This week Tom discusses Freud’s lifelong fascination with archaeology and the ancient world with Professor Miriam Leonard (UCL), one of the curators of our current exhibition, 'Freud's Antiquity: Object, Idea, Desire ..read more

This week Tom and Jamie discuss Freud's ‘Constructions in Analysis’ (1937). This was his final completed paper on psychoanalytic technique, in which he compares psychoanalysis to archaeology. This episode is an exploration of the ideas in our current exhibition, 'Freud's Antiquity: Object, Idea, Desire ..read more

To help usher in the autumn season, Tom and Jamie discuss Freud’s beautiful short paper ‘On Transience’ (1916) in the final episode of the Freud in Focus, Summer Shorts series. Producer: Karolina Heller ..read more

In this episode of Freud in Focus, Summer Shorts, Jamie and Tom discuss Freud’s 1927 paper entitled ‘Humour’.  Producer: Karolina Heller ..read more

In our new series of Freud in Focus, entitled Summer Shorts, Jamie and Tom will be discussing some of Freud's shorter, lighter papers. The first text under the microscope is 'Creative Writers and Daydreaming' (1908).  Producer: Karolina Heller ..read more

This paper explores Freud and Dalí’s rather different ideas about censorship. Starting with their comically perplexing meeting, it will also look at the myth of the ‘crazy artist’ in the context of Freud’s ideas about the unconscious and narcissism ..read more

Lisa Appignanesi discusses her new book, Everyday Madness: on Grief, Anger, Loss and Love (September 2018) with Adam Phillips. ‘The small translucent bottle of shampoo outlived him. It was the kind you take home from hotels in distant places. For over a year it had sat on the shower shelf where he had left it. I looked at it every day.” After the death of her partner of thirty-two years, Lisa Appignanesi was thrust into a state striated by rage and superstition in which sanity felt elusive. The dead of prior generations loomed large and haunting. Then, too, the cultural and political moment se ..read more

Joanna Ryan in discussion with Barry Watt What does psychoanalysis have to say about the emotional landscapes of class, the hidden injuries and disavowed privileges? How does class figure in clinical work and what part does it play in psychotherapeutic trainings? In these times of increasing inequality, Joanna Ryan will discuss aspects of her timely new book Class and Psychoanalysis: Landscapes of Inequality, exploring what can be learned about the psychic formations of class, and the class formations of psychoanalysis. Addressing some of the many challenges facing a psychoanalysis that aims ..read more

In The Not-Two, Lorenzo Chiesa examines the treatment of logic and God in Lacan’s later work. Chiesa draws for the most part from Lacan’s Seminars of the early 1970s, as they revolve around the axiom "There is no sexual relationship." Chiesa provides both a close reading of Lacan’s effort to formalize sexual difference as incompleteness and an assessment of its broader implications for philosophical realism and materialism. Chiesa argues that "There is no sexual relationship" is for Lacan empirically and historically circumscribed by psychoanalysis, yet self-evident in our everyday lives ..read more

In his latest publication In Writing acclaimed psychoanalyst and writer, Adam Phillips celebrates the art of close reading and asks what it is to defend literature in a world that is increasingly devaluing language in this enjoyable collection of essays on literature. Through an exhilarating series of encounters with – and vivid readings of – writers he has loved, from Byron and Barthes to Shakespeare and Sebald, Phillips infuses the love of writing with deep insights drawn from his work as a practicing psychoanalyst to demonstrate, in his own unique style, how literature and psychoanaly ..read more