Freud/Lynch: Behind the Curtain

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The hysterical subject is an essential figure in Lynchian cinema. With an art historical lens, this paper will explore how hysteria has returned time and time again throughout Lynch’s oeuvre by looking at a few important characters, from The Alphabet (1968), to Blue Velvet (1986), to Twin Peaks (1990-2017). 5. Catherine Spooner Lynch, who once told an interviewer “I love dream logic,” would surely agree with Sigmund Freud’s famous claim that “before the problem of the creative artist, psychoanalysis must lay down its arms.” But what else do the two agree on? 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. At the age of six I decided to be a painter. I graduated in Fine Art (Painting) in 1974 from Bristol Polytechnic, and then from Goldsmiths College in 1976 with a Post Graduate Art Teaching Degree. Having become bored with painting, horrified by teaching, but completely obsessed with the movies, I began programming independent cinemas in 1977, and was Co-Director of Cinema at the ICA in London from 1979 – 1984.

With contributions from scholars, psychoanalysts, cinephiles, and filmmakers, this collection of essays explores potential affinities and disjunctions between Lynch and Freud. Encompassing themes such as art, identity, architecture, fantasy, dreams, hysteria and the unconscious, Freud/Lynch takes as its point of departure the possibility that the enterprise in which these two distinct investigators are engaged might in some sense be a shared one. 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.With contributions from scholars, psychoanalysts, cinephiles and filmmakers, this collection of essays explores potential affinities and disjunctions between Lynch and Freud. Encompassing themes such as art, identity, architecture, fantasy, dreams, hysteria and the unconscious, Freud/Lynch takes as its point of departure the possibility that the enterprise in which these two distinct investigators are engaged might in some sense be a shared one. Rob Weatherill’s Lacan in the End Times: In the Name of the Absent Father has also just been published by Routledge. Theorising psychoanalytically the role and function of the father in contemporary society, Weatherill notes the effect of its absence in “the ferocity of the internal object and exposure to the Real.” A wide-ranging commentary on the paternal function, his book crosses the ethics of Levinas and the Gnostic assertion of an evil world with the death drive in the contemporary Lacanian clinic. Cox Cameron finds in Lynch’s 2001 masterpiece Mulholland Drive a text replete with the mechanisms of the dream-work identified in Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams. Yet if Mulholland Drive lends itself to Freudian dream-logic, it also invites us, with Lacan, to pose a series of questions on the relationship between the unconscious cipher and the magnetising power of trauma. Here, they discuss the Freud Museum London conference which inspired their debut book, Freud/Lynch: Behind the Curtain , an edited collection which explores potential affinities and disjunctions between Lynch and Freud. 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

With contributions from scholars, psychoanalysts, cinephiles and filmmakers, this collection of essays explores potential affinities and disjunctions between Lynch and Freud. Encompassing themes such as art, identity, architecture, fantasy, dreams, hysteria and the unconscious, ‘Freud/Lynch’ takes as its point of departure the possibility that the enterprise in which these two distinct investigators are engaged might in some sense be a shared one. The book was derived from a conference of the same name held in May 2018 for the Freud Museum London. It was an exciting event held at the Rio Cinema, an independent movie theatre in Dalston, East London. In the cinema’s main auditorium hangs grand red velvet curtains on the stage where the speakers presented their papers. The curtains were the perfect motif that connected our two subjects: David Lynch uses red – and blue – velvet curtains that line otherworldly settings in Blue Velvet (1986), Twin Peaks (1990–1991), and Mulholland Drive (2001). Similarly, Sigmund Freud also has red velvet curtains which adorn his famous psychoanalytic study in his home, now the Freud Museum. This motif functions as a separation between reality and fantasy spaces, or spaces to explore the unconscious, which begs the question: what lies ‘behind the curtain’? Jamie Ruers is an Art Historian and a Researcher at the Freud Museum London. She has written and given talks on art history and psychoanalysis on subjects including Viennese Modernism and the French Surrealists. Beginning with the latest books, Reading Architecture with Freud and Lacan: Shadowing the Public Realm by Lorens Holm is an intriguing work newly-released by Routledge. Modern and post-modern architects are engaged from a Lacanian perspective for the purposes of “putting the unconscious in a dialectic relation to space.” Starting from our attachment to places, Holm develops a critique of contemporary approaches to architecture, highlighting the environmental damage done by what he argues is an inability to recognise the death drive. “The text is an extended thesis”, Holm writes, “that the field of the Other is the common grammar that organises subjects into civilisations, which has consequences for how we treat the public realm in architecture, politics, and the city.”

The films of David Lynch are sometimes said to be unintelligible.

Dr. Olga Cox Cameron has been a psychoanalyst in private practice and a university lecturer in psychoanalysis and literature in Dublin for the past 30 years. She is the founder of the Psychoanalytic Film Festival now embarked on its 10th year. 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 Lynch, who once told an interviewer ‘I love dream logic’ would surely agree with Sigmund Freud’s famous claim that ‘before the problem of the creative artist, psychoanalysis must lay down its arms’. But what else might the two agree on? 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. From last month’s events, Darian Leader’s talk ‘What is sex?’ is now available on YouTube, courtesy of Derek Hook and his excellent YouTube channel. This was the first in a series of pre-conference talks ahead of the Lacan: Clinic and Culture Conference which took place in Pittsburgh earlier this month. Leader’s talk explores questions of sexual practice, and how these are shaped by childhood interests and anxieties. After the early work of second wave feminist thought challenged many popular psychoanalytic dogmas, have we made much progress today in thinking about sexuality, apart from endlessly repeating a few cliches and fetishising some loopy mathemes?