FRSS- A Return to the Mother

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 3 months.

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Abstract:

In Totem and Taboo, Freud traces the “primitive” origins of the Oedipus complex to an event in human prehistory, repeated over generations. Primal fathers, Freud says, were murdered by their sons, who desired patriarchal power, as well as incest with their mothers and sisters. These desires were carried forth from primal hordes into the unconscious minds of us all, experienced now as the Oedipus complex, driving us to reenact prehistory symbolically, in childhood phantasy. For Freud, our Oedipal feelings make us who we are; thus, he writes patriarchy into human nature, rendering human psychology an essentially patriarchal system and emphasising our paternal relationships.

Though she appears within the Oedipal triad, the mother fades away into relative obscurity. That is, until the work of Melanie Klein, which hails a turn to the mother in psychoanalysis. Unlike Freud, Klein emphasises maternal relationships, creating a curious reversal as fathers become only tangentially significant. The word “primal” no longer harks back to primal hordes of men; rather, “primal” denotes the immediate, intimate relationship between mother and infant.

In this seminar, we will examine how Klein receives and innovates Freudian psychoanalysis, and how she uses Athenian tragedy differently to Freud to convey her new perspective. Rather than drawing on Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex, as Freud does, Klein required a new paradigm, turning instead towards Aeschylus’ Oresteia. Klein creates what we might call the “Orestes complex,” an alternative, infantile developmental experience, transforming patriarchal psychoanalysis into a matriarchal one, where mothers, ancient and modern, determine the course of our lives.

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Speaker:

Faye Mather is a doctoral researcher in Classics at University College London. Her thesis examines the reception of antiquity in psychoanalysis, specifically the theories, practices, and analytic spaces of Sigmund Freud, Anna Freud, and Melanie Klein. Her research interests include: classics, psychoanalysis, feminism, ancient and modern intellectual history, and modern psychotherapy.

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Tickets:

Suggested donation £10-£15. Minimum donation £1.

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.

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The Freudian Research Seminar Series

The Freudian Research Seminar Series (FRSS) will convene virtually once every month and seeks to establish a forum which both cultivates and circulates new psychoanalytically informed research. We welcome both PhD students and Researchers across disciplines (inc. psychoanalysis, psychology, literature, art, film, history), to participate and form a community in which new ideas can be openly discussed and developed.

Each seminar will commence at 6pm (London) and last for an hour and thirty minutes, with thirty-forty minutes for the paper followed by a discussion. Seminars will be recorded for those registered to playback for 3 months but please note they will not be later made available on the On Demand service.

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Schedule:

Wednesday 22 October – Kimberly Lamm, Fashioning the Ego as Home: Black Women Writers and Clothing

Thursday 27 November – Helen Rose, No Fixed Abode, No Fixed Support? The Weaponization of Homelessness in an Era of Austerity and NHS Decline

Thursday 11 December – Kazue Niki, Staging the Finale: Freud’s London Garden as a Constructed Space

Wednesday 28 January – Faye Mather, A Return to the Mother – on the transition from Freudian fathers to Kleinian mothers in psychoanalysis and Athenian tragedy

Thursday 26 February – Arjet Pervizi, Renting Within Oneself: A psychoanalytic exploration of home – between rent and ownership, transience, and the fantasy of belonging in the psychoanalytic subject

Thursday 26 March – Callum Blades, The Unhomely Mind: Conspiracies as a Defence Against Psychic Displacement

Thursday 23 April – Nisrina Larasati, “Only You Understand Me Completely”: Contemporary Investigation of the Uncanny in AI Therapy Bots

Thursday 21 May – Sam Bolton, I Cannot Turn Away from Your Home: A Melancholic Reformulation of Transgender Dysphoria

Thursday 25 June – Anna-Peter Magyarlaki & Eric Harper, Homes, closets and wombs: Psychoanalytic reflections on home-making and homelessness for queer, trans and gender nonconforming people

Thursday 30 July – Huaiyuan “Susanna” Zhang, The Ego Is Not Master in Its Own House: Levinas, Freud, and the Ethical Unhousing of Oedipus