Freud Museum London: Psychoanalysis Podcasts

Stephen Gross - Freud and Wagner: The Assault on ReasonWagner, Freud and the End of Myth: Day conference, Saturday 28 September 2013A highly significant connection linking Freud and Wagner is the German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer. His claim that true reality consists of the primordial and undifferentiated Will beyond both space and time as well as the reach of Reason and appearance, was hugely influential on Wagner's music, particularly "Tristan and Isolde" as Bryan Magee has argued in his celebrated study Wagner and Philosophy. Freud's notion of the unconscious, most specifically the id as seat of the sex drives, can now be seen as a derivation of Schopenhauer's ideas, thereby establishing his link with Wagner. The fierce resistance and hostility towards both Freud and Wagner was founded not only on their perceived assault on prevailing sexual mores, but their assault on Reason itself, and, in Wagner's case, on his association with Nazism.Stephen Gross is an analytic psychotherapist in private practice. He also teaches and supervises at WPF Therapy and other training organisations. He is particularly interested in the overlap between psychotherapy and literature, especially the works of Shakespeare on which he has published widely. His first play, "Freud's Night Visitors" has been performed twice at The Freud Museum London.

Estela Welldon - The Chaste and the Driven: Power struggles in Wagner's Women Wagner, Freud and the End of Myth: Day conference, Saturday 28 September 2013 Far from being the passive victims of popular imagination, Wagner’s women are often complex, paradoxical and driven characters, representing diverse aspects of femininity and female desire. Wagner’s mythic narratives unveil power struggles between men and women, and between women themselves, representing warring currents of emotion within female psychology. Estela Welldon is a psychotherapist who worked for many years at the Portman Clinic and in private practice. She is the founder of the International Association for Forensic Psychotherapy and a Fellow of the Royal College of Psychiatrists. She is most famous for her book Mother, Madonna Whore: The Idealization and Denigration of Motherhood (1988) which quashed the myth that ‘perversion’ was largely a male preserve and opened up a whole new field of therapeutic enquiry. In 1997 Oxford Brookes University awarded Dr. Welldon a D.Sc. Honorary Doctorate of Science degree for her contributions to the field of forensic psychotherapy, and this year she was invited to become an Honorary member of the American Psychoanalytic Association. She is principal editor of A Practical Guide to Forensic Psychotherapy (1997) and author of Sadomasochism (2002). Her latest publication is Playing with Dynamite: A Personal Approach to the Understanding of Perversions, Violence and Criminality (Karnac, 2011) Her interest in Wagner is long-standing.

Estela Welldon - The Chaste and the Driven: Power struggles in Wagner's WomenWagner, Freud and the End of Myth: Day conference, Saturday 28 September 2013Far from being the passive victims of popular imagination, Wagner’s women are often complex, paradoxical and driven characters, representing diverse aspects of femininity and female desire. Wagner’s mythic narratives unveil power struggles between men and women, and between women themselves, representing warring currents of emotion within female psychology.Estela Welldon is a psychotherapist who worked for many years at the Portman Clinic and in private practice. She is the founder of the International Association for Forensic Psychotherapy and a Fellow of the Royal College of Psychiatrists. She is most famous for her book Mother, Madonna Whore: The Idealization and Denigration of Motherhood (1988) which quashed the myth that ‘perversion’ was largely a male preserve and opened up a whole new field of therapeutic enquiry. In 1997 Oxford Brookes University awarded Dr. Welldon a D.Sc. Honorary Doctorate of Science degree for her contributions to the field of forensic psychotherapy, and this year she was invited to become an Honorary member of the American Psychoanalytic Association. She is principal editor of A Practical Guide to Forensic Psychotherapy (1997) and author of Sadomasochism (2002). Her latest publication is Playing with Dynamite: A Personal Approach to the Understanding of Perversions, Violence and Criminality (Karnac, 2011) Her interest in Wagner is long-standing.

