Suzanne Bardgett is Head of Research and Academic Partnerships at Imperial War Museums, where she is responsible for initiating research projects across the IWM’s remit. Past achievements include leading the team that created the Holocaust Exhibition which ran at IWM London from 2000 to 2021. Suzanne is also Series Editor with Ben Barkow of the Palgrave Macmillan’s The Holocaust and its Contexts. Her book, Wartime London in Paintings, about the IWM’s officially commissioned paintings of London during the Second World War, was published in 2020, and a further book on the Air War in Paintings will be published by the IWM in 2024. Anne Biggs Wendy Monkhouse has wide ranging curatorial experience and currently works as Senior Curator (South) for English Heritage. She has worked extensively for the National Trust, historic house museums and as an independent curatorial consultant. She has a PhD in Egyptian Archaeology from University College London, and teaches Egyptian and Near Eastern Archaeology at MA and BA level. Juliet Rosenfeld Anthony is a Chartered Engineer who worked for a FTSE 100 company principally in financial communications. He is a Justice of the Peace and Member of the Independent Monitoring Board at Wandsworth Prison. Anthony is a Trustee of the Association of Jewish Refugees and Chair of MiD Mediation and Counselling. He was Chair of the Wiener Holocaust Library from 2004 to 2018 and received an OBE in the 2021 New Year’s Honours List for Voluntary service to Holocaust remembrance. Anne Worthington Psychoanalytic ‘objects’ are of course about relationships. Objects are usually persons, parts of persons, or symbols of them. This project – a week’s residency and a week’s response time – culminates in this online exhibition of the work by 18 postgraduate artists studying MA Sculpture. In it we consider objects in the widest interdisciplinary use of the term. As head of the conference programme, well over fifty conferences and symposia have been organised under your watch. Have any stood out to you as being particularly innovative or far-reaching?

Psychoanalytic therapy: a less intensive therapy (usually 1–3 times weekly for 1–3 years) with similar aims and techniques. As an A-level student I was interested in Laing and the anti-psychiatry movement, so I knew all the criticisms of Freud before I had read anything he’d written – much like many of the students who come to the museum today. The turning point was reading The Interpretation of Dreams during my second year at university. I felt an immediate affinity with Freud’s way of thinking, it was like ‘coming home’. I’d studied Physics, Zoology and English Literature at A-level and all these influences were there in the way Freud constructed his extraordinary theory.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). I shall here focus in particular on the theme of voyeurism, which also implicates us as spectators, and on the symbolic significance of the cut-off ear, the film’s iconic and emblematic MacGuffin. 4. Jamie Ruers Freud’s ideas continue to inspire empirical research in many areas. One such area is neuroscience, where there is now an interdisciplinary field called neuro-psychoanalysis. Neuroscientist and psychoanalyst Mark Solms suggests that psychoanalysis currently provides the best conceptual starting point for understanding subjective experience scientifically. Solms has, for example, provided some intriguing support for Freud’s idea of dreaming as wish fulfilment by isolating neural mechanisms that are closely involved with dreaming (Solms 2000). I’ve worked with you for many years and throughout that time you have always had exactly the same lunch. Can you explain? Psychoanalysis: a theory of the mind and form of intensive long-term therapy (usually 4–5 times weekly for several years), which focuses on the role of the unconscious mind in human behaviour and psychological distress. The success of the psychodynamic approach raises some uncomfortable questions for the prevailing medical model of serious mental illnesses such as schizophrenia. The medical model sees schizophrenia as an illness to be cured, whereas from a psychodynamic approach it is thought about more as a way of being in the world: if you take away the schizophrenia, you take away the person too. Where the medical model assumes that the schizophrenic patient has lost touch with reality, the assumption in psychoanalytic theory is that everyone’s experience of reality is distorted by past experience and the unconscious, which means that it would be a mistake to assume that there is some unproblematic standpoint from which ‘normal’ people can assess reality.

A spectacular failure as a retiree, he took up a job as CEO of the Portland Trust, which worked on both sides of the Israel/Palestine divide. Here he designed the initiative to build Rawabi, the first planned city for Palestinians in modern times. 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 This conference invites psychoanalysts, scholars and cinephiles to reflect on these Lynchian enigmas. What do we mean by ‘Lynchian’? Beyond the apparent incoherence of his films, are there hidden logics at play? Are Lynch and Freud in alignment? And what light can psychoanalysis shed on the Lynchian uncanny?Stephen Kon is a practising solicitor of 40 years standing, specialising in EU and competition law. He was previously an academic in the School of European studies at Sussex University and Senior Partner of a City law firm. He chaired for five years the London Jewish Cultural Centre and is currently a Trustee of the Association of Jewish Refugees. Wendy Monkhouse The wonderful (but strange!) filmic worlds of David Lynch lend themselves surprisingly well to Freudo-Lacanian thinking. In this special LiS event, Olga Cox Cameron will be presenting her contribution to a new collection of essays, Freud/Lynch: Behind the Curtain. And on a lighter note… You are on a desert island, that fortunately has a power supply but no internet connection, and you are only allowed to have one of the following with you: your Kindle with Freud’s complete works, or your mp3 player containing Wagner’s complete works (versions of your choice). Which would you choose?

