Pleasuring Freud

30th November – 5th December 2020

2020 marked 100 years since the publication of Sigmund Freud’s landmark text Beyond the Pleasure Principle. The publication of this work marked a significant moment in his theoretical development, it is within these pages that Freud formulated the dialectic between Eros and Thanatos within the human psyche.

Glasgow School of Art and The Drouth marked the occasion with a week-long online programme which will reached its climax on Saturday 5th December with an online symposium.

Throughout the week, we published, hosted and curated creative and critical gestures which respond to Beyond the Pleasure Principle and its afterlives, from the vantage point of our contemporary moment. This body of the work was published by The Drouth as part of our week-long séance with the legacy of Freud and this significant text.

Our scope was open and polymorphous and as we were embracing academic, theoretical, critical, artistic and creative reflections, reassessments, contestations and comments in textual, visual and multimedia form. As a publication which takes the interrogation of thought and culture seriously, the aim was always to encourage the expression of ideas which transgress the boundaries of discipline, form and convention.
25th November 2020

Pleasuring Freud – The event on video

The video in four parts of the whole symposium held on 5th December 2020 with out four speakers : Pippa Goldschmidt, Laura Gonzalez, Isabel Millar and Lorens Holm. Recorded on zoom and uploaded to youtube..
28th November 2020

Beyond the Pleasure Principle – The Text

The publication of Freud’s Beyond the Pleasure Principle seemed to represent a sinister turn from his views of mental processes as dominated by the Pleasure Principle to the overall domination of the Death Drive.
30th November 2020

Pleasuring Freud – A week long festival of talks, films, texts and discussions

2020 marks 100 years since the publication of Sigmund Freud’s landmark text Beyond the Pleasure Principle.The publication of this work marked a significant moment in his theoretical development: it is within these pages that Freud formulated the dialectic between Eros and Thanatos within the human psyche.
1st December 2020

La Cravate donc etait un Obstacle…

And what a tie! If you want to see the Symbolic Order in action then here’s Jacques Lacan fiddling with his decorative apparatus at the Catholic University of Louvain in 1972.
1st December 2020

Laura Gonzalez – Artist, Writer, Scholar …

Freud aimed at working out the ‘topographical’ aspects of mental processes in Beyond the Pleasure Principle . By ‘topographical’ means, might indeed be the best way to approach the interdisciplinary complexity and irrepressible joie-de-vivre that we see in Professor Laura Gonzalez’ work
2nd December 2020

Isabel Millar – Philosopher and Psychoanalytic Theorist

Isabel Millar is probably the world’s first virtual public intellectual. Watch this: an Englishwoman on Russian TV, speaking about a French psychoanalyst in Spanish language. That’s as neat a laying out of the cards as you might ever see.
3rd December 2020

Theatres of Disquiet: A Diagnosis of the Baroque – by Murray Smith

If the overlay and clash and contrast of instincts is a topographical question for Freud, then Murray Smith has it here as a graphical one. Smith's own instinct, however, is that the Baroque, in its heightened sensitivity to force, tension and unease, is the 3D paradigm for exposition of the ineffable mysteries of consciousness.
3rd December 2020

Lorens Holm – Writer, Scholar, Architectural Theorist

What is it about that New York rhythm of intellectual engagement that mesmerises, convinces, becalms, and at the same time energises us? Lorens Holm has it in spades
4th December 2020

Pippa Goldschmidt – Writer, Scientist, Scholar

Is it even possible to believe in the ‘two-cultures’ dichotomy in a virtual post-Freudian cyber age? No-one embodies, and operates from all the positions implicit in such an age more comprehensively than Pippa Goldschmidt.
4th December 2020

R D Laing- Glasgow, The Centre of Reality

It’s difficult to know what to believe. Was R D Laing a thoroughly humane figure driven to ruin by the inhumanity he found in the world around him? Or did he ultimately betray the early brilliance he showed in astoundingly original early works like The Divided Self by lapsing into the role of lazy charlatan in the hippy sixties and seventies?