HUGE THANKS to Simone Atenea Medina Polo and everyone who attended the event on Saturday! We had a wonderful and thought-provoking presentation and discussion. Here is the recording. Enjoy!
Coming up next we have the second class in An Introduction to Psychoanalysis on Saturday, October 18th. You may watch the recording of the first class HERE, where we covered Freud’s early life, family dynamics and how they influenced his later theories, as well as his work with Charcot and Breuer, culminating in Studies on Hysteria (1895). In the second class we will look at Freud’s correspondence with Fliess and how it functioned as a self-analysis; we’ll focus on The Interpretation of Dreams (1900) and the dream of Irma’s Injection, and discuss major works including The Psychopathology of Everyday Life (1901), Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious (1905), Fragment of a Case of Hysteria (1905), and Three Essays of the Theory of Sexuality (1905). There will be plenty of time for discussion and free association so feel free to bring your thoughts and dreams.
Then on Saturday, October 25th we have our first event with fabulous Freudian cinephile Mary Wild! She will present Feminine Jouissance in Horror Cinema. Join us for a bold investigation of women’s excessive pleasure and its cinematic expressions. More info and REGISTER HERE. Proceeds raised go directly to our presenter.
In this lecture, we will investigate representations of feminine jouissance in three films: Possession (1981) dir. Andrzej Żuławski, Paranormal Activity (2007) dir. Oren Peli, and Kiss of the Damned (2012) dir. Alexandra Cassavetes. The proposition is that women are capable of a transgressive and excessive bodily pleasure that reaches outside of the phallocentric order (male created discourse). This supplementary enjoyment causes women to be pushed out of a conscious collective reality; functionally it produces an (at best) ambivalent and most often fearful response within a culture that happens to confront female sexual power. In this context, reference will also be made to the psychoanalytic structure of hysteria, specifically to interpret the violent physical component of women in these films.
Mary Wild @psycstar is a leading voice in cinema studies, and the creator of the Projections lecture series at Freud Museum London, applying psychoanalysis to film interpretation. She is the author of Psychoanalysing Horror Cinema (2025), and posts exclusive content on Patreon and Substack. This event is hosted by Rendering Unconscious Center for Psychoanalysis.
