- This event has passed.
Tickets are offered on a pay-what-you-can basis, with a suggested donation of £10. Thank you in advance for your support of the museum at this very difficult time.
Please note: booking closes 24 hours before the start of the event, at which point the login details are send out to ticket holders.
For a good number of years now, the Freud Museum London has organised exhibitions, conferences and workshops celebrating the consecutive centenaries of some of Freud’s key essays, the most recent one in the series offering visitors an opportunity to re-discover his hugely influential 1919 paper on ‘The “Uncanny”.
For 2020, it was never in any doubt that a diverse programme of events should be planned around the hundredth anniversary of the publication of ‘Beyond the Pleasure Principle’, a text which perhaps more than any other work by Freud has attracted vehement rebuttals from within the psychoanalytic community (with the exception of Melanie Klein, Jacques Lacan, Jean Laplanche, André Green and a few others) and which continues to divide psychoanalysts and philosophers alike for its explicitly speculative proposition of a ‘death drive’.
On 23 March 2020, the eagerly anticipated commemoration of ‘Beyond the Pleasure Principle’ was overtaken by events and as things stand it is quite unlikely that the programme will ever be reinstated, even if the Museum were to reopen to the public at full capacity.
Strange as it may sound, it would appear that the centennial of Freud’s death drive will never have happened on account of the British government’s decision to impose a nationwide lockdown in a desperate effort to save lives.
In this online talk, Professor Dany Nobus will reflect upon the enduring legacy of one of Freud’s most controversial texts, gauge its value for our contemporary living conditions, and open some new perspectives for revisiting this absolute classic of Freudian psychoanalysis.
