Thursday 21 June 2012. What can psychoanalysis tell us about love? In her recent book, All About Love: Anatomy of an Unruly Emotion, author and Chair of the Freud Museum, Lisa Appignanesi grapples with this mysterious and oft-ungovernable emotion in its many manifestations from passion, to parenting, to friendship. With psychoanalyst Susie Orbach, author of the ground-breaking What Do Women Want and The Impossibility of Sex, she teases out some of the muddles and meanings of love in our lives and times - in this special conversation for the Freud Museum.