Freud

The triumph of surrealism

19 October 2024 9:00 am

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

15 June 2024 9:00 am

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’?

17 February 2024 9:00 am

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?

20 January 2024 9:00 am

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

27 May 2023 9:00 am

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

17 September 2022 9:00 am

Michael Hall on how the Queen made her mark on the Royal Collection

The treatment of mental illness continues to be a scandal

21 May 2022 9:00 am

There is much more desperation in this searching and enlightening history than there are remedies. Andrew Scull is a distinguished…

Do Jews think differently?

5 October 2019 9:00 am

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

10 March 2018 9:00 am

The precarious stasis of late pregnancy offers the narrator of Jessie Greengrass’s exceptional first novel a space — albeit an…

Mysticism and metamorphosis

2 September 2017 9:00 am

‘I frankly hate Descartes,’ states a character in Nicole Krauss’s new novel, Forest Dark: ‘The more he talks about following…

Hans Asperger at the Children’s Clinic of the University of Vienna Hospital c.1940

Did Hans Asperger save children from the Nazis — or sell them out?

12 September 2015 9:00 am

Simon Baron-Cohen wonders whether the humane Hans Asperger may finally have betrayed the vulnerable children in his care in Nazi-occupied Vienna

Henrietta Bingham holds the whip hand with Stephen Tomlin at Ham Spray, home of Lytton Strachey and Dora Carrington

Good stories of bad Bloomsbury behaviour

27 June 2015 9:00 am

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

Iain Sinclair

Iain Sinclair and me — Michael Moorcock meets his semi-mythical version

20 June 2015 9:00 am

In the late 1980s Peter Ackroyd invited me to meet Iain Sinclair, whose first novel, White Chappell, Scarlet Tracings, I…

How consumer habits are subject to the law of unintended consequences

31 January 2015 9:00 am

Some time in the 1960s, a group of people in an advertising agency (among them Llewelyn Thomas, son of Dylan)…

Maggie Smith as Jocasta in Jean Cocteau’s ‘The Infernal Machine’, Lyric Theatre, Hammersmith, 1986

Brian Aldiss unpicks the Jocasta complex

24 January 2015 9:00 am

What if the gods of Greek myth had parallels with Freud’s notion of the unconscious? This is just one idea…

Sabina Spielrein: from psychiatric patient to psychoanalyst

29 November 2014 9:00 am

Sabina Spielrein was a psychiatrist and psychoanalyst with groundbreaking ideas about the role of the reproductive drive in human psychology…

The lesson of the young men fighting for Isis: evil is in all of us

6 September 2014 9:00 am

I had an interesting discussion with my friend Aidan Hartley earlier this week about whether the young men fighting for…

Two narcissists trapped in one static caravan

31 May 2014 9:00 am

I was two days alone in the caravan and no signal or reception of any sort. It was like a…

It's a stupid lie to say we're all bisexual

4 January 2014 9:00 am

It’s a stupid lie to say that we’re all attracted to both men and women

Do women want what they say they want?

28 September 2013 9:00 am

What do women want? You might have thought the Wife of Bath had got this one sorted, but Daniel Bergner…

Hysteria is a pile-up of unmotivated absurdities

21 September 2013 9:00 am

Terry Johnson’s acclaimed farce Hysteria opens in Sigmund Freud’s Hampstead home in 1938. The godfather of psychobabble is ambushed by…