Freud/Lynch: Behind the Curtain

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Psychoanalysis: a theory of the mind and form of intensive long-term therapy (usually 4–5 times weekly for several years), which focuses on the role of the unconscious mind in human behaviour and psychological distress. The visit concluded with a highly educational session on Freud's theories on dreams. Using his wealth of knowledge and opinions about Freud's ideas, our guide skilfully led discussions exploring Freud's interpretation of dreams as a window into the unconscious mind. I think if we work at the Freud Museum, we should take Freud’s example as a touchstone and use our own lives as part of the data of analytic investigation and dissemination. So yes, it is a nod to Freud and the early Freudians, but also a conviction that Freud’s ideas are about everyone. I think that’s a great expression –‘how psychoanalytic ideas can illuminate a life’. Ours as well as ‘other people’s’.

Freud’s ideas continue to inspire empirical research in many areas. One such area is neuroscience, where there is now an interdisciplinary field called neuro-psychoanalysis. Neuroscientist and psychoanalyst Mark Solms suggests that psychoanalysis currently provides the best conceptual starting point for understanding subjective experience scientifically. Solms has, for example, provided some intriguing support for Freud’s idea of dreaming as wish fulfilment by isolating neural mechanisms that are closely involved with dreaming (Solms 2000). David Lynch is primarily known as a filmmaker whose singular cinematic/televisual creations have held audiences both spellbound and perplexed over several decades. 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. In this paper I will suggest that Lynch’s work, in whatever medium, is best understood as that of a visual (and sonic) artist. 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. 10. Chris Rodley

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. Psychoanalytic ‘objects’ are of course about relationships. Objects are usually persons, parts of persons, or symbols of them. This project – a week’s residency and a week’s response time – culminates in this online exhibition of the work by 18 postgraduate artists studying MA Sculpture. In it we consider objects in the widest interdisciplinary use of the term. STEFAN MARIANSKI is Education Manager at the Freud Museum London, where he works to engage young people with psychoanalytic thought. He has organised a number of events and conferences on psychoanalytic themes, and has written and lectured on dreams, sexuality, anthropology, surrealism, and masculinity. He is a manager with the Psychosis Therapy Project and a trainee at the Centre for Freudian Analysis and Research.

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.Jamie has given talks on Viennese modernism and the Surrealists at the Freud Museum London, the Austrian Cultural Forum, and is featured on documentaries such as Art & Mind. She has published articles and essays on psychoanalysis, philosophy, and art in The Art Newspaper, various Freud Museum publications, and artist monographs. This is her first edited book with hopefully many more to come. If you’re in/near London, you don’t want to miss the book launch event of ‘Freud/Lynch: Behind the Curtain’ on Friday 24 February 2023 at the Freud Museum. During your tenure, the Museum has held a great many thought-provoking and artistic exhibitions. Do any highlights spring to mind? Freud and Lynch are predestined to meet. Only through Freud can we discern in Lynch's films an authentic effort of thought, not just a postmodern confusion. And only through Lynch's films can we see how relevant Freud's theory remains for grasping the crazy predicament we live in. Freud/Lynch is thus a collection of essays which was predestined to be written."

The brilliant contributors include directors, cinephiles, philosophers, art and cultural historians, as well as psychoanalysts. The papers cover themes such as dream logic, language, fantasy, identity, art, architecture, hysteria, perversion, and what the term “Lynchian” means culturally and clinically. Each paper is so rich in their handling of the Freud/Lynch dichotomy that we’re delighted Phoenix published a legacy of this project.Please note that this is not a dream interpretation workshop. Participants will not be able to discuss their own dreams. Juliet Rosenfeld is a psychoanalytic psychotherapist and writer who works in London. She has a special clinical interest in both grief and love (as the two are often so profoundly entwined) and working with those who have suffered bereavement, recently or in the past. Juliet read languages at Oxford before a ten year career in advertising and marketing, ending up in the Civil Service. Juliet qualified in 2012 as an integrative psychotherapist but is passionate about psychoanalysis and specifically how its ideas can be useful and applied to bigger audiences. Juliet is also an elected Board Member of the UKCP ( United Kingdom Council Of Psychotherapy) which represents 12,000 psychotherapists, and takes a keen interest in how any talking therapy can become more usual, and available to anyone who might benefit from it. She is currently working on her second book and has written for a number of national publications on relationships, grief and psychotherapy. Anthony J Spiro OBE JP 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’? Also providing invaluable insight for the artists during the project has been the expertise of the staff. Their granular knowledge of Freud’s life, his psychoanalytic theories, his objects and the house that he lived and worked in along with his analyst daughter Anna Freud have provided and enriched discussions.