Jamie has given talks on Viennese modernism and the Surrealists at the Freud Museum London, the Austrian Cultural Forum, and is featured on documentaries such as Art & Mind. She has published articles and essays on psychoanalysis, philosophy, and art in The Art Newspaper, various Freud Museum publications, and artist monographs. This is her first edited book with hopefully many more to come. Freud’s ideas have also found growing influence in the very different field of corporate management. Frans Cilliers (2018) studied accounting executives who were given psychodynamic coaching. The executives reported that they gained valuable insights into the origins of their anxieties and their motives for leadership, and that these insights significantly aided them in their roles. This event is a fundraiser for our upcoming ‘Young Psychologists’ Club’, a free offering for A Level Psychology students. Our Young Psychologists will benefit from a platform to connect with one-another, participate in extra-curricular activities, and access to a range of exclusive careers talks, revision sessions and inspiring insights from subject experts across the landscape of psychology, psychotherapy and mental health. The work in this online exhibition, made as a response to our access to the museum, is resonant and timely. When you are faced with the choice ‘who do you love best, mummy or daddy?’ it’s sometimes best to make a strategic withdrawal. I’d take the complete works of Darwin and study the ecology of the island.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). Please note that this is not a dream interpretation workshop. Participants will not be able to discuss their own dreams. The opportunity to consider the relations between home space and work space, between objects present and objects on screen, in collaboration with the Freud Museum has been a delight. It comes while we are embedded in our own domestic spaces, which has had an intensity over the last 12 months like never before. The way that objects and spaces profoundly connect with us via screens is reflected in the psychic plasticity of Freud’s work on dreams. In combination with his avid collecting of material objects and antiquities (and their on-screen digitization), this has been fertile territory for our18 artists. This talk will explore some common misconceptions about symbolism, and discuss aspects of the formation of symbols and the establishment of the symbolic function. 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 might the two agree on?

What is the point of documenting these dreams, or sharing them with other people? Deirdre Barrett, an assistant professor of psychology at Harvard Medical School who edits the journal Dreaming and published a special portfolio of Covid dreams research this fall, said in a statement that tuning into your Covid dreams can be revealing and potentially cathartic: “Your dreams can make you more aware of just what about the pandemic is bothering you the most,” she said. And talking about them with others can help you understand how many of these concerns and sorrows we share. He also produced an independent report for the UK Labour Government on welfare to work in 2007, called Reducing Dependency, Increasing Opportunity. This led to a job as Conservative Minister for Welfare Reform (2010-16), where he worked to reshape the British welfare system. In particular he was involved in creating and shaping Universal Credit, to break the poverty and welfare traps. 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. You’ve been at the forefront of the Museum’s unique and innovative psychoanalytic education service since its inception, holding sessions with countless visiting school groups. What did you set out to achieve, and how did you go about it? “I think if we work at the Freud Museum, we should take Freud’s example as a touchstone and use our own lives as part of the data of analytic investigation and dissemination.” Ivan Ward Costume plays an important but under-recognised part in Lynch’s aesthetic. 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. It will also playfully examine the influence Lynch’s work has had on fashion. 6. Jaice Sara TitusAnalytic Agora is a peer-reviewed psychoanalytic journal, published annually, which aims at promoting awareness of psychoanalysis – as a placeholder – in social bonds, with the view to setting up an open but critical space for debates between different schools of psychoanalytic thought, outside the dogmatism of regulatory bodies and partisan training organisations. Juliet Rosenfeld is a psychoanalytic psychotherapist and writer who works in London. She has a special clinical interest in both grief and love (as the two are often so profoundly entwined) and working with those who have suffered bereavement, recently or in the past. Juliet read languages at Oxford before a ten year career in advertising and marketing, ending up in the Civil Service. Juliet qualified in 2012 as an integrative psychotherapist but is passionate about psychoanalysis and specifically how its ideas can be useful and applied to bigger audiences. Juliet is also an elected Board Member of the UKCP ( United Kingdom Council Of Psychotherapy) which represents 12,000 psychotherapists, and takes a keen interest in how any talking therapy can become more usual, and available to anyone who might benefit from it. She is currently working on her second book and has written for a number of national publications on relationships, grief and psychotherapy. Anthony J Spiro OBE JP