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:
Blending autoanalysis, clinical examples and theory, this presentation proposes to interrogate the tension between home-making and homelessness for queer, trans and gender nonconforming people and their analysts.
Queer, trans, and gender nonconforming people often experience both literal homelessness and what Malatino (2019) terms ontological homelessness, or a sense of being unhousable or invisible in the cis- and heteronormative matrix. The trans body exists in the cisgender imaginary as a monster or as a void, a no-person (Hansbury, 2025). ‘Logically’, the homes matching these creatures could only be cages, police cells or hospital wards.
Home – that is the home(s) we were born into – therefore, for many of us, is marked by rejection, disavowal or a forceful retreat into the closet.
What happens though when one makes a new home on the margins of the cis- and heteronormative matrix, like Preciado claimed his apartment on Uranus (2019)? How can we reconcile with the twinned labour of home- and gender-making that we – as analysts or as analysands – might restage in this process (Whorall-Campbell, 2022)? Can analysis (whether in a room or on the streets) become a home-before-home, a Winnicottian womb, or a sort of intra-utero playground for those who have been denied homes outside of it?
The authors will offer and contrast their personal and clinical experiences: that of a nonbinary trainee psychodynamic psychotherapist, seeking a home under the psychoanalytic tent and of a bisexual psychoanalyst working with trans homeless people in London’s homeless hostels.
Looking at these questions with an intersectional and feminist lens, we will conclude that every home and body is tinged with the uncanny: we all harbor something alien, an unhomely polymorphous perversity. It is only through understanding homelessness within a home and/or homelessness as home, that analysis can re-open spaces that were shut down by violence.
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Speaker:
Eric Harper (he/him) is a psychoanalyst teaching at Goldsmiths. Prior to joining academia, he focused his practice on working with marginalised clients who do not come knocking at the analyst’s door. This included setting up a therapy service for the homeless as well as pioneering therapy in cold weather shelters and on the streets. He has a publication coming out called In the refuge of the wake in the edited volume Critical Research and Creative Practice with Migrant and Refugee Communities: Towards interventions based on practice research and community voices. Prior to that he published Psychoanalysis in the Time of the Last Breath together with Matt Lee in Sitegiest A Journal of Psychoanalysis and Philosophy.
Anna-Peter Magyarlaki (they/them) is a trainee psychodynamic psychotherapist, studying at Goldsmiths. They are trans and nonbinary and are originally from Hungary. Prior to training as a therapist, they worked in the human rights field, trained as a psychologist and then focused on understanding queer community dynamics and identity formation from a social psychology perspective. This culminated in the publication of “I got given all these keys”: a photovoice study examining master and alternative narratives and nonbinary identity formation in London’s queer communities in the International Journal of Transgender Health. They also have an upcoming publication on nonbinary dress strategies in the Clothing and Textiles Research Journal. These days, they feel mostly at home in the pools, lakes and reservoirs of London.
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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.
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. 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:
Wednesday 22 October – Kimberly Lamm, Fashioning the Ego as Home: Black Women Writers and Clothing
Thursday 27 November – Helen Rose, No Fixed Abode, No Fixed Support? The Weaponization of Homelessness in an Era of Austerity and NHS Decline
Thursday 11 December – Kazue Niki, Staging the Finale: Freud’s London Garden as a Constructed Space
Wednesday 28 January – Faye Mather, A Return to the Mother – on the transition from Freudian fathers to Kleinian mothers in psychoanalysis and Athenian tragedy
Thursday 26 February – Arjet Pervizi, Renting Within Oneself: A psychoanalytic exploration of home – between rent and ownership, transience, and the fantasy of belonging in the psychoanalytic subject
Thursday 26 March – Callum Blades, The Unhomely Mind: Conspiracies as a Defence Against Psychic Displacement
Thursday 23 April – Nisrina Larasati, “Only You Understand Me Completely”: Contemporary Investigation of the Uncanny in AI Therapy Bots
Thursday 21 May – Sam Bolton, I Cannot Turn Away from Your Home: A Melancholic Reformulation of Transgender Dysphoria
Thursday 25 June – Anna-Peter Magyarlaki & Eric Harper, Homes, closets and wombs: Psychoanalytic reflections on home-making and homelessness for queer, trans and gender nonconforming people
Thursday 30 July – Huaiyuan “Susanna” Zhang, The Ego Is Not Master in Its Own House: Levinas, Freud, and the Ethical Unhousing of Oedipus