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:
On most days, I stay in touch with my female friends through the exchange of Instagram reels, interspersed with brief messages noting our reactions to these comedic video clips. These ‘reels’ range from 2-60 seconds in length. They resemble sketch comedy, but address subjects ranging from love, depression, motherhood to animals and food. The creators of these reels often present themselves in states of tiredness or despair, dressed in pajamas, or going about mundane activities.
My paper would look at Instagram reels through the lens of Freud’s “Jokes and their relation to the unconscious.” I posit that reels perform a psychoanalytic function by making digestible particular painful, anxiety-inducing aspects of women’s emotional lives. The private exchange of reels also serves a communicative purpose, allowing women to express feelings that would otherwise be censored in daily conversation.
In addition, I draw on personal observations and psychoanalytic theories about the social function of comedy. I will apply Bion’s concept of reverie and alpha function to understand how certain types of reels might contain and process everyday emotions. While social media is often perceived as having detrimental effects, I hope to explore a more positive side of it through this paper.
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Speaker:
Anushka Jasraj is a Mumbai-based writer whose short stories have been featured in Granta Online. She holds an MA in Gender Studies from the University of Texas at Austin and has completed a psychoanalytic infant observation with PTRC in India. Her recent work explores the impact of technology on memory and intimacy.
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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
