Provocations: A Thread of Violence – Mark O’Connell in conversation with Dr Carine Minne

Join us for a series of evening events at the Freud Museum titled Provocations, or Difficult Conversations in the Home of the Talking Cure curated by Rachel Cooke. In-house only.

In tonight’s event Mark O’Connell will be in conversation with Dr Carine Minne.

“Whether I liked it or not I was implicated”

In 1982, Malcolm Macarthur, the privileged heir to a small estate, found himself broke, and decided to rob a bank. In the course of procuring a car and gun in order to do this, however, he brutally murdered two people. His eventual arrest, in the apartment of Ireland’s attorney general, Patrick Connolly, nearly brought down the government of Charles Haughey. The case, bizarre and horrifying, was later fictionalised by John Banville in his novel, The Book of Evidence.

In 2012, Macarthur, now an old man, was released from prison. Long haunted by his crimes, Mark O’Connell tracked him down, and they began to talk: a series of conversations that forms the spine of his award-winning book A Thread of Violence, in which he seeks not only to try and understand a series of unfathomable and irredeemably dark acts, but in which he also asks hard questions of himself. What does it mean to write about a murderer? What are the ethics of this? How might it be done without recourse to sensationalism?

SPEAKERS

Mark O’Connell is an award-winning writer. His first book, To Be A Machine, won the 2018 Wellcome Book Prize and was shortlisted for the Baillie Gifford Prize. In 2019, he was the first non-fiction writer to win the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature. His second book, Notes From An Apocalypse, was long listed for the Wainwright Prize. A Thread of Violence won the Dubray Non-Fiction Book of the Year at the 2023 Irish Book Awards, and is on the shortlist for The Writers’ Prize 2024.

Dr Carine Minne is Consultant Psychiatrist in Forensic Psychotherapy at Broadmoor Hospital in Crowthorne, Berkshire, a Fellow of the Royal College of Psychiatrists and a Psychoanalyst with British Psychoanalytical Society. She currently serves as Chair of the Violence Committee of the International Psychoanalytical Association and of the Sohn Seminar at the British Psychoanalytical Society. She is the founding Editor-in-Chief of The Journal of Forensic Psychotherapy and the Past President of the International Association for Forensic Psychotherapy. 

TICKETS

Tickets include a welcome drink, book signing, plus special after-hours viewing of the Museum.

Freud Museum Members and Patrons receive 20% off the standard ticket price on all events, courses, conferences and On Demand programming.

Tickets are NON-REFUNDABLE.

The purpose of this event is to raise funds for the Freud Museum London, which receives no regular public income.

Provocations, or Difficult Conversations in the Home of the Talking Cure

A series of evening events at the Freud Museum.

Provocations: Good Girls – Hadley Freeman in conversation with Philippa Perry – 14 February 

Provocations: Two Sisters – Blake Morrison in conversation with Rachel Cooke – 28 February 

Provocations: Mortal Secrets – Frank Tallis in conversation with Samira Ahmed – 6 March 

Provocations: A Thread of Violence – Mark O’Connell in conversation with Dr Carine Minne – 14 March