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Join us in celebrating the launch of John Forrester’s Freud and Psychoanalysis: Six Introductory Lectures (Polity, May 2023), edited by Lisa Appignanesi.
Forrester’s lectures take us on a masterful journey from Vienna to London, from Paris to New York and Hollywood, from the lab to the couch to the campus to film and literature.
The evening begins with a panel discussion where esteemed psychoanalysts and authors, Darian Leader and Josh Cohen, join Lisa Appignanesi in conversation, followed by a drinks reception in Sigmund Freud’s dining room. The event is also an opportunity for an out-of-hours view of our current exhibition, Freud’s Antiquities: Object, Idea, Desire, and of course, Freud’s study.
John Forrester’s passionate yet probing engagement with Freud and psychoanalysis is legendary. Here, in six introductory lectures delivered to his students at the University of Cambridge, his range and lucidity bring the evolution of Freud’s thinking and the nature of Freud’s discoveries into sharp focus. With an historian’s eye for context, Forrester explores Freud’s biography, the scientific moment, and the radical subject matter of the field itself – sex, dreams, desire, the unconscious, childhood, language – as well as Freud’s development of a new clinical practice.
In this publication, Forrester also explores both the growth of the psychoanalytic movement and the question of what kind of beast it might be as it travels through time and geography. He illuminates the cultural and revolutionary impact of psychoanalytic thinking – not only Freud’s, but that of some of his progeny in the many places where the movement flourished.
John Forrester was Professor of History and the Philosophy of the Sciences at the University of Cambridge. An authority on Freud, Lacan, psychoanalysis, and the history of the human sciences, his books include Thinking in Cases, Freud in Cambridge, Dispatches from the Freud Wars, Truth Games, The Seductions of Psychoanalysis and, with Lisa Appignanesi, Freud’s Women.
Lisa Appignanesi OBE is the prize-winning author of many books, including Everyday Madness: On Grief, Anger, Loss and Love, Mad, Bad and Sad: A History of Women and the Mind Doctors, Trials of Passion: Crimes in the Name of Love and Madness and Losing the Dead, and co-author with John Forrester of Freud’s Women. She was Chair of the Freud Museum London and the Royal Society of Literature, and President of English Pen.
Darian Leader is a psychoanalyst working in London and a member of the Centre for Freudian Analysis and Research and of The College of Psychoanalysts-UK. He is the author of several books including: Why do women write more letters than they post?; Freud’s Footnotes; Stealing the Mona Lisa: What Art Stops Us From Seeing, Why do people get ill?’(with David Corfield), The New Black: Mourning, Melancholia and Depression, What is Madness? , Strictly Bipolar, Hands, Why Can’t We Sleep? (2019) and Jouissance; Sexuality, Suffering and Satisfaction, (2021). He writes frequently about contemporary art.
Josh Cohen is a psychoanalyst in full-time private practice and Professor of Literary Theory at Goldsmiths University of London. He has published many books and essays on psychoanalysis, literature and culture. His books include How to Read Freud, The Private Life, Not Working, How to Live. What to Do and Losers.
Buy the Book
Freud and Psychoanalysis: Six Introductory Lectures is available to pre-order from the Freud Museum Shop with a 10% discount.
Collect your copy at the event by choosing the + book ticket option when booking.
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