Andrei Tarkovsky's metaphysical dream zone: Seven week evening course - 11 January 2016 - 22 February 2016

The Freud Museum, London, United Kingdom 

The new PROJECTIONS series by Mary Wild in partnership with Cygnnet Publishing, is a 7-week course dedicated to the exploration of Tarkovsky’s acclaimed filmography, providing a platform for interactive engagement with one of the most influential figures in the history of cinema. Almost every Tarkovskian frame is hyper-significant and dense with meaning; so psychoanalysis will serve a vital function, facilitating a multitude of interpretations and searching for possibilities in “dream rooms” through which Tarkovsky moved with great ease. Memories, attachment, alienation, identity, nostalgia, conflict, transcendence and the uncanny are some of the concepts that will foster a deeper understanding of the Russian master’s uniquely captivating vision. Through a combination of group discussion and an appreciation of Tarkovsky’s theoretical perspective, we will attempt to reassess and become aware of our unconscious connection to these notoriously challenging works of art – a practice that is not dissimilar to the psychoanalytic tradition itself.

The written word, even at the height of its powers, does not successfully convey the beauty, vastness and mystery of films directed by Andrei Tarkovsky. To engage with the outstanding repertoire of Russia’s greatest motion picture auteur requires an absolute immersion in the visual domain, as well as patience, imagination, and a profound faith in the creative process. Tarkovsky’s innovative cinematic language, developed over seven feature-length titles, is neither conventional nor especially plot-driven, but instead focuses on the inner worlds of on-screen characters, their existential crises and spiritual quests. The Tarkovskian image is interminably poetic, always in pursuit of an epic, life-altering truth. His primary method was to “sculpt time” by fixing reality, preserving passing moments with exceptionally long takes; lingering, observing, using cinematography to generate a mosaic of time. Brooding trees, flowing rivers, dilapidated buildings, religious paintings, smoldering flames, torrential rain, ethereal levitations, the repositioning of nature indoors – these are the unmistakable symbolic cues that indicate entry into a metaphysical dream zone.

Full filmography (advance viewing is optional, select scenes will be shown during weekly sessions):

Week 1 – Ivan's Childhood (1962): an orphan boy’s experiences during World War II

Week 2 – Andrei Rublev (1966): the life, times and afflictions of 15th-century Russian icon painter

Week 3 – Solaris (1972): mysterious phenomena taking place aboard a space station orbiting a fictional planet

Week 4 – Mirror (1975): dying man remembers his childhood, mother and recent Russian history

Week 5 – Stalker (1979): guide leads two men through the Zone to find a room that grants wishes

Week 6 – Nostalghia (1983): poet travels through Italy researching the life of 18th-century Russian composer

Week 7 – The Sacrifice (1986): middle-aged intellectual bargains with God to stop impending nuclear holocaust

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. MARY WILD, a Freudian cinephile from Montreal, is the creator of PROJECTIONS.

More info here.

Unforbidden Pleasures by Adam Phillips - Author's Talk - 12 November 2015

Freud Museum London

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.

Unforbidden pleasures, he argues, are always the ones we tend not to think about, yet when you look into it, it is probable that we get as much pleasure, if not more, from them. And we may have underestimated just how restricted our restrictiveness, in thrall to the forbidden and its rules, may make us.

Adam Phillips is a psychoanalyst and the author of several previous books, all widely acclaimed, including On Kissing, Tickling and Being Bored, Going Sane and Side Effects. His most recent books are On Kindness, co-written with the historian Barbara Taylor, Missing Out: In Praise of the Unlived Life, On Balance and One Way and Another.

‘Every mind-blowing book from Adam Phillips suspends all the certainties we are most attached to and somehow makes this feel exhilarating’ Deborah Levy

‘Phillips radiates infectious charm. The brew of gaiety, compassion, exuberance and idealism is heady and disarming’ Sunday Times

‘Phillips is one of the finest prose stylists at work in the language, an Emerson for our time’ John Banville

Unforbidden Pleasures is published by Hamish Hamilton (5 November 2015)

Hold Your Breath/Light That Obscures - 17 November 2015

The London Museum London

Screening and discussion: Clement Page and Vicky Caplin

Join us for a screen of two films created by artist and filmmaker Clement Page, inspired by Sigmund Freud's work. Followed by a discussion between the artist and art historian, art agent and former psychoanalyst Vicky Caplin.

