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:
Bertha Pappenheim (1859–1936), famously known as Anna O, was a pivotal figure in psychoanalysis, inspiring the development of the ‘talking cure’ through the work of Breuer and Freud. A feminist, activist, and founder of the Jewish Women’s Association, she also wrote stories, plays, and poems under the pseudonym Paul Berthold. At the turn of the century, she played a vital role in shaping concepts of femininity and challenging societal constraints.
This talk examines Bertha Pappenheim’s book ‘In the Junk Shop’, published in 1890, through Freud’s structural models of the mind and Kleinian theory, exploring themes of melancholia, psychic splitting, the Oedipal situation, and reparation. The book’s setting, a junk shop, serves as a symbolic representation of the unconscious, housing repressed emotions and unresolved conflicts. Freud’s concept of melancholia is reflected in the narrative’s portrayal of internalised grief and self-reproach, while Kleinian theory elucidates psychic splitting through the second-hand objects’ oscillation between idealisation and devaluation. The Oedipal situation emerges in the dynamics of unresolved attachments, while themes of reparation underscore the characters’ struggles to reconcile feelings of love, loss, and guilt.
This analysis draws an analogy between the book’s symbolic elements and psychoanalytic concepts, offering a personal interpretation of Pappenheim’s narrative through the lens of intrapsychic themes.
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Speaker:
Anıl Aykan is a trainee Jungian psychotherapist at the British Jungian Analytic Association, with a design background working with internationally renowned publishers and foundations, and holds a PhD in typography with prior experience as an academic.
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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
