Freud Museum London: Psychoanalysis Podcasts

A live performance.  Filmed at the Freud Museum on 30th April 2012. Ghost Track is very beautiful because Claire quite clearly gets into a dialogue with her own biographies so it circles around her as a person but it expands into her field, it has a clear context and expands into space’ Serge von Arx theatre architect and scenographer Berlin A solo performance by Claire Hind, written in collaboration with Gary Winters of Lone Twin, co-directed with Alexander Kelly of Third Angel. Ghost Track is a performance that weaves autobiography with King Lear, and the perennial difficulties of the father-daughter relationship. Claire Hind tells stories about the thoughts and terrors one has when waking up in the middle of the night, about her petrol pump neurosis and her 7 dads, one of whom is her ‘ghost dad’. It is a work that carefully braids humour with the power that fear and anxiety has over us as we lead very busy lives and juggle many roles. This work draws upon the ‘Father’ of psychoanalysis Sigmund Freud and thinks about the different ways in which his writing inscribes himself into his work, including his moving paper ‘The theme of the three caskets’ (1913) that takes King Lear and his three daughters as his prime example. Psychoanalysis is used as a compositional strategy to write a space for the performer – and also as a zone in which the playfulness of the performer as storyteller can be explored. Ghost Track demonstrates the slippages that occur in story-telling and uses the Nano pad (a sound sampler) as a symbol of the unconscious mind that disrupts our sense of cohesion, functioning as a buffer zone between play and fear. The material is developed from a series of performance writing workshops that Claire experienced with artist Gary Winters of the international renowned performance duo Lone Twin. They became interested in the repetition of language that occurs in act one scene one of King Lear, Nothing. Nothing will come of nothing and the repetition of the ritual in this act – each daughter coming forward to repeat a similar speech act to their father - and relate this to the death drive and the Electra complex. Kong Lear Super 8mm film Kong Lear is a humorous and touching film referencing King Lear’s madness upon some heath and re-imagining King Kong inside Lear’s psyche as woman. It is an Ubu for the 21st Century – Andrew Head, Hull University. The images of Kong Lear on the screen are beautiful and evocative. One minute she (as Kong Lear) appears playful, the next vulnerable and melancholic, absorbed in a world where nature once stood. Arrested Motion. Kong Lear is a play on words of the two male characters of King Kong and King Lear. We like the idea that Kong is inside King Lear’s psyche and we like the idea that the character of Kong Lear is played by a woman – imagine that… Freud would have a field day! This short film is the B track – the flip side to the live show. We decided to write a piece for super 8mm film to act as if the live show’s material had an unconscious, or a psyche. We are playing with the idea that the id, in Freudian psychoanalysis is silent and we became fascinated about the position of writing on silent film’s intertitles – for us they have the possibility to reveal what is hidden inside the character’s and performer’s psyche. Our playful merging of these two icons produced a string of images, texts and activities that included the filming of the character looking down upon the city of York from the Lord Mayors’ apartment roof, running feral along Fifth Avenue in New York and ascending a climbing wall inside a Go Outdoors store on Foss Island retail park (not Skull island). Lone Twin are currently working on a project for the Cultural Olympiad entitled the Boat Project.

The Lost Objects of Childhood Author's talk: Deborah Levy.  Filmed at the Freud Museum London on 26 April 2012 'When I read biographies of famous people, I only get interested when they escape from their family and spend the rest of their life getting over them.' (extract from Swimming Home) Deborah Levy's new novel, Swimming Home, is a subversive thriller about the footprints the past leaves on the everyday of a sun-drenched family holiday. Its witty and beguiling exploration of the complexities and mysteries of family life have enthralled readers and critics in equal measure. Levy will read from her book and discuss its connecting conversation with Louise Bourgeois’s life-long artistic preoccupation with the strange drama of being a wife, mother and daughter. Deborah Levy is a playwright and novelist. She recently dramatised two of Freud's case histories, The Wolfman andDora for BBC Radio 4. She was AHRC Fellow in Creative and Performing Arts at The Royal College of Art from 2006-9. A new fiction exploring the ways in which everyday objects might conceal and reveal our anxieties, Weeping Machines is published in Issue 4 of The White Review. An interview with Levy about her writing can be found here.