Gavin Plumley - Private Theatre and Hysterical Opera: Wagner’s influence in Freud’s Vienna Wagner, Freud and the End of Myth: Day conference, Saturday 28 September 2013 Post-Wagnerian composers in Vienna, hugely influenced by the Bayreuth Behemoth, actively explored the kind of mental dissociation described in Freud and Breuer's Studies on Hysteria (1894). Employing vast orchestras to create swirling psychodramas, their operas offer a beguiling artistic response to Anna O's idea of 'private theatre', and to Wagner’s use of the mythological as a way of approaching psychological ‘truths’. A few decades later many of those composers, exiled by the Nazis, employed the same soundworld to accompany the ultimate dissociative narratives of Hollywood's Silver Screen. In this paper I will look at operas by Schreker, Korngold and their contemporaries through a Freudian lens. Gavin Plumley is a writer and broadcaster, specialising in the music and culture of Central Europe. He has appeared on BBC Radio 3 and has recently spoken at the Royal Opera House, ENO, the CBSO, V&A, The Freud Museum, and the Neue Galerie New York. He has given a number of talks at the Southbank Centre’s ‘The Rest is Noise’ festival this year and was recently appointed commissioning editor for the English language programmes at the Salzburg Festival. www.entartetemusik.blogspot.com

Gavin Plumley - Private Theatre and Hysterical Opera: Wagner’s influence in Freud’s ViennaWagner, Freud and the End of Myth: Day conference, Saturday 28 September 2013Post-Wagnerian composers in Vienna, hugely influenced by the Bayreuth Behemoth, actively explored the kind of mental dissociation described in Freud and Breuer's Studies on Hysteria (1894). Employing vast orchestras to create swirling psychodramas, their operas offer a beguiling artistic response to Anna O's idea of 'private theatre', and to Wagner’s use of the mythological as a way of approaching psychological ‘truths’. A few decades later many of those composers, exiled by the Nazis, employed the same soundworld to accompany the ultimate dissociative narratives of Hollywood's Silver Screen. In this paper I will look at operas by Schreker, Korngold and their contemporaries through a Freudian lens.Gavin Plumley is a writer and broadcaster, specialising in the music and culture of Central Europe. He has appeared on BBC Radio 3 and has recently spoken at the Royal Opera House, ENO, the CBSO, V&A, The Freud Museum, and the Neue Galerie New York. He has given a number of talks at the Southbank Centre’s ‘The Rest is Noise’ festival this year and was recently appointed commissioning editor for the English language programmes at the Salzburg Festival. www.entartetemusik.blogspot.com

Anthony Cantle - Introductory Remarks Wagner, Freud and the End of Myth: Day conference, Saturday 28 September 2013 Anthony Cantle has introduced and chaired three previous Freud Museum events - on the "Therapist's Body" (2000), "Understanding Perversion" (2009) and "Mahler" (2010). He is a practising Psychoanalyst and Psychoanalytic Psychotherapist and a Fellow of The Institute of Psychoanalysis, London and its former Curator. Formerly Founder and Director of the Open Door Adolescent Consultation Service in London he has also taught on the MA in Psychotherapy at the Tavistock Clinic. He worked for many years at the St Albans College of Art & Design where he set up and offered a consultation service to postgraduate students studying Art, Dance & Drama Therapies. In addition to his clinical practice he is currently a Training Analyst and Supervisor for the former British Association of Psychotherapists, the Lincoln Clinic for Psychotherapy and the London Centre for Psychotherapy and the Tavistock Clinic and the Tavistock Centre for Couple Relationships. He is also member of the UK Mahler Society and participated in the 2009 BBC Series “Robert Winston’s Musical Analysis” where he spoke about the marriage of Gustav and Alma Mahler. In 2010 he introduced and chaired the Freud Museum event - with Gavin Plumley as the guest speaker - and entitled "The 'Faust' Problem: Music and Madness in Mahler's Vienna. Later the same year, as part of the centenary celebrations of Mahler's death, the BBC asked Anthony Cantle and the British composer and Mahler expert David Matthews to make a programme about Gustav Mahler's meeting and four hour conversation with Sigmund Freud in the Dutch city of Leiden. Recorded on location, "Walking with Freud" was transmitted in 2010 and was repeated as the interval documentary during the 2011 BBC Proms season. Anthony Cantle was also a contributor to the 2011 BBC Radio Four series "Soul Music" featuring the Adagietto from Mahler's 5th symphony and assisted in the BBC Wales production of the 2012 two part programme on the Finnish composer, Jean Sibelius. 

