Freud/Lynch: Behind the Curtain

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As an A-level student I was interested in Laing and the anti-psychiatry movement, so I knew all the criticisms of Freud before I had read anything he’d written – much like many of the students who come to the museum today. The turning point was reading The Interpretation of Dreams during my second year at university. I felt an immediate affinity with Freud’s way of thinking, it was like ‘coming home’. I’d studied Physics, Zoology and English Literature at A-level and all these influences were there in the way Freud constructed his extraordinary theory. From 1st July 2021, VAT will be applicable to those EU countries where VAT is applied to books - this additional charge will be collected by Fed Ex (or the Royal Mail) at the time of delivery. Shipments to the USA & Canada:

Psychology places great emphasis on its status as a science. Broadly speaking, scientists seek objectivity and evidence. The mid-twentieth-century philosopher Karl Popper suggested that a good scientific theory should be both testable and falsifiable, and he famously dismissed psychoanalysis as a body of unfalsifiable theories. However, claims that psychoanalysis is unfalsifiable tend to overlook the crucial difference between an idea that is untestable and one that is simply hard to test. Many of Freud’s ideas (such as the Oedipus complex) are very complex and therefore methodologically difficult to study, especially experimentally. This is actually very similar to the situation in physics, where experimental physicists cannot directly test the propositions of theoretical physics, yet physics remains at the top of the ‘scientificness’ hierarchy. When you rent one of our On Demand events, you will be able to watch it right away and stream the video anytime during the specified rental period. 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’? This fascinating and horrifying Billy Penn/WHYY reporting out of Philadelphia about how a 22-year-old grad student with no health care experience somehow ended up running the city’s vaccine program. Cut to accounts of 85-year-olds weeping in line over canceled appointments and the student eventually scooping up “leftover” vaccine to take to his buddies . Certainly this Fyre Festivalesque fiasco is in part about a mystifying decision by the city, but it’s also about what happens when the federal government decides that vaccine distribution is simply not its problem.

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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. And on a lighter note… You are on a desert island, that fortunately has a power supply but no internet connection, and you are only allowed to have one of the following with you: your Kindle with Freud’s complete works, or your mp3 player containing Wagner’s complete works (versions of your choice). Which would you choose? The conference was attended by 400 people, coming from all over the world. There was such an appetite for discussion, sharing ideas, and finding reason in David Lynch’s cinematic oeuvre, which are known for their seemingly nonsensical narratives, non-linear storylines, absurd characters, and mystical spaces. In his more than thirty years here, Ivan set up the Museum’s innovative education service (shortlisted for a Gulbenkian Award in Education in 1991), and the highly respected and extensive conference programme. He also contributed to the exhibition programme. Ivan has written widely on psychoanalysis, and edited the series Ideas in Psychoanalysis. A conference honouring Ivan’s contribution to the Museum is being planned, and he will no doubt remain closely associated with the Freud Museum. Meanwhile, he just needs to sort out thirty years of accumulated books and papers from his desk, and a very fine collection of early computers…

Many of Freud’s original theories were impossible to verify at a larger scale at the time. While for some of them the jury is still out, many have gained empirical support. For example, we have already seen that dreaming is linked to wish fulfilment on a neurological level and that psychoanalytic therapies provide effective treatment for various mental health conditions (an empirical test of their value). 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? 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. The success of the psychodynamic approach raises some uncomfortable questions for the prevailing medical model of serious mental illnesses such as schizophrenia. The medical model sees schizophrenia as an illness to be cured, whereas from a psychodynamic approach it is thought about more as a way of being in the world: if you take away the schizophrenia, you take away the person too. Where the medical model assumes that the schizophrenic patient has lost touch with reality, the assumption in psychoanalytic theory is that everyone’s experience of reality is distorted by past experience and the unconscious, which means that it would be a mistake to assume that there is some unproblematic standpoint from which ‘normal’ people can assess reality.Psychoanalytic therapy: a less intensive therapy (usually 1–3 times weekly for 1–3 years) with similar aims and techniques. My lunch has changed dramatically over the years, but the wheels turn slowly. Sadly, Freud offers few insights into the phenomenon: ‘We come across people, for instance, to whom we should be inclined to attribute a special ‘adhesiveness of the libido’… They cannot make up their minds to detach libidinal cathexes from one object and displace them on to another, although we can discover no special reason for this cathectic loyalty.’ (‘Analysis Terminable and Interminable’ 1937).