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2024 marks the bicentenary of Lord Byron’s death. Join us for what promises to be a fascinating insight into Freud’s reading of this most Romantic of poets!
This is the first in a series of online talks that explore the significance of books from Sigmund Freud’s library preserved in his final home at 20 Maresfield Gardens, and to raise funds for their conservation.
“Good books… are books to which one stands in rather the same relationship as to “good” friends, to whom one owes a part of one’s knowledge of life and view of the world… “Sigmund Freud, 1907
Sigmund Freud was a prolific reader and an admirer of the great figures in literary history. His library collection of over 1,600 works testifies to the extraordinary range of his interests: art, literature and poetry, archaeology, philosophy and history, as well as science, medicine, psychology and psychoanalysis.
The Complete Works of both Shakespeare and Goethe line his walls. As do the works of the most flamboyant of the major English Romantic poets, Lord Byron. Freud also admired Homer and Sophocles, as his collection of ancient Greek and Roman antiquities might imply.
In this special online talk, the Freud Museum welcomes psychoanalyst and academic Professor Dany Nobus in conversation with Byron scholar Dr Christine Kenyon-Jones, on the subject of Sigmund Freud as a reader of Lord Byron.
Professor Nobus and Dr Kenyon-Jones ponder why The Works of Lord Byron (comprising five volumes) was among the many titles that Freud chose to rescue and bring with him from Vienna to London when fleeing Nazi persecution in 1938. Did the poetry of Lord Byron have a special significance for Freud? Might it have been that Byron’s poetry influenced his revolutionary thinking in particular ways?
The 1842 edition published by Tauchnitz, is one of a number of books from Freud’s library identified as being in need of urgent conservation. We are launching an Appeal to raise £30,000 to protect Freud’s library and carry out urgent conservation work on this and other important at-risk titles. Every donation will help cover the costs of specialist conservator fees and equipment for the on-going conservation of Sigmund Freud’s study, collections and couch.
Thank you for helping to preserve Sigmund Freud’s library for the next generation to discover, treasure and learn from.
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Speakers
Dr Christine Kenyon Jones is a writer and lecturer and a Research Fellow in the Department of English at King’s College London. She has published widely on Byron, including on his voice and his religious views, his love of animals and his after-life as a science-fiction character. ‘Dangerous to Show: Byron and his Portraits’, written jointly with Geoffrey Bond, was published in 2020, and her most recent book, ‘Jane Austen and Lord Byron: Regency Relations’ will be published by Bloomsbury next month.
Professor Dany Nobus is a Clinical Psychologist, Psychoanalytic Psychotherapist, former Chair and Fellow of the Freud Museum London, and Founding Scholar of the British Psychoanalytic Council. He is currently Professor of Psychoanalytic Psychology at Brunel University London. His main research interests include the history, theory and practice of psychoanalysis, the history of psychiatry, the intersections between psychoanalysis, philosophy and the arts, and the history of ideas, especially with reference to the Renaissance and Early Modern periods. In 2017, Dany Nobus was awarded the Sarton medal of the University of Ghent for his outstanding contributions to psychoanalytic historiography.
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All registrants will receive their webinar link to join via Zoom. All attendees will also receive access to the recording, available to watch back for 1 month.
Ticket pricing: Suggested donation £10-£25. All donations from this event will go towards the conservation of Sigmund Freud’s library held at the Freud Museum London, which receives no regular government funding. We endeavour to make our events available to all, but we hope you can support our independent museum as generously as possible.