Anthony Cantle - Introductory RemarksWagner, Freud and the End of Myth: Day conference, Saturday 28 September 2013Anthony Cantle has introduced and chaired three previous Freud Museum events - on the "Therapist's Body" (2000), "Understanding Perversion" (2009) and "Mahler" (2010). He is a practising Psychoanalyst and Psychoanalytic Psychotherapist and a Fellow of The Institute of Psychoanalysis, London and its former Curator. Formerly Founder and Director of the Open Door Adolescent Consultation Service in London he has also taught on the MA in Psychotherapy at the Tavistock Clinic. He worked for many years at the St Albans College of Art & Design where he set up and offered a consultation service to postgraduate students studying Art, Dance & Drama Therapies.In addition to his clinical practice he is currently a Training Analyst and Supervisor for the former British Association of Psychotherapists, the Lincoln Clinic for Psychotherapy and the London Centre for Psychotherapy and the Tavistock Clinic and the Tavistock Centre for Couple Relationships. He is also member of the UK Mahler Society and participated in the 2009 BBC Series “Robert Winston’s Musical Analysis” where he spoke about the marriage of Gustav and Alma Mahler. In 2010 he introduced and chaired the Freud Museum event - with Gavin Plumley as the guest speaker - and entitled "The 'Faust' Problem: Music and Madness in Mahler's Vienna. Later the same year, as part of the centenary celebrations of Mahler's death, the BBC asked Anthony Cantle and the British composer and Mahler expert David Matthews to make a programme about Gustav Mahler's meeting and four hour conversation with Sigmund Freud in the Dutch city of Leiden. Recorded on location, "Walking with Freud" was transmitted in 2010 and was repeated as the interval documentary during the 2011 BBC Proms season.Anthony Cantle was also a contributor to the 2011 BBC Radio Four series "Soul Music" featuring the Adagietto from Mahler's 5th symphony and assisted in the BBC Wales production of the 2012 two part programme on the Finnish composer, Jean Sibelius. 

David Morgan and Prof Gavin MacFadyen The Political Consequences of Dissent - Prof. Gavin MacFadyen The Psychological Consequences of Political and Social Disclosure - David Morgan Organisations cannot be held to account unless they are open to internal criticism, yet despite measures such as the Public Interest Disclosure Act, individuals within the UK’s institutions, public bodies and corporations are subject to severe gagging constraints. Whistleblowers are heavily penalised, both through mechanisms such as the Official Secrets Act and the Confidentiality Clauses built into employment agreements, and informally through loss of status and income, and social ostracism. What are the motives for whistleblowing, and how can whistleblowers be protected and encouraged to come forward despite the practical and psychological pressures that they face? Gavin MacFadyen and David Morgan will discuss these problems with us. Gavin MacFadyen is Director of the Centre for Investigative Journalism and has researched, directed and produced investigative programmes in numerous countries around the world. He is currently Visiting Professor at City University, London, and a founder of the broad-support lobbying group, Whistleblowers UK which was launched in 2012. David Morgan is a Consultant Psychotherapist and Psychoanalyst.He worked for many years at the Portman Clinic is now in private practice and is consultant psychotherapist for a number of organisations including WBUK, a Whistleblowers support network.

David Morgan and Prof Gavin MacFadyen The Political Consequences of Dissent - Prof. Gavin MacFadyen The Psychological Consequences of Political and Social Disclosure - David Morgan Organisations cannot be held to account unless they are open to internal criticism, yet despite measures such as the Public Interest Disclosure Act, individuals within the UK’s institutions, public bodies and corporations are subject to severe gagging constraints. Whistleblowers are heavily penalised, both through mechanisms such as the Official Secrets Act and the Confidentiality Clauses built into employment agreements, and informally through loss of status and income, and social ostracism. What are the motives for whistleblowing, and how can whistleblowers be protected and encouraged to come forward despite the practical and psychological pressures that they face? Gavin MacFadyen and David Morgan will discuss these problems with us. Gavin MacFadyen is Director of the Centre for Investigative Journalism and has researched, directed and produced investigative programmes in numerous countries around the world. He is currently Visiting Professor at City University, London, and a founder of the broad-support lobbying group, Whistleblowers UK which was launched in 2012. David Morgan is a Consultant Psychotherapist and Psychoanalyst.He worked for many years at the Portman Clinic is now in private practice and is consultant psychotherapist for a number of organisations including WBUK, a Whistleblowers support network.

