Freud
When Freud met Hitler
A new play by Lawrence Marks and Maurice Gran, the writers of Birds of a Feather, feels like a major…
The triumph of surrealism
When Max Ernst was asked by an American artist to define surrealism at a New York gathering of exiles in…
Limp and lifeless: Freud’s Last Session reviewed
Freud’s Last Session stars Anthony Hopkins and Matthew Goode and is a work of speculative fiction asking what would have…
What do we mean when we say we are ‘giving up’?
Adam Phillips explores the various implications of the phrase, contrasting giving up smoking or alcohol with giving up hope – and being given up on
Have we all become more paranoid since the pandemic?
Covid-19 proved devastating to our self-confidence and faith in others, says Daniel Freeman, who describes the ‘corrosive’ effects of mistrust on individuals and society
Double trouble
Elsa, a concert pianist, is starting to panic. Her adoptive father is dying, and she keeps meeting her doppleganger, fuelling an obsession with her origins
The art of the monarchy
Michael Hall on how the Queen made her mark on the Royal Collection
A mad racket
There is much more desperation in this searching and enlightening history than there are remedies. Andrew Scull is a distinguished…
Do Jews think differently?
Sixteen years into a stop-go production saga, I got a call from the director of The Song of Names with…
Jessie Greengrass’s Sight is unashamedly philosophical
The precarious stasis of late pregnancy offers the narrator of Jessie Greengrass’s exceptional first novel a space — albeit an…
Mysticism and metamorphosis
‘I frankly hate Descartes,’ states a character in Nicole Krauss’s new novel, Forest Dark: ‘The more he talks about following…
Hero or collaborator?
Simon Baron-Cohen wonders whether the humane Hans Asperger may finally have betrayed the vulnerable children in his care in Nazi-occupied Vienna
Filling in the Bloomsbury puzzle
Even the Group considered Bunny Garnett and Henrietta Bingham quite ‘wayward’. Their powerful charms appealed to both sexes, says Anne Chisholm — and they even managed a fling together
One vast, blaring cultural circus
In the late 1980s Peter Ackroyd invited me to meet Iain Sinclair, whose first novel, White Chappell, Scarlet Tracings, I…
Shopping and viewing
Some time in the 1960s, a group of people in an advertising agency (among them Llewelyn Thomas, son of Dylan)…
Women of Thebes
What if the gods of Greek myth had parallels with Freud’s notion of the unconscious? This is just one idea…
From patient to doctor
Sabina Spielrein was a psychiatrist and psychoanalyst with groundbreaking ideas about the role of the reproductive drive in human psychology…
The wolf in all of us
I had an interesting discussion with my friend Aidan Hartley earlier this week about whether the young men fighting for…
Low life
I was two days alone in the caravan and no signal or reception of any sort. It was like a…
Having it both ways
It’s a stupid lie to say that we’re all attracted to both men and women
Basic instincts
What do women want? You might have thought the Wife of Bath had got this one sorted, but Daniel Bergner…
Freudian slip
Terry Johnson’s acclaimed farce Hysteria opens in Sigmund Freud’s Hampstead home in 1938. The godfather of psychobabble is ambushed by…
