All registrants will receive their link to join via ZOOM. Attendees will also receive access to the recording on the Monday after the event, available to watch back for 3 months.
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Abstract:
In works such as ‘Totem and Taboo’ and ‘Moses and Monotheism’, Freud traces the “primitive” origins of the Oedipus complex to an early event in human prehistory – the murder of the primal father by his sons. The words “primitive” and “primal” function, for Freud, as indicators of our collective past. As he constructs a timeline of human psychical development from prehistory to modernity, he emphasizes the rivalrous relationship between fathers and sons, carried forth from the primal horde into the unconscious minds of subsequent generations. The Oedipus complex experienced by us all, Freud says, attempts to reenact the events of prehistory in childhood phantasy. This signifies the enduring emphasis, in both the human psyche and Freudian psychoanalysis, on patriarchal systems of thought.
As for the figure of the mother in Freudian theory, though she appears within the Oedipal triad, she fades away into relative obscurity against the background of an androcentric aetiology of human nature. That is, until the work of Melanie Klein, which hails a return to the mother in psychoanalysis – the subject of this seminar. Unlike Freud, Klein emphasizes the mother–infant dyad in her research, creating a curious reversal as the father becomes only tangentially significant. The words “primitive” and “primal” no longer hark back to prehistoric hordes of men, but now hold new significances; they denote the immediate, intimate relationship between mother and infant. Whilst Klein develops psychoanalysis in this way, she also retains fundamental Freudian elements in her thinking. One instance of Freudian conservation is her use of Athenian tragedy to illustrate her theories, just as Freud uses Sophocles’ ‘Oedipus Rex’. But, to convey her innovations, Klein turns away from the Oedipus story and turns towards the ‘Oresteia’ tragedies of Aeschylus. She constructs what we might call the “Orestes complex,” an alternative, infantile developmental experience. We shall explore the ways Klein transitions from a patriarchal psychoanalysis to a matriarchal one which centralises the mother – an ambivalent object of love and hatred, who possesses the original power to give life and take it away…
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Speaker:
Faye Mather is a PhD student in Classics at University College London. Her thesis examines the reception of antiquity in psychoanalysis, specifically the theories, practices, and analytic spaces of Sigmund Freud, Anna Freud, and Melanie Klein. Her research interests include; classics, psychoanalysis, feminism, ancient and modern philosophy, intellectual history, and modern therapeutic approaches.
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Tickets:
Suggested donation £10-£15.
Minimum donation £1.
The purpose of this event is to raise funds for the Freud Museum London, which receives no regular Government income. We are grateful to you for supporting our independent museum as generously as possible.
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The Freudian Research Seminar Series
The Freudian Research Seminar Series (FRSS) will convene virtually once every month and seeks to establish a forum which both cultivates and circulates new psychoanalytically informed research. We welcome both PhD students and Researchers across disciplines (inc. psychoanalysis, psychology, literature, art, film, history), to participate and form a community in which new ideas can be openly discussed and developed. To celebrate the Women & Freud exhibition currently on display at the Freud Museum London, this series will feature papers that examine and extend the ideas raised by the exhibition regarding concepts of gender and sexuality.
Each seminar will commence at 6pm (London) and last for an hour and thirty minutes, with thirty-forty minutes for the paper followed by a discussion. The seminar will be in a Zoom webinar format, which means attendees will enter with their cameras and mics turned off to allow a smooth and uninterrupted delivery of the speaker’s paper; however, for the discussion, we welcome and encourage attendee participation and people may request to have the camera and audio turned on.
Seminars will be recorded for those registered to playback for 3 months but please note they will not be later made available on the On Demand service.
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Schedule:
Thursday 20 February – Anil Aykan, Intrapsychic Dynamics in Bertha Pappenheim’s ‘In the Junk Shop’
Thursday 20 March – Harriet Mossop, Slave Play in the Psychoanalytic clinic: a self-theorisation of overwhelming experiences of queer, inter-racial erotic transference
Thursday 24 April – Sophia Rohwetter, The Sphinx as Figure
Thursday 22 May – Dylan Lackey, Joyce’s Lalangue: On Masochism, Anti-Blackness, and Écriture féminine
Thursday 19 June – Faye Mather, A Return to the Mother, an exploration of the transition from Freudian fathers to Kleinian mothers in psychoanalysis
Thursday 24 July – Anushka Jasraj, Send this to someone: The psychoanalytic function of Instagram reels in female friendships