A lecture by Sander L. Gilman"Against the soul-destroying glorification of the instinctual life! For the nobility of the human soul! We consign to the flames the writings of the school of Sigmund Freud..."Freud’s works were ritually burned by the Nazi’s in 1933, and we have the pictures to prove it. But the relationship was more complicated than that. The Third Reich Source Book will appear this summer with the University of California Press. It is the most extensive collection of primary documents on the Third Reich ever made available to English readers. It also presents for the first time primary materials on the struggle over the meaning of the psyche and the legacy of psychoanalysis under Hitler. Sander Gilman, one of its editors, will present the reader and the material on psychology and psychoanalysis under the Nazis.Sander L. Gilman is a distinguished professor of the Liberal Arts and Sciences as well as Professor of Psychiatry at Emory University. A cultural and literary historian, he is the author or editor of over eighty books. His Obesity: The Biography appeared with Oxford University Press in 2010; his most recent edited volume, Wagner and Cinema (with Jeongwon Joe) was published in the same year. He is the author of the basic study of the visual stereotyping of the mentally ill, Seeing the Insane, published by John Wiley and Sons in 1982 (reprinted: 1996) as well as the standard study of Jewish Self-Hatred, the title of his Johns Hopkins University Press monograph of 1986. For twenty-five years he was a member of the humanities and medical faculties at Cornell University where he held the Goldwin Smith Professorship of Humane Studies. For six years he held the Henry R. Luce Distinguished Service Professorship of the Liberal Arts in Human Biology at the University of Chicago and for four years was a distinguished professor of the Liberal Arts and Medicine and creator of the Humanities Laboratory at the University of Illinois at Chicago. He has held many distinguished posts in the UK and across the world, including the Weidenfeld Visiting Professor of European Comparative Literature at Oxford University in 2004-5, and Professor at the Institute in the Humanities, Birkbeck College from 2007 to 2012. He was elected an honorary professor of the Free University in Berlin in 2000, and has been an honorary member of the American Psychoanalytic Association since 2007.

A lecture by Sander L. Gilman "Against the soul-destroying glorification of the instinctual life! For the nobility of the human soul! We consign to the flames the writings of the school of Sigmund Freud..." Freud’s works were ritually burned by the Nazi’s in 1933, and we have the pictures to prove it. But the relationship was more complicated than that. The Third Reich Source Book will appear this summer with the University of California Press. It is the most extensive collection of primary documents on the Third Reich ever made available to English readers. It also presents for the first time primary materials on the struggle over the meaning of the psyche and the legacy of psychoanalysis under Hitler. Sander Gilman, one of its editors, will present the reader and the material on psychology and psychoanalysis under the Nazis. Sander L. Gilman is a distinguished professor of the Liberal Arts and Sciences as well as Professor of Psychiatry at Emory University. A cultural and literary historian, he is the author or editor of over eighty books. His Obesity: The Biography appeared with Oxford University Press in 2010; his most recent edited volume, Wagner and Cinema (with Jeongwon Joe) was published in the same year. He is the author of the basic study of the visual stereotyping of the mentally ill, Seeing the Insane, published by John Wiley and Sons in 1982 (reprinted: 1996) as well as the standard study of Jewish Self-Hatred, the title of his Johns Hopkins University Press monograph of 1986. For twenty-five years he was a member of the humanities and medical faculties at Cornell University where he held the Goldwin Smith Professorship of Humane Studies. For six years he held the Henry R. Luce Distinguished Service Professorship of the Liberal Arts in Human Biology at the University of Chicago and for four years was a distinguished professor of the Liberal Arts and Medicine and creator of the Humanities Laboratory at the University of Illinois at Chicago. He has held many distinguished posts in the UK and across the world, including the Weidenfeld Visiting Professor of European Comparative Literature at Oxford University in 2004-5, and Professor at the Institute in the Humanities, Birkbeck College from 2007 to 2012. He was elected an honorary professor of the Free University in Berlin in 2000, and has been an honorary member of the American Psychoanalytic Association since 2007.

An evening lecture with Gavin Plumley Post-Wagnerian composers in Vienna, still immensely influenced by the Bayreuth behemoth, actively explored the kind of mental dissociation described in Freud and Breuer's Studies on Hysteria. Employing vast orchestras to create swirling psychodramas, their operas offer a beguiling artistic response to Anna O's idea of 'private theatre'. A few decades later many of those composers, exiled by the Nazis, employed the same soundworld to accompany the ultimate dissociative narratives of Hollywood's Silver Screen, creating a new combination of music and drama first envisioned by Wagner. Writer and musicologist Gavin Plumley looks at operas by Schreker, Korngold and their contemporaries through a Freudian lens. Much of the repertoire featured in Gavin Plumley's talk forms the backbone of Michael Haas's new book Forbidden Music: The Jewish Composers Banned by the Nazis (published by Yale University Press), in which he looks at the contribution of Jewish composers in Germany and Austria before 1933. Michael Haas will introduce the volume and sign copies. Gavin Plumley is a writer and broadcaster, specialising in the music and culture of Central Europe. He has appeared on BBC Radio 3 and has recently spoken at the Royal Opera House, ENO, the CBSO, V8A and the Neue Galerie New York. He has given a number of talks at the Southbank Centre’s ‘The Rest is Noise’ festival this year and was recently appointed commissioning editor for the English language programmes at the Salzburg Festival.  www.entartetemusik.blogspot.com Michael Haas was producer of London/Decca’s 'Entartete Musik' recording series and was music curator at the Jewish Museum in Vienna. He is presently research director of the Jewish Music Institute for Suppressed Music, SOAS, University of London. www.coralfox.co

