Freud/Lynch: Behind the Curtain

Product Information

By exploring these questions, the reader can begin to peer behind the Lynchian curtain and will, most likely, see quite a bit more than they might have expected to. These include award-winning films on Andy Warhol and Johnny Cash, as well as the series ‘The Genius of Photography’ and ‘This is Modern Art’.

Conferences - Freud Museum London

The book was derived from a conference of the same name held in May 2018 for the Freud Museum London. In the intervening 35 years I have produced and/or directed over 80 arts documentaries for television and contributed to over a dozen documentary series. Why does he invite us into his own dreamscapes and then leave us to figure our own way out, with just a liberal scattering of clues to help?

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. Freud/Lynch: Behind the Curtain takes as its point of departure that Lynch’s work is not so much unintelligible as ‘ uncanny,’ revealing what Todd McGowan has termed “the bizarre nature of normality” – and the everydayness of what we take to be strange. 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). Filled with sickly rooms, dark corridors and oppressive small towns, David Lynch’s work often generates feelings of claustrophobia and confinement.

Freud/Lynch: Behind the Curtain by Jamie Ruers | Goodreads

As such, the perceived lacunae or unintelligibility in it may be understood or “experienced” in other ways and, further, that psychoanalysis may help to bring to light various aspects of his work which have hitherto been less explored than others. Her interests include cinematic representations of identity, femininity, the unconscious, love and mental illness. But there’s another way his worlds operate – they escape and exceed the usual boundaries, they spill out in unexpected directions at uneven speeds. 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. He is also a member of the Psychosis Therapy Project, which provides low-cost psychoanalytic psychotherapy for people experiencing psychosis.

Maybe it was for this reason that the event was so well attended: it was a cathartic space for us all to digest what had happened the year before; or maybe it was a space to relive it, and work through the trauma together. You can watch the video straight from our page once you’ve paid or log in to your Vimeo account, where you can find all the videos that you have rented. Mulholland Drive proves surprisingly amenable to the dream logic explored by Freud in The Interpretation of Dreams, so let’s see where it takes us. And only through Lynch's films can we see how relevant Freud's theory remains for grasping the crazy predicament we live in.