Light That Obscures (20 minutes), explores the intimate world of Isabella, a young female artist, living in Berlin, who develops an extreme fear of light, or (photo-phobia). The film focuses on the optical disturbances and fantasies which accompany her fear.

Hold Your Breath (20 minutes), is based on Sigmund Freud’s case history ‘The Wolf-Man: From the History of an Infantile Neurosis’. The ‘Wolf-Man’ is the story of Sergei Pankejeff, an enigmatic Russian boy who, aged five, suffers from a phobia of animals.

More info here.

PROJECTIONS: Psychopathology of everyday economics - a cinematic journey - six-week evening course

at The Freud Museum London

12 October 2015 - 16 November 2015

Everywhere I go, I find that an unrestricted free-market has been there before me. In an era of post-2008 global financial crash, it seems that neoliberalism, quantitative easing, bank bailouts and other similarly obscure signifiers are emerging as hot topics of debate in diverse cultural circles. Sigmund Freud once stated, “Money is laughing gas to me,” but later made the important distinction that “love and work are the cornerstones of our humanness.”

Moving beyond the unhelpful adage that it is “the root of all evil”, money is fascinating from a psychoanalytic perspective: it has been known to symbolise the irrational, illusory and neurotic, often linked to crisis, loss and castration. Unconscious motives reveal themselves through monetary transactions; entrepreneurial killer instincts strive to meet ever-increasing demands; libidinal desires expressed via ‘retail therapy’. Jacques Lacan remarked that capitalism is “wildly clever but headed for a blowout […] it runs too fast and consumes so well that it consumes itself.”

‘PROJECTIONS: Psychopathology of everyday economics – a cinematic journey’ is a 6-week course deconstructing filmic representations of money and the workplace in a psychoanalytic framework, with particular attention to concepts including the pleasure principle, anal stage of psychosexual development, obsessional neurosis, death drive, alienation and desire. The market’s non-negotiable ambition is maximum profit at any cost; it competes fiercely and we follow suit, trading our labour (sometimes at uninspiring, dead-end jobs) to access the means of survival; inequality is becoming rife with material excess enjoyed by an elite few and austerity imposed on the vast majority. So what is the path to liberation from a system where financial globalisation, like the ego, is always an inauthentic agency, serving to disguise an unsettling absence of unity? How can we, individually and collectively, connect once more to a dignified livelihood built, defiantly, not on greed, but on meaningful creativity, the irresistible cornerstone of humanness?

Please see below for the full programme of topics and films to be analysed (advance viewing is optional; short scenes and video montages will be screened during weekly sessions):

Week 1 – AMBITION: Starry Eyes, Whiplash, Perfume, Suspiria, Nightcrawler

Week 2 – COMPETITION: Glengarry Glen Ross, Only Lovers Left Alive, September Issue, Wall Street, Crime D’Amour

Week 3 – LIVELIHOOD: Modern Times, Working Girl, Office Space, Pretty Woman, The Misfits

Week 4 – EXCESS: Dans Ma Peau, American Psycho, The Wolf of Wall Street, How to Get Ahead in Advertising, Margin Call

Week 5 – AUSTERITY: The Man Who Fell To Earth, Blue Jasmine, Dancer In the Dark, Compliance, Under The Skin

Week 6 – LIBERATION: Bonnie and Clyde, Brazil, Samsara, The Truman Show, Finding Vivian Maier

PROJECTIONS is psychoanalysis for film interpretation. PROJECTIONS empowers film spectators to express subjective associations they consider to be meaningful. Expertise in Freudian 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. MARY WILD, a Freudian cinephile from Montreal, is the creator of PROJECTIONS.

Book online here.

Studies on Hysteria - Anniversary Debate at The Freud Museum London

11 October 2015

Is Freud and Breuer’s Studies on Hysteria still relevant today?

