FRSS - Staging the Finale: Freud’s London Garden as a Constructed Space

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: 

Following his flight from Nazi-occupied Vienna—a city transformed from the Heimlich to the Unheimlich—Sigmund Freud faced the urgent task of reconstructing both his domestic and professional worlds. This presentation will argue that the ‘garden’ at Maresfield Gardens was not a passive space of healing, but the final application of Freud’s lifelong intellectual project: imposition of order upon chaos. From domestic, social, and personal perspectives, this presentation will demonstrate how Freud constructed the garden as his final stage, based on the culmination of his intellectual achievements, while confronting the harsh realities of exile, war, and his own mortality.

Unlike at Berggasse, where professional and domestic spheres were distinct, architectural modifications by his son, Ernst, collapsed these boundaries. The direct linkage of the study to the garden created a new, integrated space, allowing Freud—confined by illness—to preside over his world from a single vantage point. This change was not a breakdown of order, but the imposition of a new one, based on observation and control. The garden of the house, once a separate space for leisure, was now fully annexed into his professional and personal domain.

This stage served multiple functions, intensifying a practice Freud had long established. He had previously used summer gardens as a venue for crucial discussions with key colleagues, a practice that became absolute in London. The garden was his sole reception area for public honours, a consulting room for his own medical concerns with specialists, and the primary setting for family life. Nevertheless, Freud’s letters from this period reveal a more complex reality, where the garden’s beauty often served to highlight the brutal ironies of his displacement and physical decline. Ultimately, the garden was the space where the lifelong ‘observer’ became the ‘observed,’ analysing the outbreak of war and the progress of his own end from the very same couch, performing his role as the founder of psychoanalysis to the very end.

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Speaker: 

Kazue Niki holds an MSc in Theoretical Psychoanalytic Studies from University College London. She is now an independent scholar specialising in the cultural and intellectual history of psychoanalysis, drawing on her background as a Clinical Psychologist in Japan. Her current research examines the relationship between domestic space and the construction of his legacy in Sigmund Freud's final years.

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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 – Foram Trivedi, Home-Environmental Tweaks and Functional Independence in Adults with ADHD: A Narrative Review with Psychoanalytic Reflection 

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