Freud/Lynch: Behind the Curtain

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It was an exciting event held at the Rio Cinema, an independent movie theatre in Dalston, East London. If you’re in/near London, you don’t want to miss the book launch event of ‘Freud/Lynch: Behind the Curtain’ on Friday 24 February 2023 at the Freud Museum. Placing the film alongside James Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake as rare examples of artworks which succeed in reproducing dream logic and considering Freud’s 1900 dream theory in light the developments of Beyond the Pleasure Principle, this talk examines the film with reference to the question posed by Lacan in relation to Freud’s famous ‘Irma’ dream: given that the dream repeatedly comes up against something that provokes anxiety, what allows the dreamer to continue dreaming? Encompassing themes such as art, identity, architecture, fantasy, dreams, hysteria and the unconscious, ‘Freud/Lynch’ takes as its point of departure the possibility that the enterprise in which these two distinct investigators are engaged might in some sense be a shared one. She has published articles and essays on psychoanalysis, philosophy, and art in The Art Newspaper, various Freud Museum publications, and artist monographs.

But there’s another way his worlds operate – they escape and exceed the usual boundaries, they spill out in unexpected directions at uneven speeds. There was such an appetite for discussion, sharing ideas, and finding reason in David Lynch’s cinematic oeuvre, which are known for their seemingly nonsensical narratives, non-linear storylines, absurd characters, and mystical spaces. The material on this site may not be reproduced, distributed, transmitted, cached or otherwise used, except with the prior written permission of Condé Nast. Please include what you were doing when this page came up and the Cloudflare Ray ID found at the bottom of this page.

By exploring these questions, the reader can begin to peer behind the Lynchian curtain and will, most likely, see quite a bit more than they might have expected to. Jamie Ruers is an art historian specialising in art and culture from Vienna 1900 and Surrealist art and film.

I totally get it,” my then-partner uttered, victoriously, as soon as the lights came back on in Amsterdam’s Kriterion movie theater, where we had just watched David Lynch’s 2001 thriller “Mulholland Drive.This talk will explore the distinctive contribution costume makes to Lynch’s oeuvre with a particular focus on Twin Peaks, showing how for Lynch, costume is more than just character and relates to his ongoing fascination with the curtain or veil. STEFAN MARIANSKI is Education Manager at the Freud Museum London, where he works to engage young people with psychoanalytic thought. As the cinema foyer filled with the aromas of damn fine coffee, the animated discussions whirled before spilling out on to the street, so that passers-by catching a few fragments of conversation about the mysteries of Lumberton, the sinister underbelly of Twin Peaks, or the depravity of Bobby Peru could be forgiven for surmising that it was a convention of detectives (or perverts). Lynch, who once told an interviewer, "I love dream logic," would surely agree with Sigmund Freud's famous claim that "before the problem of the creative artist, psychoanalysis must lay down its arms. Some of the concepts went totally over my head having only studied a Psychology A Level but I feel like I got a lot out of reading this.

Dr Olga Cox Cameron analyses the movie in relation to Freud’s dream logic as well as Lacan’s theories. The central premise of this talk is that in each instalment of the trilogy, a psychogenic fugue follows the unconscious trauma of unrequited love. A sold out 90-minute lecture followed by 30-minute group discussion filmed at the Freud Museum London on 22 August 2012. Psychoanalytic theory will be shown to illuminate Lynch’s iconic dream-logic, which is disturbing and beguiling in equal measure. I shall consider from a psychoanalytic perspective how Blue Velvet, dominated as it is by perverse relationships, presents us with ‘a strange world’ (a sentence repeatedly uttered by two of the film’s protagonists).

The brilliant contributors include directors, cinephiles, philosophers, art and cultural historians, as well as psychoanalysts.