Freud’s Two-by-Two: Habitation, Homemaking

Hybrid Symposium organised by the RAI – Online and in Person in Manchester

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Wednesday 15 October 2025, 10.00 am to 6.00 pm BST

Location: Room 3.o13a in the Alliance Manchester Business School, Booth St W, Manchester M15 6PB

Online attendees will be send a Zoom link the day before the event.

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Freud’s Two-by-Two: Habitation, Homemaking

Convened by Richard Werbner

With speakers

Tim Ingold, Professor, University of Aberdeen

Rupert Stasch, Professor, University of Cambridge

Hannah Knox, Professor, University of Manchester

Karen Sykes, Professor, University of Manchester

Yang, Ph.D. candidate, University of Manchester

Albena Yaneva, Professor, Politechnico of Torino

Iza Kavedžija, Associate Professor, University of Cambridge

Joel Robbins, Professor, University of Cambridge

Guilherme Fians, Lecturer, University of Manchester

Kevin Malone, Emeritus Professor, University of Manchester

Michael Lambek, Emeritus Professor, University of Toronto

Robert Ulin, Professor, Rochester Institute of Technology

Michael Fischer, Emeritus Professor, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

One basis for this international and interdisciplinary symposium is the six episode video essay, ‘Conquistador Freud’ by Richard Werbner, now available from the Royal Anthropological Institute. It opens out for our symposium’s critique an intimate portrait of Sigmund Freud—not simply as the father of psychoanalysis, but as a restless adventurer, master of stagecraft, self-conscious Jew, passionate cosmopolitan, and obsessive curator of his own interior worlds. Moving between biography, design history, and Freud’s imaginative insights, the video essay reveals Freud’s life and work through the rooms he inhabited and the objects he cherished. Ever a man of the mind, but surrounded by his horde of thousands of ancient figurines, Freud became a man of huge and fine materiality.

The discussions at the symposium will draw on the video essay’s representation of Freud as a wayfarer. From his early self-description as a “conquistador” to his exile from Vienna, Freud is seen to be the restless wayfarer —both geographically and imaginatively—whose consulting room, study, veranda, and passageways became carefully staged theatres of the mind, and for immersive experience. Each episode explores how Freud’s interiors embodied paradoxes: nomadic yet cocooned, public yet private, scientific yet dreamlike. The discovery of his intimate argument of images for masculinity and femininity in gender relations is pathbreaking.

To contextualise this representation, the symposium will screen the UK premiere of ‘The Burning Child’, Joseph Koerner’s celebrated documentary of Viennese homemaking before and after the holocaust.‘Freud’s Doors of Perception and Portal of Free Movement’, a short film by Richard Werbner, from his video essay, will also be shown.

Following an introductory talk by Richard Werbner, Tim Ingold and Joel Robbins will moderate discussions with our twelve speakers.

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The six episodes of the video essay will be available for streaming here:

https://vimeo.com/ondemand/conquistadorfreud6

Symposium attendees will be sent a 50% discount code upon registration via Eventbrite.