This special event marks the 120th anniversary of the publication of Studies on Hysteria - first published in 1895. Written by Sigmund Freud and Joseph Breuer, it was the book that launched Freud's career and his subsequent theories of psychoanalysis. Freud’s work has been a major influence on the (psychological) model and treatment of Hysteria – now known in psychiatry as Conversion Disorder or Functional Neurological Symptom Disorder. This disorder is increasingly recognised as a common and highly disabling affliction for which there are few evidence-based treatments. Although Freud’s work – and the psychoanalytic model more broadly – have been increasingly challenged in recent years we are finding new evidence to support his theories, which are now being tested using the tools of modern neuroscience.

Images (from above)
The Lesson of Dr Charcot (detail) Lithographic print hanging above Freud's couch, after an original painting by Andre Brouillet depicting a clinical lesson on Hysteria. Freud attended such lessons during his training and was significantly influenced by Charcot.
Montogmery Clift and Susannah York in a scene from John Huston's film Freud: The Secret Passion (1962), showing Freud seated behind the patient for the first time.

This event is aimed at the general public and assumes no prior knowledge or training in psychology or psychiatry. It starts with an introductory lecture on Hysteria and a review of Freud and Breuer’s book. There will then be a debate by four international experts about whether Studies on Hysteria is still relevant to our understanding and treatment of the disorder today.

More info here.

The Effectivness of Symbols - Interdisciplinary Conference - 24 October 2015 - London

The Freud Museum London

Why do symbols have such a powerful influence on human beings?

This question lies at the heart of both psychoanalysis and anthropology. In his seminal paper on ‘The Effectiveness of Symbols’, the French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss compared the healing practices of shamans and psychoanalysts in terms of the structuring effects of symbol and language on the body.

Lévi-Strauss opened up new ways of thinking about the symbolic dimension of human life, offering a subtle reformulation of the Freudian unconscious and putting forward a theory of symbolic function that continues to resonate within both fields.

This conference brings together eminent speakers from the fields of psychoanalysis and anthropology to reflect on Lévi-Strauss’ paper and its influence, and to discuss symbolic effectiveness in their own research and practice.

SPEAKERS AND TITLES

Exclusion, Unsustainability and the Determinations of the Symbolic
Henrietta Moore (social anthropologist and Director of the Institute for Global Prosperity and Chair in Philosophy, Culture and Design at UCL)

Lévi-Strauss and the Poetics of the Unconscious
Boris Wiseman (Associate Professor, Department of English, Germanic and Romance Studies, University of Copenhagen)

Symbol and Symbolic Function
Darian Leader (psychoanalyst and author)

Therapeutic Emplotment in the Native American Church
Joseph Calabrese (medical anthropologist, UCL)

More info here.

Every piece of dust on Freud's couch - Broomberg & Chanarin - Freud Museum London

7 October 2015 - 22 November 2015

For Every piece of dust on Freud’s couch, commissioned by the Freud Museum, Broomberg & Chanarin hired a police forensic team to scrutinise Sigmund Freud’s iconic couch, gathering DNA samples, strands of hair and a multitude of dust particles left by his home’s many visitors. These may include traces of Freud’s early patients such as ‘Dora’, the ‘Wolf Man’ and others, as well as those of more mundane visitors, mainly tourists, who have travelled from around the world to visit this legendary item of furniture.

The couch itself was given to Freud by one of his patients, Madame Benvenisti in Vienna in about 1890, and the Persian Qashqa’i rug that covered it for its entire active duty is believed to have been given to him by his cousin Moritz Freud, a trader in antiquities. It has remained on the couch in London, where Freud spent his final years, ever since he fled to England to escape the Nazis. The rug was the primary focus of Broomberg & Chanarin’s forensic analysis. The thick pile is covered in invisible household dust, most of which is keratin, the main protein of skin. In addition to skin, analysis found the rug to be covered with hair and cloth fibres containing human DNA.

© the artists

The artists have transformed the forensic scientists’ findings – presented initially as a series of high-resolution radiographic quartz images – into large woven tapestries, that mirror the scale and texture of the original covering. The first in a series of these textile works is to be draped over the actual couch, replacing the rug with an abstracted portrait of one of its sitters. Broomberg & Chanarin’s exercise in forensics aspires to the language of science and, like psychoanalysis, it attempts something contradictory; the objective study of subjectivity. Just as Freud radically changed the way we think about history, memory and evidence – forever influencing the stories we tell ourselves about the past – the physical presences suggested by these collected samples alter not only the history and texture of this iconic expanse of woven material, but they colour the already charged and celebrated atmosphere of the room itself.

