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 1 month.
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The film Freud’s Last Session (2023) portrays an imagined meeting between Sigmund Freud and CS Lewis on the day that Britain declared war on Germany in 1939. Although the film’s main subject is the philosophical and theological disagreement between Freud the atheist and Lewis the Christian, it also portrays Anna Freud as in a lesbian relationship with her long-term partner Dorothy Burlingham, and Sigmund Freud as uncomfortable with this unconventional relationship. Together with a panel of four speakers with academic and clinical interest in gender and sexuality in psychoanalysis, we will use the movie as a starting point to reflect on how cultural representations of this enigmatic relationship have changed in the 40 years since Anna Freud’s death, and to relate this to work with different expressions of gender and sexuality in the psychoanalytic clinic today, in the context of ongoing movements towards (or returns to) ‘queer and trans psychoanalysis’.
- Chair: Professor Raluca Soreanu
- Panellists: Patricia Gherovici PhD, Dr Noreen Giffney, Harriet Mossop, Dr Hannah Zeavin
Click here for speakers’ biographies
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This is the second of two events at the Freud Museum, London – January/February 2025
Abstract:
Speculation about the nature of the five-decade-long personal and professional partnership between Anna Freud and Dorothy Burlingham is not new. However, early twenty-first Century culture is turning its “queer eye” onto the relationship in particular ways in the context of more open – although not always more accepting – social and psychoanalytic attitudes to non-normative expressions of gender and sexuality. Two events at the Freud Museum, London in early 2025 will explore how their relationship was portrayed during Freud and Burlingham’s lifetime, by their biographers in the 1980s, and in the film Freud’s Last Session (2023), as well as recent research which sheds light onto how more personal elements of their relationship were omitted from the archive. The events will be an opportunity to reflect on how cultural representations of their relationship have changed in the 40 years since Anna Freud’s death, and to relate this to work in the psychoanalytic clinic with different expressions of gender and sexuality. There will be a panel discussion and a special tour of the Freud Museum focusing on Anna and Dorothy’s life together in the house, and the archive of their letters.
These events are part of an ongoing programme with the Queer Encounters network for psychosocial PhD and early-career researchers in gender and sexuality (www.queerencounters.org), considering the history of psychoanalysis from a queer and trans perspective, and have been supported by the Department of Psychosocial and Psychoanalytic Studies at the University of Essex.
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Tickets: £25
Freud Museum Members and Patrons receive 20% off the standard ticket price on all events, courses, conferences and On Demand programming.
A limited number of £10 bursary tickets are available for those under financial hardship. Priority will be given to UK unemployed and PIP/ESA claimants. Please email [email protected] to apply for a bursary.
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.