The Lost Objects of Childhood Author's talk: Deborah Levy.  Filmed at the Freud Museum London on 26 April 2012 'When I read biographies of famous people, I only get interested when they escape from their family and spend the rest of their life getting over them.' (extract from Swimming Home) Deborah Levy's new novel, Swimming Home, is a subversive thriller about the footprints the past leaves on the everyday of a sun-drenched family holiday. Its witty and beguiling exploration of the complexities and mysteries of family life have enthralled readers and critics in equal measure. Levy will read from her book and discuss its connecting conversation with Louise Bourgeois’s life-long artistic preoccupation with the strange drama of being a wife, mother and daughter. Deborah Levy is a playwright and novelist. She recently dramatised two of Freud's case histories, The Wolfman andDora for BBC Radio 4. She was AHRC Fellow in Creative and Performing Arts at The Royal College of Art from 2006-9. A new fiction exploring the ways in which everyday objects might conceal and reveal our anxieties, Weeping Machines is published in Issue 4 of The White Review. An interview with Levy about her writing can be found here.

Lucian Freud My Father Artist's Talk: Jane McAdam Freud On the 22nd February 2012 Jane McAdam Freud joined us to discuss her exhibition Lucian Freud My Father - A personal portrayal.  This is a video excerpt from that event. Artist Jane McAdam Freud presented a large scale sculpture portraying her father Lucian Freud. It was unveiled and exhibited for the first time in the Freud Museum – once home to her great grandfather, Sigmund Freud. Jane spent many hours with her father in the months before his death in July 2011 making sketches for this new work. It was shown at the Freud Museum alongside other smaller scale work and preparatory sketches. The show ran from 25 January 2012 - 4 March 2012

'Hysteria, heredity and anti-Semitism: Freud's challenge to the Jewish stereotype' A Talk by Estelle Roith Recorded at the Freud Museum London on 28 February 2012. Estelle Roith is a psychoanalytic psychotherapist and trained at the London Centre for psychotherapy. She is the author of the of The Riddle of Freud: Jewish influences on his theory of female sexuality published in 1987, in the New Library of Psychoanalysis. Her recent work includes:Ishmael and Isaac: An Enduring Conflict, in Sibling Relationships'by Coles, 2006, Dr. Roith is currently working on a study that proposes that significant events in Freud's time, overlooked until now, have been an important influence in his life and in the development of psychoanalysis.

'Hysteria, heredity and anti-Semitism: Freud's challenge to the Jewish stereotype' A Talk by Estelle Roith Recorded at the Freud Museum London on 28 February 2012. Estelle Roith is a psychoanalytic psychotherapist and trained at the London Centre for psychotherapy. She is the author of the of The Riddle of Freud: Jewish influences on his theory of female sexuality published in 1987, in the New Library of Psychoanalysis. Her recent work includes:Ishmael and Isaac: An Enduring Conflict, in Sibling Relationships'by Coles, 2006, Dr. Roith is currently working on a study that proposes that significant events in Freud's time, overlooked until now, have been an important influence in his life and in the development of psychoanalysis.

Trauma and Aesthetic Transformation Convened by Griselda Pollock, Centre for Cultural Analysis, Theory and History University of Leeds. AHRC Research Fellowship Symposium at the Anna Freud Centre 20 Maresfield Gardens, London NW3 on the 18th February 2012 Two weeks before the opening of the exhibition Louise Bourgeois: The Return of the Repressed, the Freud Museum presented an afternoon symposium for anyone interested in a transdisciplinary encounter across art, psychoanalysis and feminism. Griselda Pollock’s research has engaged with a series of artistic, cinematic and literary case studies dealing with bereavement, seduction, Holocaust survival, exile, migration and second generation transmitted trauma, in order to explore the proposition that art can be ‘a transport station of trauma’ (Bracha Ettinger). Examining the work of several different artists including Louise Bourgeois, Chantel Akerman and Vera Frenkel, the symposium will use psychoanalytical approaches to trauma in order investigate specific art practices as sites of transformation, blockage, encryption and dangerous failure. The symposiums aim was to open up a dialogue with clinical practitioners, cultural theorists and artists working in this area in order to ask: Do artists travel away from or towards an encounter with the traces of trauma? Can aesthetic practices teach us anything significant about the possibility of transformation of trauma or the dangers of such a re-encounter? Can art produce what Geoffrey Hartman calls ‘traumatic knowledge’?

