The Freud Museum London announces a second cycle of the Freudian Research Seminar Series (FRSS) commencing this autumn 2025. The FRSS convenes virtually once every month and seeks to establish a forum which both cultivates and circulates new psychoanalytically informed research. They welcome both PhD students and Researchers across disciplines to participate and form a community in which new ideas can be openly discussed and developed. To celebrate their forthcoming exhibition: Housekeeper, their theme for the second series is ‘Home’. They are looking for papers between 30–40 minutes in length to be delivered from October to June. Potential topics include but are not limited to:
• Homelessness: the loss of home; or providing therapy to those in financial crisis
• Renting v. Ownership of a home and its mental impact
• Displacement and the refugee crisis
• ‘The ego is not master in its own house’; home between body and mind
• Construction of identity (gender, sexuality, ethnicity) through the domestic space
• Home as the parental domain
• Cinematic / Literary / Artistic representations and engagements with the domestic space
• 20 Maresfield Gardens / 19 Bergasse
• The domestic space as setting for psychoanalytic practice
• Furniture, between commodity and memory
• Home and the unhomely (uncanny)
iPSA authors will wish to share their developing ideas on the “Home” theme:
• Iraj Ghoochani, Through the Looking Pane: Freud’s Mirror, the Domestic Uncanny, and the Topology of the Torus
Excerpt: This paper investigates the small mirror that hangs on the windowpane of Sigmund Freud’s study—first in his Vienna apartment at Berggasse 19, and later installed in his London home at 20 Maresfield Gardens. Although the provenance of the mirror is clearly documented by the Freud Museum, its perceptual and symbolic function destabilizes any simple binary between original and replica, object and image. The mirror occupies the function of a door: a liminal threshold, a ritual passage between the inside and the outside, the seen and the hidden. Like a door that both opens and bars entry, it marks the boundary between self and other, interior and exterior, presence and absence—while never fully resolving any of them. Positioned against a windowpane, it disorients spatial expectations: turning the gaze outward even as it folds inward, reflecting what is behind while facing the beyond.
• Don Kunze, The Projective Home: Topological Aspects of the Uncanny in Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping
Excerpt: Lacan’s diagram of the projective plane, given in Seminar XII, happens to be all about home in relation to the non-home. It says, in short, that home and non-home are the same; that they are bound by a surface that twists as it glides between two circular, circulating voids. To avoid giving a picturesque falsification of this, allow me to switch to a possible literary counterpart to this twisty donut. It is Marilynne Robinson’s 1980 novel, Housekeeping. Set in a fictional town in Idaho, the story suffers the traumas of catastrophe. Wikipedia puts it this way: ‘The novel treats the subject of housekeeping, not only in the domestic sense of cleaning, but in the larger sense of keeping a spiritual home for one’s self and family in the face of loss, for the girls experience a series of abandonments’. Abstract for submission.
• Lorens Holm, To Be Announced