Todd McGowan teaches theory and film at the University of Vermont. He is the author of The Impossible David Lynch, Only a Joke Can Save Us: A Theory of Comedy, Capitalism and Desire: The Psychic Cost of Free Markets, and other works. 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.” But what else do the two agree on? The conference was attended by 400 people, coming from all over the world. 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.

Due to be released before the end of November is Robert Samuels’ (Mis)Understanding Freud with Lacan, Zizek, and Neuroscience, part of the Palgrave Lacan Series. Returning to five core Freudian concepts – the pleasure principle, the primary processes, the unconscious, transference, and the reality principle – Samuels looks at how the paradigms of the post-Freudian world have informed neurospsychoanalysis, Lacan, Zizek and object relations. He argues for the relevance of Freud’s unpublished ‘Project for Scientific Psychology’ from 1895 in offering a vital challenge to the brain sciences, and a return to what has been distorted in Freud’s original system. 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? Finally, the ECF has launched Miller TV on YouTube, dedicated to videos of the presentations given by Jacques-Alain Miller. A total of 66 videos have been collected so far, with a handful currently uploaded at time of writing. Among them is Miller’s presentation of his new publication, ‘How Analyses Happen’ (subtitles in English). Watch the announcement of the channel’s launch by ECF President Eric Zuliani (with English subtitles) here. Pascale Fari, Director of Miller TV, also discusses the project with Laurent Dupont who himself runs Lacan Web Television on YouTube. The ECF’s other YouTube project, Studio Lacan, continues to produce interviews with psychoanalysts and contributors about issues in contemporary society more widely. Due out next month is Freud/Lynch: Behind the Curtain, edited by Jamie Ruers and Stefan Marianski. Drawn from a major Freud Museum London conference, Freud/Lynchgoes against the dubious cliché of finding Freudian solutions to Lynchian mysteries. Rather thanpresuming to fill in what Lynch leaves open by positing some forbidden psychosexual reality lurking behind his trademark red curtains, this book instead maintains a fidelity tothe mysteries of his wonderful and strange filmic worlds, finding in them productive spaces where thought and imagination can be set to work. The book features Lacanian contributions from Olga Cox Cameron, Tamara Dellutri, Todd McGowan, Carol Owens and Jamie Ruers.

Even more turmoil is evidenced by the murder of Mr. Eddy. In the movie it is not actually Fred who fires the shots, but the Mystery Man. Since Mr. Eddy and the Mystery Man are both characters in Fred's mind, the scene shows that the factions of his mind are warring with one another. To reduce the discomfort produced by the faction responsible for Mr. Eddy, Fred's super-ego tries to destroy that other part. This is the death drive doing its work. While much of Fred's fantasy centered around the libido, it now becomes clear that he can't live in such a phony realm of fantasy for long, and the thoughts that begin to creep in all deal with fear and anger. So the next step in satisfying the pleasure principle is to try to destroy those thoughts and their source, which Fred does by killing Mr. Eddy. Just as he began by killing his wife to symbolically destroy all of his restlessness surrounding her suspected infidelity, he now kills Mr. Eddy to destroy the other half of such paranoia: the kind of man Renee might cheat with. Another stark and important contrast between these characters is established in the two major sex scenes of the movie, one with Fred and his wife Renee, and one with Pete and Renee's double, Alice. Lynch makes it very simple for the viewer by making the setup the same, in terms of how much foreplay occurs, and the position for sex. But then he breaks from the similarities and one observes that Fred's sex scene is very unemotional, and even fairly unattractive. He stares into his wife's eyes, looking for emotion and meaning, but her facial expression is flat and unresponsive. Pete and Alice, on the contrary, are much more passionate. Alice is as excited as Pete is and they both seem very satisfied at the end. This use of similarity makes the composition of the two characters readily apparent, while the contrasts in the situations give the viewer an indication of what Fred's life is like, and how he wishes it would be. And at this point the viewer now has prime examples of both types of wishes (according to Freud): erotic and ambitious. In fact, the jobs and sex lives of these two characters are given so much attention in the movie that it wouldn't be at all overreaching to observe that Lynch could have written the story with Freud's "Creative Writers and Day-Dreaming" as its singular foundation. Stefan Marianskiis Education Manager at the Freud Museum London, where he works to engage young people with psychoanalytic thought. He has organised a number of events and conferences on psychoanalytic themes, and has written and lectured on dreams, sexuality, anthropology, surrealism, and masculinity. He is a manager with the Psychosis Therapy Project and a trainee at the Centre for Freudian Analysis and Research.