© the artists

An extension of this project, Every piece of dust on Freud’s couch, is on show as part of the eighth British Art Show (Leeds Art Gallery, 9 October – 10 January 2017, then touring to Edinburgh, Norwich and Southampton) and coincides with a solo exhibition entitled Rudiments at Lisson Gallery, 25 September – 30 October.

Adam Broomberg & Oliver Chanarin, Trace fiber from Freud's couch under crossed polars with Quartz wedge compensator (#1), 2015, unique jacquard woven tapestry, 2.9m x 2m

About the artists
Tackling politics, religion, war and history, Broomberg & Chanarin prise open the fault lines associated with such imagery, creating new responses and pathways towards an understanding of the human condition. Trained as photographers they now work across diverse media, reacting to the photojournalistic experience of being embedded with the British Army in Afghanistan (and the controlled access to frontline action therein) with an absurd, conceptual riposte, composed of a series of abstract, six-metre swathes of photographic paper exposed to the sun for 20 seconds, for the work The Day Nobody Died (2008). Through painstaking restitution of found objects or imagery, from the long-lost set and discarded footage of the film Catch-22 in Mexico, for example, Broomberg & Chanarin enact an archeology or exorcism of aesthetic and ideological constructs behind the accepted tropes of visual culture, laying bare its foundations for fresh interpretation.

Adam Broomberg (born 1970, Johannesburg, South Africa) and Oliver Chanarin (born 1971, London, UK) are artists living and working in London. Solo exhibitions include Centre for Contemporary Art Ujazdowski Castle, Warsaw (2015); Jumex Foundation, Mexico City (2014); FotoMuseum, Antwerp (2014); Mostyn, Llandudno, UK (2014); Townhouse, Cairo (2010) and the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam (2006). Their participation in international group shows has included: ‘Conflict, Time and Photography’ at Tate Modern (2015); Shanghai Biennale (2014) and Gwanju Biennale (2012). Major awards include the ICP’s Infinity Award (2014) and the Deutsche Börse Photography Prize (2013).

Attachment: Our Enduring Need For Others ~ 16 September 2015 - 4 October 2015

The Bowlby Centre, in collaboration with the Freud Museum London, are proud to present a unique exhibition on Attachment inspired by the life and work of John Bowlby, the founder of Attachment Theory.

John Bowlby with grandson, 1968

This intimate exhibition presents seldom-seen letters and photographs from the John Bowlby Archive at the Wellcome Library. The material has been thoughtfully curated to trace our understanding of the universal need for others across the lifespan and how this develops in a cultural and social context.

As John Bowlby wrote, “Intimate attachments to other human beings are the hub around which a person’s life revolves, not only when he is an infant or a toddler or a school-child but throughout his adolescence and his years of maturity as well, and on into old age.” (Bowlby, 1980)

Our attachment to others continues throughout our lives. Thus, we are born with the inherent capacity for making emotional bonds, becoming attached to those who care for us in our childhood. By having enough of our early attachment needs met, we are enabled to explore the world with confidence, trusting that we have a safe haven to return to when the going gets tough. We thereby learn what to expect in the way of behaviour from others, and likely consequences for how we feel, think and act.

This exhibition illustrates the lifelong relevance of attachment for all our close relationships, including how children, parents and elders are cared for and provided for:

• Discover how, with attachment principles at their core, organisations such as schools and hospitals can support their staff to provide caregiving relationships in creative ways.

• Explore how, despite loss and separation, our continuing capacity to learn, heal and grow is possible through long term loving relationships, including those offered by counsellors and psychotherapists.

• Reflect on how our lifelong need for others continually shapes our emotional life and wellbeing.

25th Anniversary Event - an international conference in celebration of John Bowlby's work

John Bowlby - Quotes 

The Man Who Closed the Asylums: Franco Basaglia & the Revolution in Mental Health Care - August 18, 2015

August 18, 2015

The Freud Museum

The Man Who Closed the Asylums: Franco Basaglia & the Revolution in Mental Health Care

John Foot will be talking about his new book on one of the key intellectual and cultural figures of 1960s counterculture

Writer and Professor of Modern Italian History, John Foot discusses his latest publication, The Man Who Closed the Asylums, the fascinating story of Franco Basaglia, one of the key intellectual and cultural figures of 1960s counterculture—a contemporary of R.D. Laing who worked to overturn institutions from within and ended up transforming mental health care in Italy.

