Freud's Lost Lecture.
Freud’s Lost Lecture is a short film made in collaboration with the author Deborah Levy, which critically and humorously engages with Sigmund Freud’s theories of dream interpretation and hysteria in women. The film creates a speculative fiction of a Freud lecture, juxtaposing digitally composited images to voice-over text, playing with shifts in scale and uncanny movement in a formal strategy aimed at highlighting the performative elements of hysterical female behaviour, and questioning how such movements have been interpreted by Freudian theory. Thorburn’s research aims to provoke discussion about the ambivalent relationship between feminism and Freudian theory. See Portfolio Booklet for documentation of research dimensions.
- Submitting institution
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The University of Westminster
- Unit of assessment
- 32 - Art and Design: History, Practice and Theory
- Output identifier
- qqy0z
- Type
- Q - Digital or visual media
- Publisher
- -
- Month
- February
- Year
- 2019
- URL
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- Supplementary information
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- Request cross-referral to
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- Output has been delayed by COVID-19
- No
- COVID-19 affected output statement
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- Forensic science
- No
- Criminology
- No
- Interdisciplinary
- No
- Number of additional authors
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0
- Research group(s)
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- Proposed double-weighted
- No
- Reserve for an output with double weighting
- No
- Additional information
- The project questions the Freudian analysis of hysteria in women, and is guided by Thorburn and Levy’s concern to develop a collaborative film-making process that critically engages with a canonical text, yet does not simply result in an illustration of that text. The project’s starting point is the observation that despite the foundational importance of Freud’s ideas on psychoanalytic feminism, his interpretation of female patients’ hysterical symptoms needs to be questioned. Within the field of contemporary artistic engagement with Freudian ideas, Thorburn’s research develops a collaborative process, radically shifting the focus away from autobiographical utterance or first-person exploration of trauma. Freud’s Lost Lecture also proposes a form for critical engagement with Freudian ideas, which moves away from overuse of the female body.
The film highlights scale and movement as formal strategies for questioning Freud’s analysis of the hysterical woman. Eschewing a straightforward illustration of the text, Thorburn develops a collaborative form of film-making that might apply to similar canonical theoretical works. Freud’s Lost Lecture has been screened at: Freud Museum (2019), European Psychoanalytic Film Festival (2019), Oaxaca FilmFest (2019), Buenos Aires International Film Festival (2019), among other venues.
- Author contribution statement
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- Non-English
- No
- English abstract
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