Drawn from a major Freud Museum London conference, Freud/Lynch goes against the dubious cliche of finding Freudian solutions to Lynchian mysteries. In 1996 we began working on the book Lynch on Lynch, which was published in 1997 and has since been updated. The central premise of this talk is that in each instalment of the trilogy, a psychogenic fugue follows the unconscious trauma of unrequited love. Yet he initially trained as a fine artist and has continued to work as such throughout his life, using a wide variety of media to express his unique artistic vision across various fields. Her interests include cinematic representations of identity, femininity, the unconscious, love and mental illness.

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

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. In this talk I would like to take a look at some of the remarkable parallels between David Lynch’s masterpiece and Lacanian psychoanalysis. Her project particularly explores how the structure of desire and jouissance are embedded in the dimension of play, freedom and laughter. And sprawl has a bad reputation: it’s undisciplined and ungainly, it occupies time and space with ugly, disorganized forms. 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’.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). The brilliant contributors include directors, cinephiles, philosophers, art and cultural historians, as well as psychoanalysts. Only through Freud can we discern in Lynch's films an authentic effort of thought, not just a postmodern confusion. 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. 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 - Karnac Books Freud/Lynch: Behind the Curtain by Jamie Ruers - Karnac Books

He is the author of The Film Paintings of David Lynch: Challenging Film Theory (Intellect, 2010), in addition to which he has published on landscapes in Lynch’s work in relation to the legacy of the sublime in North American art, and on pop music and loss in Mulholland Drive. 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. As the cinema foyer filled with the aromas of damn fine coffee, the animated discussions whirled before spilling out on to the street, so that passers-by catching a few fragments of conversation about the mysteries of Lumberton, the sinister underbelly of Twin Peaks, or the depravity of Bobby Peru could be forgiven for surmising that it was a convention of detectives (or perverts). And only through Lynch’s films can we see how relevant Freud’s theory remains for grasping the crazy predicament we live in.

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. 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.

Freud/Lynch: Behind the Curtain - Freud Museum London Freud/Lynch: Behind the Curtain - Freud Museum London

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.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. He completed his PhD at the London Consortium, and has also taught at Birkbeck, University of London, and Middlesex University. Rather than presuming to fill in what Lynch leaves open by positing some forbidden psychosexual reality lurking behind his trademark red curtains, this book instead maintains a fidelity to the mysteries of his wonderful and strange filmic worlds, finding in them productive spaces where thought and imagination can be set to work. In this paper I will suggest that Lynch’s work, in whatever medium, is best understood as that of a visual (and sonic) artist.

Freud/Lynch: Behind the Curtain - ed. by Jamie Ruers and

David Lynch is known for creating luxurious cinematic dreamscapes – infuriatingly beautiful mind puzzles in his signature surrealistic style. 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. I first worked with David Lynch in 1993 while making a documentary about American independent cinema. 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.

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. He works in private practice in London, is an Honorary Senior Lecturer at University College London (UCL), a Consultant to the IPA in Culture Committee, the Founder Editor of the journal Psychoanalysis and History, the Director of the European Psychoanalytic Film Festival (epff) and a former trustee of the Freud Museum. Stefan Marianski is Education Manager at the Freud Museum London, where he works with young people to engage them with psychoanalytic thought. 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. The paper will trace how humour plays an important role in the recollection of trauma and what it means to be stuck in a joke-fantasy while trying to claim one’s place in the world.