Inspired by the writings of authors such as Primo Levi, R. D. Laing, Erving Goffman, Michel Foucault and Frantz Fanon, and the practices of experimental therapeutic communities in the UK, Basaglia’s seminal work as a psychiatrist and campaigner in Gorizia, Parma and Trieste fed into and substantially contributed to the national and international movement of 1968. In 1978 a law was passed (the ‘Basaglia law’) which sanctioned the closure of the entire Italian asylum system.

The first comprehensive study of this revolutionary approach to mental health care, The Man Who Closed the Asylums is a gripping account of one of the most influential movements in twentieth- century psychiatry, which helped to transform the way we see mental illness. Basaglia’s work saved countless people from a miserable existence, and his legacy persists, as an object lesson in the struggle against the brutality and ignorance that the establishment peddles to the public as common sense.

John Foot is Professor of Modern Italian History in the School of Modern Languages, University of Bristol. He has published several books on sports and contemporary Italian history. He writes a blog for the Italian magazine Internazionale and has written for the Guardian, the Independent on Sunday, the Times Literary Supplement, the London Review of Books, and History Today. He was Co-editor of the journal Modern Italy between 2010 and 2014.

The event will be chaired by Graham Music, a Consultant Child and Adolescent Psychotherapist at the Tavistock and Portman Clinics and an adult psychotherapist in private practice. His publications include Nurturing Natures, Attachment and Children's Emotional, Sociocultural and Brain Development (2011), Affect and Emotion (2001), and The Good Life: Wellbeing and the new science of altruism, selfishness and Immoralityl' (2014). He has a particular interest in exploring the interface between developmental findings and clinical work. Formerly Associate Clinical Director of the Tavstock's child and family department, he has worked therapeutically with maltreated children for over two decades, has managed a range of services concerned with the aftermath of child maltreatment and neglect and organised many community based psychotherapy services,. He has recently been working clinically with forensic cases at the Portman clinic. He teaches, lectures and supervises on a range of trainings in Britain and abroad.

- Tickets are £10/£7 members/concs and available from the Freud Museum on 020 7435 2002 or via email: eventsandmedia@freud.org.uk
 

Psychoanalytic Poetry Festival 2015 (London)

The Creative Unconscious

Saturday 19 September 2015, 10:00 am – 5:30 pm

Psychoanalytic Poetry Festival 2015

The Poetry Society and the Freud Museum present an all-day event examining the creative unconscious, with leading speakers from the worlds of poetry and psychoanalysis, including Nuar Alsadir, Gerry Byrne, Vahni Capildeo, Annie Freud, Kathryn Maris and Maurice Riordan.

The programme includes performances, talks and conversation on subjects including the unruly WB Yeats, New York Shcool poet Joe Brainard and the taming of interrupted dreams.

Tickets are £60/£45 students/concessions/members of The Poetry Society or Freud Museum.
Tickets are now available on the Freud Museum website.

There will also be a poetry workshop related to this event on 23 August, with Kathryn Maris.

Festival of the Unconscious - 24 June 2015 – 4 October 2015 (London)

The Unconscious Revisited at the Freud Museum London

The Freud Museum -Sigmund Freud’s final home- invites artists, designers, writers and performers to revisit Freud’s paper The Unconscious (1915) during The Festival of the Unconscious.

Animation still, students from Kingston University

Exciting things are happening at the Freud Museum London this summer. A century after Sigmund Freud’s revolutionary ideas reached a wider public, his final home, dedicated to preserving his legacy, has invited artists, designers, writers and performers to revisit Freud’s seminal paper The Unconscious (1915)

Using a combination of psychological games, scientific and historical information and engaging displays and workshops, The Festival of the Unconscious will encourage visitors to think and learn about the unconscious mind and how it influences our behaviour.

