Pleasuring Freud

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?
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.
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
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.