Freud/Lynch: Behind the Curtain

Product Information

Analytic Agora is a peer-reviewed psychoanalytic journal, published annually, which aims at promoting awareness of psychoanalysis – as a placeholder – in social bonds, with the view to setting up an open but critical space for debates between different schools of psychoanalytic thought, outside the dogmatism of regulatory bodies and partisan training organisations. If you’re in/near London, you don’t want to miss the book launch event of ‘Freud/Lynch: Behind the Curtain’ on Friday 24 February 2023 at the Freud Museum.

STEFAN MARIANSKI is Education Manager at the Freud Museum London, where he works to engage young people with psychoanalytic thought. He has organised a number of events and conferences on psychoanalytic themes, and has written and lectured on dreams, sexuality, anthropology, surrealism, and masculinity. He is a manager with the Psychosis Therapy Project and a trainee at the Centre for Freudian Analysis and Research. Many of Freud’s original theories were impossible to verify at a larger scale at the time. While for some of them the jury is still out, many have gained empirical support. For example, we have already seen that dreaming is linked to wish fulfilment on a neurological level and that psychoanalytic therapies provide effective treatment for various mental health conditions (an empirical test of their value).

In February 2021, the Freud Museum hosted eighteen RCA Sculpture students in an online residency. Here, RCA tutor Melanie Jackson introduces their project.

Each artist has an active button on the home screen of the virtual tour of 20 Maresfield Gardens. In addition, artist Roy Claire Potter has contributed text written from and with the tools and structure of their workshop. This was delivered to students as part of the residency, using words generated by and with the museum. Artist and Writer Ameera Kawash (PhD Candidate RCA) also contributes a work in response by the seminar she delivered as part of the event. Suzanne Bardgett is Head of Research and Academic Partnerships at Imperial War Museums, where she is responsible for initiating research projects across the IWM’s remit. Past achievements include leading the team that created the Holocaust Exhibition which ran at IWM London from 2000 to 2021. Suzanne is also Series Editor with Ben Barkow of the Palgrave Macmillan’s The Holocaust and its Contexts. Her book, Wartime London in Paintings, about the IWM’s officially commissioned paintings of London during the Second World War, was published in 2020, and a further book on the Air War in Paintings will be published by the IWM in 2024. Anne Biggs Our warm thanks to Carol Seigel, Director, Ivan Ward Deputy Director/Head of Learning, Bryony Davies, Curator, and Stefan Marianski, Education Officer for their expertise, knowledge and generosity. I shall consider from a psychoanalytic perspective how Blue Velvet, dominated as it is by perverse relationships, presents us with ‘a strange world’ (a sentence repeatedly uttered by two of the film’s protagonists). I shall here focus in particular on the theme of voyeurism, which also implicates us as spectators, and on the symbolic significance of the cut-off ear, the film’s iconic and emblematic MacGuffin. 4. Jamie Ruers

Freud/Lynch: Behind the Curtain is a collection of essays investigating the commonalities of an unlikely match: a psychoanalyst from Vienna, Austria, and a film director from Missoula, Montana, who would both go on to be great explorers of the human condition in their respective fields. Freud’s ideas continue to inspire empirical research in many areas. One such area is neuroscience, where there is now an interdisciplinary field called neuro-psychoanalysis. Neuroscientist and psychoanalyst Mark Solms suggests that psychoanalysis currently provides the best conceptual starting point for understanding subjective experience scientifically. Solms has, for example, provided some intriguing support for Freud’s idea of dreaming as wish fulfilment by isolating neural mechanisms that are closely involved with dreaming (Solms 2000).This event is a fundraiser for our upcoming ‘Young Psychologists’ Club’, a free offering for A Level Psychology students. Our Young Psychologists will benefit from a platform to connect with one-another, participate in extra-curricular activities, and access to a range of exclusive careers talks, revision sessions and inspiring insights from subject experts across the landscape of psychology, psychotherapy and mental health. This talk argues that the series Twin Peaks: The Return creates the expectation of Dale Cooper’s return as a fantasy figure capable of healing the wound of subjectivity itself only to show how he actually plays a crucial role in its perpetuation. 8. Mary Wild How far down the Lost Highway can we get with psychoanalytic theory as our guide? In this talk I would like to take a look at some of the remarkable parallels between David Lynch’s masterpiece and Lacanian psychoanalysis. I hope to draw out some Lynchian lessons about the structure of desire and the function of the law, and to offer some psychoanalytic reflections on some of Lost Highway‘s many enigmas. 12. Richard Martin David Lynch is known for creating luxurious cinematic dreamscapes – infuriatingly beautiful mind puzzles in his signature surrealistic style. Three films in particular (Lost Highway, Mulholland Drive and Inland Empire) form his unofficial ‘blurred identity trilogy’, featuring characters who embark on bizarre inward journeys in search of lost selves. The central premise of this talk is that in each instalment of the trilogy, a psychogenic fugue follows the unconscious trauma of unrequited love. Psychoanalytic theory will be shown to illuminate Lynch’s iconic dream-logic, which is disturbing and beguiling in equal measure. 9. Allister MacTaggart