Trauma and Aesthetic Transformation Convened by Griselda Pollock, Centre for Cultural Analysis, Theory and History University of Leeds. AHRC Research Fellowship Symposium at the Anna Freud Centre 20 Maresfield Gardens, London NW3 on the 18th February 2012 Two weeks before the opening of the exhibition Louise Bourgeois: The Return of the Repressed, the Freud Museum presented an afternoon symposium for anyone interested in a transdisciplinary encounter across art, psychoanalysis and feminism. Griselda Pollock’s research has engaged with a series of artistic, cinematic and literary case studies dealing with bereavement, seduction, Holocaust survival, exile, migration and second generation transmitted trauma, in order to explore the proposition that art can be ‘a transport station of trauma’ (Bracha Ettinger). Examining the work of several different artists including Louise Bourgeois, Chantel Akerman and Vera Frenkel, the symposium will use psychoanalytical approaches to trauma in order investigate specific art practices as sites of transformation, blockage, encryption and dangerous failure. The symposiums aim was to open up a dialogue with clinical practitioners, cultural theorists and artists working in this area in order to ask: Do artists travel away from or towards an encounter with the traces of trauma? Can aesthetic practices teach us anything significant about the possibility of transformation of trauma or the dangers of such a re-encounter? Can art produce what Geoffrey Hartman calls ‘traumatic knowledge’?

An Illustrated Hampstead Authors Society Talk by Mary Bergstein Video Recorded at the Freud Museum on 13 February 2012 Mary Bergstein, gave an illustrated talk at the Freud Museum, introduced by HAS Chaiman Zsuzsanna Ardó. The talk explored Freud's visual imagination in terms of the photography he (and his patients) pondered. It is important that Freud believed repressed memories were unconscious, and that the most potent memories and desires would emerge in psychoanalysis from deep inside, via dreams. In the period from Freud's childhood to his old-age ruminations, several kinds of photographs were prominent: portraits, psychiatric illustrations, archaeological photography, and ethnographic documentation. These images along with the erotic photography and films of the era, that Mary Bernstein will introduce, paralleled the phenomena of Freudian memories and dreams. Mary Bergstein is a scholar of Italian Renaissance sculpture, painting, and architecture. She has also published widely on the cultural history of photography, which includesMirrors of Memory: Freud, Photography, and the History of Art (2010). Bergstein is interested in the social history of art and visual culture, and has written on topics from Donatello and Michelangelo, to “reproductive” photography, to advertising art and contemporary manufactured dolls such as Barbie and Bratz. The Hampstead Authors Society (HAS) is a transcultural, transdisciplinary creative society, connecting ideas, people and places. HAS venues and partners include the Royal Institute, the British Film Academy (BAFTA), Nehru Centre, Jewish Cultural Centre, French Cultural Institute, Riverside Studio, Everyman Cinemas, Artsdepot Gallery, La Notte Blu di Firenze, Casa della Creativita, 12 Star Gallery, Europe House.