Consultant Child Psychotherapist Dr Graham Music and critic Dr Maria Walsh, author of 'Art and Psychoanalysis',  in conversation with the artist Rebecca Fortnum. The event is is part of our current exhibition 'Self Contained' by Rebecca Fortnum. “.. only where I find a face do I encounter an exteriority and does an outside happen to me.” G. Agamben, Means without End, Notes on Politics (2000) Rebecca Fortnum’s exhibition at the Freud Museum, 'Self Contained', develops several strands of her recent work on the formation of identity, dreams and the power of the gaze. The series 'Dream' depicts children with their eyes closed in paired pencil portraits. In these small, intimate works we can look at the subjects very closely but they never look back. No blinking, no flinching; we are struck by their interiority. They shut out the intrusive viewer. The imagery responds directly to notions of the power relations of the subject’s gaze, introducing on a suggestive level the ideal of the child’s dreams and imaginings that are inaccessible to the viewer. The portraits are completed in pairs in a process developed to question the authenticity of the single image. These works will be displayed in Anna Freud’s room at the Freud Museum, along with works in silverpoint, to draw out connections with Anna Freud’s writings on the child’s relationship with the adult world. The series 'Wide Shut' includes three large paired portraits, each with a veil of colour over the image. These are of older girls, one image of each pair with open eyes. They act out the duality of proper and improper, of communication and communicability, of potentiality and action.

Consultant Child Psychotherapist Dr Graham Music and critic Dr Maria Walsh, author of 'Art and Psychoanalysis',  in conversation with the artist Rebecca Fortnum. The event is is part of our current exhibition 'Self Contained' by Rebecca Fortnum. “.. only where I find a face do I encounter an exteriority and does an outside happen to me.” G. Agamben, Means without End, Notes on Politics (2000) Rebecca Fortnum’s exhibition at the Freud Museum, 'Self Contained', develops several strands of her recent work on the formation of identity, dreams and the power of the gaze. The series 'Dream' depicts children with their eyes closed in paired pencil portraits. In these small, intimate works we can look at the subjects very closely but they never look back. No blinking, no flinching; we are struck by their interiority. They shut out the intrusive viewer. The imagery responds directly to notions of the power relations of the subject’s gaze, introducing on a suggestive level the ideal of the child’s dreams and imaginings that are inaccessible to the viewer. The portraits are completed in pairs in a process developed to question the authenticity of the single image. These works will be displayed in Anna Freud’s room at the Freud Museum, along with works in silverpoint, to draw out connections with Anna Freud’s writings on the child’s relationship with the adult world. The series 'Wide Shut' includes three large paired portraits, each with a veil of colour over the image. These are of older girls, one image of each pair with open eyes. They act out the duality of proper and improper, of communication and communicability, of potentiality and action.

In Repulsion (1965), Rosemary’s Baby (1968) and The Tenant (1976), Polish filmmaker Roman Polanski portrays a series of fragmented psyches confined in claustrophobic spaces. Fear objects move progressively from sexual intercourse (Carol), via pregnancy/childbirth (Rosemary), culminating in the blurring of gender identities (Trelkovsky). In her Projections lecture, Mary Wild offers a Freudian psychoanalytic interpretation of Polanski’s ‘apartment trilogy’, a genre-defining set of films with an influence as far-reaching as 2010’s Black Swan. PROJECTIONS is psychoanalysis for film interpretation. PROJECTIONS empowers film spectators to express subjective associations they consider to be meaningful. Expertise in psychoanalytic theory is not necessary - the only prerequisite is the desire to enter and inhabit the imaginary world of film, which is itself a psychoanalytic act. Please watch Roman Polanski’s ‘Repulsion’, ‘Rosemary’s Baby’ and ‘The Tenant’ before attending the lecture as there may be spoilers! MARY WILD, a Freudian cinephile from Montreal, is the creator of PROJECTIONS.