The Museum will become a strange and mysterious place, where writings, objects and artistic works will offer insights into unconscious experience. Newly commissioned films by animators from Kingston University will weave through the house; sound and video installations by London-based art project Disinformation will occupy the dining room, and an installation by stage designers from the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama, inspired by the work of cosmologist Carlos Frenk, will spectacularly transform Freud’s study. Visitors can contemplate their own unconscious associations through a personal display developed by Julian Rothenstein, co-author of the best-selling ‘Psychobox’. Finally there will be the unique opportunity of reclining and free-associating on a psychoanalytic couch, in Freud’s bedroom.

As part of the “Festival of the Unconscious” exhibition, the Freud Museum presents a sound and video installation titled “The Portrait of Jean Genet” by Disinformation. The installation is based on the final interview given by the French burglar, prostitute and playwright Jean Genet, shortly before his death.

Artistic contributions include The Dream Collector by Melanie Manchot, a 5-channel synched video and sound installation filmed in Mexico City - on view for the first time in the UK. Collaborative artists Brass Art present a video piece which uses Kinect scanners to capture intimate-scaled performances in the museum with sound composed by Monty Adkins. Other works include ‘the unconscious project’ by art therapists teaching on the MA Art Psychotherapy course at Goldsmiths, University of London, while Sarah Ainslie and Martin Bladh will display works offering modern takes on the ‘Thematic Apperception Test’ and the Rorschach ink blot test.

The Dream Collector, Melanie Manchot © the artist

A season of wide-ranging and imaginative events, conferences and workshops accompany the exhibition. Highlights include Digging the Unconscious, a participatory archaeological dig in Freud’s garden, with performance artist lili Spain on 9 August, and a major interdisciplinary conference with keynote speaker Mark Solms on 26/27 September. You can unlock your unconscious with workshops in drama, poetry and art, while Hip Hop poet Reveal will perform and talk about Freestyle Rap and its relation to unconscious communication.

After the exhibition is over, the Festival events still continue with a major conference jointly organised with the British Journal of Psychotherapy. Mentalization and the Unconscious will take place on 28th November, with keynote speakers Nicola Abel-Hirsch, Catherine Freeman, Jean Knox, and Mary Target. Co-organiser and chair for the day is BJP editor, Ann Scott.

Have you ever done something without knowing why?

Despite the fact that the term is now associated with Freud, the existence of unconscious processes in the mind was recognised long before him. What Freud introduced was the revolutionary notion of a dynamic unconscious, working in a different way from consciousness, with its own kind of logic. He posited a part of the mind in which ideas associated with ‘wishful impulses’, childhood experiences and unacceptable thoughts are hidden from conscious awareness but continue to motivate our behaviour. Starting with his own dreams, he went on to show that the unconscious reveals itself not only in the unexplained symptoms of ‘mental illness’ but in countless manifestations of everyday life.

We laugh at a joke, but we don’t know why. A slip of the tongue reveals an embarrassing thought or a hidden intention. Thoughts come into our head, but where do they come from? We repeat patterns of self-destructive behaviour or plague ourselves with irrational fears. It is as if everything we do or say has a hidden dimension, a sub-text. The discovery of the unconscious means that we are no longer ‘masters in our own house’ – we literally do not know who we are.

In 1915, Freud wrote his paper on The Unconscious, which was an attempt to give scientific account of how the unconscious works. It is not an entirely successful paper, grappling as he is with the ‘unknown’. He makes hypotheses, modifies them, tries again. Freud often finds himself in the position of a cosmologist, trying to give an account of what is in a black hole, or what ‘cold dark matter’ is composed of. They just don’t know. But they know dark matter and black holes exist, obey their own laws and affect the galaxies in which they find themselves.

Freud’s metapsychology may not have the same impact as his captivating case histories or his books on dreams, jokes, and slips of the tongue, but his 1915 paper established ‘the unconscious’ as the principal object of psychoanalysis and the key term of its theory.

The Festival of the Unconscious invites visitors to explore Freud’s challenging idea through talks, performances and a major exhibition. As befits such an elusive concept, most of the works on display are not designed to transmit knowledge, but to evoke something of the visitor’s own unconscious. By engaging with them, we hope visitors may catch a glimpse of a world that is both strange and familiar.

Festival of the Unconscious
24 June 2015 – 4 October 2015

The Freud Museum
20 Maresfield Gardens
London NW3 5SX