An Illustrated Hampstead Authors Society Talk by Mary Bergstein Video Recorded at the Freud Museum on 13 February 2012 Mary Bergstein, gave an illustrated talk at the Freud Museum, introduced by HAS Chaiman Zsuzsanna Ardó. The talk explored Freud's visual imagination in terms of the photography he (and his patients) pondered. It is important that Freud believed repressed memories were unconscious, and that the most potent memories and desires would emerge in psychoanalysis from deep inside, via dreams. In the period from Freud's childhood to his old-age ruminations, several kinds of photographs were prominent: portraits, psychiatric illustrations, archaeological photography, and ethnographic documentation. These images along with the erotic photography and films of the era, that Mary Bernstein will introduce, paralleled the phenomena of Freudian memories and dreams. Mary Bergstein is a scholar of Italian Renaissance sculpture, painting, and architecture. She has also published widely on the cultural history of photography, which includesMirrors of Memory: Freud, Photography, and the History of Art (2010). Bergstein is interested in the social history of art and visual culture, and has written on topics from Donatello and Michelangelo, to “reproductive” photography, to advertising art and contemporary manufactured dolls such as Barbie and Bratz. The Hampstead Authors Society (HAS) is a transcultural, transdisciplinary creative society, connecting ideas, people and places. HAS venues and partners include the Royal Institute, the British Film Academy (BAFTA), Nehru Centre, Jewish Cultural Centre, French Cultural Institute, Riverside Studio, Everyman Cinemas, Artsdepot Gallery, La Notte Blu di Firenze, Casa della Creativita, 12 Star Gallery, Europe House.

Recorded at the Freud Museum London on 22 January 2012 The Graving Tool Sian Thomas in conversation with Timberlake Wertenbaker This year playwright Timberlake Wertenbaker isWriter in Residence at the Freud Museum, generously funded by theLeverhulme Trust. Timberlake Wertenbaker is an acclaimed and prolific playwright whose works have been performed and studied all over the world. Her play Our Country’s Good is an A level text and won the Laurence Olivier Play of the Year award in 1988. She is also a translator, translating and adapting plays for performance from French (examples include Marivaux’s False Admissions, Anouilh’s Wild Orchids and Racine’s Phedre) and from classical Greek (examples include Sophocles Elektra and Euripides Hippolytus.) Her recent translation of Racine’s Britannicus received rapturous reviews at Wilton’s Music Hall. She is using her residency at the Freud Museum to complete her latest play, The Suicide of Colonel A. Ajaxinspired by Sophocles’ Ajax. Timberlake is organising The Graving Tool, a series of conversations between herself and leading theatre practitioners probing how they create complex characters. These conversations will take place on Sunday evenings in January/February 2012 at the Freud Museum. Timberlake will ask how actors and directors explore the physical and mental makeup of a character on stage. How does an actor enter into the psychology of a character, particularly in a new play? What physical manifestation, including habits or tics do they come up with and how is this used in the performance? What do they read, particularly when acting a disturbed character? Where do they find this in themselves? How are actors affected by the personalities they inhabit? Siân Thomas is an award-winning Welsh actress who has appeared on stage, on TV and in films. After graduating in acting from the Central School of Speech and Drama, she spent a year in rep before working for two years at the Glasgow Citizens' Theatre, which she describes as one of the happiest times of her life. Shortly after she made her debut as "Katarina" in the Royal Shakespeare Company's production of "The Taming of the Shrew" and has since worked with several leading stage groups, notably the National Theatre. Most recently she played Agrippina in Timberlake Wertenbaker's translation of Britannicus, that she recently played Martha in Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf at the Shefiield Crucible and that she is currently appearing at the Donmar's Richard the Second as the Duchess of York.

