Freud/Lynch: Behind the Curtain

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In his more than thirty years here, Ivan set up the Museum’s innovative education service (shortlisted for a Gulbenkian Award in Education in 1991), and the highly respected and extensive conference programme. He also contributed to the exhibition programme. Ivan has written widely on psychoanalysis, and edited the series Ideas in Psychoanalysis. A conference honouring Ivan’s contribution to the Museum is being planned, and he will no doubt remain closely associated with the Freud Museum. Meanwhile, he just needs to sort out thirty years of accumulated books and papers from his desk, and a very fine collection of early computers… 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 And on a lighter note… You are on a desert island, that fortunately has a power supply but no internet connection, and you are only allowed to have one of the following with you: your Kindle with Freud’s complete works, or your mp3 player containing Wagner’s complete works (versions of your choice). Which would you choose? From 1st July 2021, VAT will be applicable to those EU countries where VAT is applied to books - this additional charge will be collected by Fed Ex (or the Royal Mail) at the time of delivery. Shipments to the USA & Canada: 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.

Psychology places great emphasis on its status as a science. Broadly speaking, scientists seek objectivity and evidence. The mid-twentieth-century philosopher Karl Popper suggested that a good scientific theory should be both testable and falsifiable, and he famously dismissed psychoanalysis as a body of unfalsifiable theories. However, claims that psychoanalysis is unfalsifiable tend to overlook the crucial difference between an idea that is untestable and one that is simply hard to test. Many of Freud’s ideas (such as the Oedipus complex) are very complex and therefore methodologically difficult to study, especially experimentally. This is actually very similar to the situation in physics, where experimental physicists cannot directly test the propositions of theoretical physics, yet physics remains at the top of the ‘scientificness’ hierarchy. He also produced an independent report for the UK Labour Government on welfare to work in 2007, called Reducing Dependency, Increasing Opportunity. This led to a job as Conservative Minister for Welfare Reform (2010-16), where he worked to reshape the British welfare system. In particular he was involved in creating and shaping Universal Credit, to break the poverty and welfare traps.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. Our pandemic dreams are anxious, funny, frightened, hopeful. Distinct themes emerge. Many people dream about contracting Covid themselves: “I had a dream I was desperately trying not to get Covid from the MyPillow guy,” one writes. Others dream of feeling hemmed into dangerous crowded spaces. Still others describe sunny fantasies from a world before (or after) the virus—pubs, shows, airplanes, vacations, “no covid just vibes.”

This talk will explore some common misconceptions about symbolism, and discuss aspects of the formation of symbols and the establishment of the symbolic function.We learnt how Freud likened the mind to archaeology, ‘retrieving memories out of sedimented depths and incorporating these memories into the present’. I thought this was a good summary of his controversial approach. We also gained a great insight into Freud’s personal life, such as how he was forced out of Vienna due to the Nazis taking over Austria. I found learning about Freud’s daughter, Anna, the most interesting part of the trip. Her work contributed greatly to current understanding of child psychology. Anna Freud’s approach was mainly directed towards putting ourselves in a child’s skin to understand their thoughts and feelings and the issues they are going through so that they can be treated on a more personal level. The Freud Museum served as a platform for self-reflection, reminding us of the complexities of the human mind and the ongoing journey of discovery in the field of psychology. Students Francesca and Niamh were keen to share their perspectives: What is the point of documenting these dreams, or sharing them with other people? Deirdre Barrett, an assistant professor of psychology at Harvard Medical School who edits the journal Dreaming and published a special portfolio of Covid dreams research this fall, said in a statement that tuning into your Covid dreams can be revealing and potentially cathartic: “Your dreams can make you more aware of just what about the pandemic is bothering you the most,” she said. And talking about them with others can help you understand how many of these concerns and sorrows we share.