FRSS - The Ego Is Not Master in Its Own House

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:
This paper stages a psychoanalytic and phenomenological encounter between Freud and Levinas through a rereading of Oedipus Tyrannus. Beginning from Freud’s foundational claim that the tragedy externalizes the unconscious—the myth of Oedipus as “our own” primal scene—it interrogates how this reading has paradoxically dulled the ethical force of the play through mythologization. Drawing on what André Green calls “cultural immunity” to Oedipus, I argue that the familiarity of Freud’s interpretation has obscured a more disturbing dimension: not unconscious wish but ethical vulnerability.

Through a close analysis of Jocasta’s rationalization of dreams and Oedipus’ final farewell to his daughters, the paper offers a Levinasian interpretation that shifts the focus from desire and repression to trauma, substitution, and infinite responsibility. In this reading, Oedipus is not merely the bearer of a repressed wish but the subject un-homed by an ethical demand he neither willed nor understood. Blinded and broken, Oedipus becomes a figure of radical heteronomy—one who suffers the call of the Other without mastery or defense.

By juxtaposing Freud’s “ego” with Levinas’ “hostage,” the paper rethinks tragedy as a scene of ethical unhousing. Here, the domestic is not merely familial or architectural but the very terrain of subjectivity undone. What emerges is a vision of the tragic not as cathartic resolution but as a site of ethical disorientation—where the home becomes uncanny, and the self is convoked beyond its grasp. In this light, Oedipus Tyrannus becomes not a myth of desire, but a play of unmastery—of what it means to live in a house not one’s own.

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Speaker:

Huaiyuan Zhang is a dual-title PhD candidate in Philosophy and Classics and Ancient Mediterranean Studies at Penn State University. Her current work focuses on desire, tragic ethics, and the temporal structure of ethical subjectivity, bringing ancient texts into dialogue with 20th-century phenomenology and psychoanalysis. Her writing has appeared or is forthcoming in leading journals including Classical World and Studia Phaenomenologica.

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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