Recorded at the Freud Museum London on 8 January 2012 The Graving Tool: A Series of Talks Hosted by Timberlake Wertenbaker Michael Pennington in conversation with Philip Franks This year playwright Timberlake Wertenbaker is Writer in Residence at the Freud Museum, generously funded by theLeverhulme Trust. Timberlake Wertenbaker is an acclaimed and prolific playwright whose works have been performed and studied all over the world. Her play Our Country’s Good is an A level text and won the Laurence Olivier Play of the Year award in 1988. She is also a translator, translating and adapting plays for performance from French (examples include Marivaux’s False Admissions, Anouilh’s Wild Orchids and Racine’s Phedre) and from classical Greek (examples include Sophocles’ Elektra and Euripides’ Hippolytus.) Her recent translation of Racine’s Britannicus received rapturous reviews at Wilton’s Music Hall. She is using her residency at the Freud Museum to complete her latest play, The Suicide of Colonel A. Ajaxinspired by Sophocles’ Ajax. Timberlake is organising The Graving Tool, a series of conversations between herself and leading theatre practitioners probing how they create complex characters. Timberlake will ask how actors and directors explore the physical and mental makeup of a character on stage. How does an actor enter into the psychology of a character, particularly in a new play? What physical manifestation, including habits or tics do they come up with and how is this used in the performance? What do they read, particularly when acting a disturbed character? Where do they find this in themselves? How are actors affected by the personalities they inhabit? Michael Pennington is a British director and actor, most of his career has been on stage in works such as Hamlet(RSC), Oedipus the King, The Entertainer and Gross Indecency: The Three Trials of Oscar Wilde. In 1986, Pennington and director Michael Bogdanov together founded the English Shakespeare Company. As joint artistic director, he starred in the company's inaugural productions of The Henrys and, in 1987, the seven-play history cycle of The Wars of the Roses, which toured worldwide. He appeared in the 2005 film Fragile, co-starring Calista Flockhart and is the author of the book Are You There, Crocodile? which combines biographical material about the Russian playwright Anton Chekhov with a narration of Pennington's efforts to write a one-man play about Chekhov. In April 2004 he became the second actor, after Harley Granville-Barker in 1925, to deliver the British Academy's annual Shakespeare lecture. The lecture was entitledBarnadine's Straw: The Devil in Shakespeare's Detail. Philip Franks is an English director and actor, he has directed many plays including Kafka's Dick and The Kiss of the Spiderwoman (Nottingham Playhouse), Hamlet(Greenwich and tour), The Duchess of Malfi (West Yorkshire Playhouse, Greenwich and West End), Private Lives and The Heiress (Royal National Theatre) and The White Devil(Lyric Theatre, Hammersmith). Franks is best known for his roles as tax inspector Cedric "Charley" Charlton in the British sitcom The Darling Buds of May, and Sgt. Raymond Craddock on Heartbeat. He has also made guest appearances in Absolutely Fabulous andFoyle's War. Other appearances include the TV miniseriesBleak House, Martin Chuzzlewit, The Buddha of Suburbia, The Green Man and To Serve Them All My Days. Franks is also a member of the Royal Shakespeare Company.

Recorded at the Freud Museum London on 8 January 2012 The Graving Tool: A Series of Talks Hosted by Timberlake Wertenbaker Michael Pennington in conversation with Philip Franks This year playwright Timberlake Wertenbaker is Writer in Residence at the Freud Museum, generously funded by theLeverhulme Trust. Timberlake Wertenbaker is an acclaimed and prolific playwright whose works have been performed and studied all over the world. Her play Our Country’s Good is an A level text and won the Laurence Olivier Play of the Year award in 1988. She is also a translator, translating and adapting plays for performance from French (examples include Marivaux’s False Admissions, Anouilh’s Wild Orchids and Racine’s Phedre) and from classical Greek (examples include Sophocles’ Elektra and Euripides’ Hippolytus.) Her recent translation of Racine’s Britannicus received rapturous reviews at Wilton’s Music Hall. She is using her residency at the Freud Museum to complete her latest play, The Suicide of Colonel A. Ajaxinspired by Sophocles’ Ajax. Timberlake is organising The Graving Tool, a series of conversations between herself and leading theatre practitioners probing how they create complex characters. Timberlake will ask how actors and directors explore the physical and mental makeup of a character on stage. How does an actor enter into the psychology of a character, particularly in a new play? What physical manifestation, including habits or tics do they come up with and how is this used in the performance? What do they read, particularly when acting a disturbed character? Where do they find this in themselves? How are actors affected by the personalities they inhabit? Michael Pennington is a British director and actor, most of his career has been on stage in works such as Hamlet(RSC), Oedipus the King, The Entertainer and Gross Indecency: The Three Trials of Oscar Wilde. In 1986, Pennington and director Michael Bogdanov together founded the English Shakespeare Company. As joint artistic director, he starred in the company's inaugural productions of The Henrys and, in 1987, the seven-play history cycle of The Wars of the Roses, which toured worldwide. He appeared in the 2005 film Fragile, co-starring Calista Flockhart and is the author of the book Are You There, Crocodile? which combines biographical material about the Russian playwright Anton Chekhov with a narration of Pennington's efforts to write a one-man play about Chekhov. In April 2004 he became the second actor, after Harley Granville-Barker in 1925, to deliver the British Academy's annual Shakespeare lecture. The lecture was entitledBarnadine's Straw: The Devil in Shakespeare's Detail. Philip Franks is an English director and actor, he has directed many plays including Kafka's Dick and The Kiss of the Spiderwoman (Nottingham Playhouse), Hamlet(Greenwich and tour), The Duchess of Malfi (West Yorkshire Playhouse, Greenwich and West End), Private Lives and The Heiress (Royal National Theatre) and The White Devil(Lyric Theatre, Hammersmith). Franks is best known for his roles as tax inspector Cedric "Charley" Charlton in the British sitcom The Darling Buds of May, and Sgt. Raymond Craddock on Heartbeat. He has also made guest appearances in Absolutely Fabulous andFoyle's War. Other appearances include the TV miniseriesBleak House, Martin Chuzzlewit, The Buddha of Suburbia, The Green Man and To Serve Them All My Days. Franks is also a member of the Royal Shakespeare Company.