From 1st July 2021, VAT will be applicable to those EU countries where VAT is applied to books - this additional charge will be collected by Fed Ex (or the Royal Mail) at the time of delivery. Shipments to the USA & Canada: This talk argues that the series Twin Peaks: The Return creates the expectation of Dale Cooper’s return as a fantasy figure capable of healing the wound of subjectivity itself only to show how he actually plays a crucial role in its perpetuation. 8. Mary Wild From last month’s events, Darian Leader’s talk ‘What is sex?’ is now available on YouTube, courtesy of Derek Hook and his excellent YouTube channel. This was the first in a series of pre-conference talks ahead of the Lacan: Clinic and Culture Conference which took place in Pittsburgh earlier this month. Leader’s talk explores questions of sexual practice, and how these are shaped by childhood interests and anxieties. After the early work of second wave feminist thought challenged many popular psychoanalytic dogmas, have we made much progress today in thinking about sexuality, apart from endlessly repeating a few cliches and fetishising some loopy mathemes?How far down the Lost Highway can we get with psychoanalytic theory as our guide? In this talk I would like to take a look at some of the remarkable parallels between David Lynch’s masterpiece and Lacanian psychoanalysis. I hope to draw out some Lynchian lessons about the structure of desire and the function of the law, and to offer some psychoanalytic reflections on some of Lost Highway‘s many enigmas. 12. Richard Martin How far down the Lost Highway can we get with psychoanalytic theory as our guide? In this talk I would like to take a look at some of the remarkable parallels between David Lynch’s masterpiece and Lacanian psychoanalysis. I hope to draw out some Lynchian lessons about the structure of desire and the function of the law, and to offer some psychoanalytic reflections on some of Lost Highway‘s many enigmas. We hope you’ll enjoy delving in and getting lost in the Freudian and Lynchian dreamscapes, but do make sure to have a MacGuffin to hand to help you wake up again … Dr. Olga Cox Cameron has been a psychoanalyst in private practice and a university lecturer in psychoanalysis and literature in Dublin for the past 30 years. She is the founder of the Psychoanalytic Film Festival now embarked on its 10th year.

With contributions from scholars, psychoanalysts, cinephiles, and filmmakers, this collection of essays explores potential affinities and disjunctions between Lynch and Freud. 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. Beginning with the latest books, Reading Architecture with Freud and Lacan: Shadowing the Public Realm by Lorens Holm is an intriguing work newly-released by Routledge. Modern and post-modern architects are engaged from a Lacanian perspective for the purposes of “putting the unconscious in a dialectic relation to space.” Starting from our attachment to places, Holm develops a critique of contemporary approaches to architecture, highlighting the environmental damage done by what he argues is an inability to recognise the death drive. “The text is an extended thesis”, Holm writes, “that the field of the Other is the common grammar that organises subjects into civilisations, which has consequences for how we treat the public realm in architecture, politics, and the city.” Lacan began holding yearly seminars, starting in 1952, re-examining Freud’s work. At the time, the theory and technique of psychoanalysis was facing a complete overhaul at the hands of post-Freudian psychoanalysts, many of whom had emigrated to the United States after the war. Lacan railed against their teaching of Freud, seeing it as an oversimplification of his work and a corruption of psychoanalytic technique reducing it to the status of life management. Through his seminars he offered another interpretation of Freud’s work and psychoanalytic theory. Inventive, radical and adventurous, many still believe Lacan’s to be a creative mis-reading of Freud.If you're coming to Coles by car, why not take advantage of the 2 hours free parking at Sainsbury's Pioneer Square - just follow the signs for Pioneer Square as you drive into Bicester and park in the multi-storey car park above the supermarket. Come down the travelators, exit Sainsbury's, turn right and follow the pedestrianised walkway to Crown Walk and turn right - and Coles will be right in front of you. You don't need to shop in Sainsbury's to get the free parking! Where to Find Us The other major overlap is a story that is told by Renee to Fred on the way home from a party of a man she met at a bar called Moke's who told her about a job. Fred does not delve into her story any further. But later when the story recurs with Pete and Alice Pete asks how she got involved in pornography, and she tells of this very same man whom she met at Moke's. He wants to know more, and she goes on to relate the story of meeting Mr. Eddy (a customer of Pete's) who forced her to strip at gunpoint. Hearing the story Pete is very tense and jealous, and afterwards asks bitterly why she didn't just leave. She offers no reply, and he suggests that perhaps she enjoyed it. The fantasy now seems to be breaking down. This Lacan in Scotland seminar ‘Lynch & Lacan: Dream Logic in Mulholland Drive’ took place on Zoom on Thursday 24 November 2022. Dr Olga Cox Cameron analyses the movie in relation to Freud’s dream logic as well as Lacan’s theories. The event is chaired by Dr Calum Neill, Director of Lacan in Scotland, and the presentation is prefaced with comments by Stefan Marianski and Jamie Ruers, the editors of the newly released book ‘Freud/Lynch: Behind the Curtain’. The presentation is followed by a discussion with the audience. Here, they discuss the Freud Museum London conference which inspired their debut book, Freud/Lynch: Behind the Curtain , an edited collection which explores potential affinities and disjunctions between Lynch and Freud.

Freud/Lynch: Behind the Curtain takes as its point of departure that Lynch’s work is not so much unintelligible as ‘uncanny,’ revealing what Todd McGowan has termed “the bizarre nature of normality” – and the everydayness of what we take to be strange.Freud/Lynch: Behind the Curtain takes as its point of departure that Lynch’s work is not so much unintelligible as ‘uncanny,’ revealing what Todd McGowan has termed “the bizarre nature of normality” – and the everydayness of what we take to be strange.