Freud/Lynch: Behind the Curtain

Product Information

This conference invites psychoanalysts, scholars and cinephiles to reflect on these Lynchian enigmas. What do we mean by ‘Lynchian’? Beyond the apparent incoherence of his films, are there hidden logics at play? Are Lynch and Freud in alignment? And what light can psychoanalysis shed on the Lynchian uncanny? Programme Saturday 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. 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. 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." Costume plays an important but under-recognised part in Lynch’s aesthetic. This talk will explore the distinctive contribution costume makes to Lynch’s oeuvre with a particular focus on Twin Peaks, showing how for Lynch, costume is more than just character and relates to his ongoing fascination with the curtain or veil. It will also playfully examine the influence Lynch’s work has had on fashion. 6. Jaice Sara Titus

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. 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. Andrea Sabbadini is a Fellow of the British Psychoanalytical Society and its former Director of Publications. 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. His most recent books are Boundaries and Bridges: Perspectives on Time and Space in Psychoanalysis (Karnac 2014) and Moving Images: Psychoanalytic Reflections on Film (Routledge 2014). Jamie Ruers is an art historian specialising in art and culture from Vienna 1900 and Surrealist art and film. She is a researcher and the events manager at the Freud Museum London. Stefan Marianski is the education manager at the Freud Museum London. He is also a member of the Psychosis Therapy Project, which provides low-cost psychoanalytic psychotherapy for people experiencing psychosis. If you're coming to Coles by car, why not take advantage of the 2 hours free parking at Sainsbury's Pioneer Square - just follow the signs for Pioneer Square as you drive into Bicester and park in the multi-storey car park above the supermarket. Come down the travelators, exit Sainsbury's, turn right and follow the pedestrianised walkway to Crown Walk and turn right - and Coles will be right in front of you. You don't need to shop in Sainsbury's to get the free parking! Where to Find UsAnother stark and important contrast between these characters is established in the two major sex scenes of the movie, one with Fred and his wife Renee, and one with Pete and Renee's double, Alice. Lynch makes it very simple for the viewer by making the setup the same, in terms of how much foreplay occurs, and the position for sex. But then he breaks from the similarities and one observes that Fred's sex scene is very unemotional, and even fairly unattractive. He stares into his wife's eyes, looking for emotion and meaning, but her facial expression is flat and unresponsive. Pete and Alice, on the contrary, are much more passionate. Alice is as excited as Pete is and they both seem very satisfied at the end. This use of similarity makes the composition of the two characters readily apparent, while the contrasts in the situations give the viewer an indication of what Fred's life is like, and how he wishes it would be. And at this point the viewer now has prime examples of both types of wishes (according to Freud): erotic and ambitious. In fact, the jobs and sex lives of these two characters are given so much attention in the movie that it wouldn't be at all overreaching to observe that Lynch could have written the story with Freud's "Creative Writers and Day-Dreaming" as its singular foundation.

An introductory understanding of Fred Madison's mind should be clear at this point. While the movie presents many more images that could be examined for further meaning, there just isn't enough space in the confines of this essay to do a complete character study. What is clear is that Fred's mind has tended toward fantasy as a coping mechanism for the troubles in his life, and that each component of his psyche - id, ego, and superego - are each equally at work creating an illusory universe where he can work out these troubles by venting his frustration. Ultimately, however, this fantastical diversion seems to have done little good. Fred's superego does a remarkable job of keeping him relatively close to reality, letting him know that he's taking his fantasy too far. In the end he may feel as though he has exorcised many of his demons, but the closing shots of the film suggest otherwise. Perhaps near the end, after the fantasy has dissolved, he begins to realize that the anger he feels so deeply does not in fact originate with his wife, but with himself. Much of his paranoia seems unfounded, and in the early, reality portion of the film the viewer finds little reason to suspect that Renee is cheating on him. His inclination to fabricate the ending of her story about the job she was offered by the man at Moke's seems indicative of a mind bent on expecting the worst, and then worrying about it endlessly.Movement, Velocity, and Rhythm from a Psychoanalytic Perspective is a new collection out at the end of October, edited by Jessica Datema and Angie Voela. It examines how rituals of the body – varied in speed and rhythm – produce effects on the experience of subjectivity more widely. Rather than focus solely on the clinical, this collection combines psychoanalysis with art, philosophy, and popular culture to consider the place of ritualistic, embodied alternatives to the frenetic pace of modern life. 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. 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? The wonderful (but strange!) filmic worlds of David Lynch lend themselves surprisingly well to Freudo-Lacanian thinking. In this special LiS event, Olga Cox Cameron will be presenting her contribution to a new collection of essays, Freud/Lynch: Behind the Curtain. 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).

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 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’? 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. This conference invites psychoanalysts, scholars and cinephiles to reflect on these Lynchian enigmas. What do we mean by ‘Lynchian’? Beyond the apparent incoherence of his films, are there hidden logics at play? Are Lynch and Freud in alignment? And what light can psychoanalysis shed on the Lynchian uncanny? Costume plays an important but under-recognised part in Lynch’s aesthetic. This talk will explore the distinctive contribution costume makes to Lynch’s oeuvre with a particular focus on Twin Peaks, showing how for Lynch, costume is more than just character and relates to his ongoing fascination with the curtain or veil. It will also playfully examine the influence Lynch’s work has had on fashion.

Freud/Lynch: Behind the Curtain

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.