Richard Crow - Radio Schreber, Soliloques for Schziophonic (extract), 20.4.2011 Phantasmic voices of Radio Schreber: Richard Crow, Gabriel Séverin, Anna Teresa Scheer, Nick Couldry, Adam Bohman, Douglas Park and others who remain obscure and unknown... Radio Schreber, Soliloques for Schziophonic voices investigates the recurring theme of ‘hearing voices’ in sonic and literary works by paying homage to Daniel Paul Schreber’s Memoirs of My Nervous Illness. Written in 1903 during his second mental illness at Sonnenstein Public asylum, the Memoirs detail an alternate delusional world famously analysed by Freud in his Psycho-analytic Notes on An Autobiographical account of a case of paranoia (Dementia Paranoides) published in 1911. For the centenary of Schreber’s death (and Freud’s Psychoanalytic Notes), a sound performance by artist Richard Crow will give voice to Schreber’s visionary text through a specially created composition that will be premiered at the Freud Museum London. As a continuation of his project, Imaginary Hospital Radio, Richard Crow will work in collaboration with sound-poet Gabriel Séverin in exploring a sonic tableaux of phantasmic and disembodied voices embedded in the text as well as in its physical and imaginary locations inhabited by Schreber. Presented by Sound Threshold. Curated by Lucia Farinati with the assistance of Rita Correddu. Recorded by Colin Potter.

Richard Crow - Radio Schreber, Soliloques for Schziophonic (extract), 20.4.2011 Phantasmic voices of Radio Schreber: Richard Crow, Gabriel Séverin, Anna Teresa Scheer, Nick Couldry, Adam Bohman, Douglas Park and others who remain obscure and unknown... Radio Schreber, Soliloques for Schziophonic voices investigates the recurring theme of ‘hearing voices’ in sonic and literary works by paying homage to Daniel Paul Schreber’s Memoirs of My Nervous Illness. Written in 1903 during his second mental illness at Sonnenstein Public asylum, the Memoirs detail an alternate delusional world famously analysed by Freud in his Psycho-analytic Notes on An Autobiographical account of a case of paranoia (Dementia Paranoides) published in 1911. For the centenary of Schreber’s death (and Freud’s Psychoanalytic Notes), a sound performance by artist Richard Crow will give voice to Schreber’s visionary text through a specially created composition that will be premiered at the Freud Museum London. As a continuation of his project, Imaginary Hospital Radio, Richard Crow will work in collaboration with sound-poet Gabriel Séverin in exploring a sonic tableaux of phantasmic and disembodied voices embedded in the text as well as in its physical and imaginary locations inhabited by Schreber. Presented by Sound Threshold. Curated by Lucia Farinati with the assistance of Rita Correddu. Recorded by Colin Potter.