Freud museum

The Freud museum have some great exhibitions plus you get to look around a historic house at the same time. Freud, who himself only lived there a year, had lovely furniture: painted cupboards (Austrian country style), his famous couch, covered with dark red Arabian carpets, many African sculptures and your basic Jewish middle-class Hampstead interior circa 1940. I love looking at people's houses. I just wish they still had the kitchen. There is also a family tree on the wall. I found it amusing that his wife was called Martha (mater, mother?)

On Thursday night the Freud museum held an opening for an exhibition around the theme Fathers and Sons. Almost everybody in attendance looked ancient and quite a few looked like Sigmund Freud himself. There was one guy, complete with glasses, white beard and domed forehead who was a total doppelganger. If he applied to a lookalike agency, he'd be inundated (although they perhaps have more call for Posh-Spice-a-likes). 

Introducing the show were various dignitaries from Austria, one of whom gave a speech in 'Cherman'. He had a translator, but it was easier to understand the German, where I got about 1 word in 5, more than I did from the translator. In the end he gave up, saying:

I wouldn't want to burn you anymore. 

The director of the Freud museum, another man with mad white sticking out hair (a style curiously popular with academics), gave a little speech:

We like the artists to focus on the fact that they are exhibiting in this historic house. Psychoanalysis had unfortunately in the last 40 to 50 years become very establishment. This exhibition shows a time when psychoanalysis was still revolutionary.

The exhibition focused on two people I knew little about: Hans Gross and his son, psychoanalyst Otto Gross.

Hans Gross was one of the creators of criminalistics, crime scene investigation. Alongside the progress he made in this field, he also had some pretty dodgy theories, about the link between the shape of skulls and criminality. (Precursor to the holocaust. As my friend Dvd says, (and calls Freud 'Fraud') things like the holocaust don't appear out of the blue. The ingredients are all there, in the zeitgeist, and all it takes it a little nudge for them to appear fully grown, in concrete form).

His son Otto Gross, was an anarchist, drug addict, goddess worshiper and free love adherent. He held 'Cult of Astarte' orgies in a barn in the Austrian countryside. He also was a founder of the Monte Virita commune in Switzerland. The  black and white photographs of this community look like any hippy festival, long haired naked people cavorting in the countryside, except that this is early 20th Century. 

He slept with Frieda Weekley (who went on to have a relationship with D.H. Lawrence) and her sister. Two other women that he slept with, influenced by him, committed suicide. (As this was when they became pregnant by him, clearly his goddess-worshipping tendencies escaped him at this point).

His father, Hans, then used his connections to have him committed to an asylum, in part to get custody of Otto's children. There was an international outcry and Otto was released.

Otto detested his father but needed him as a counter-point. When Hans Gross died, Otto died not long afterwards, directionless without someone to hate. 

The author Franz Kafka, a student of Hans Gross who, having met Otto Gross on a train, reputedly based his book The Trial on the Gross asylum case. 

The exhibition highlights a fascinating period of history, with everyone shagging everyone else. And of course the D.H.Lawrence obscenity trial for Lady Chatterley's lover heralded the start of 'Free love'. The 1960's started here. 

Dreams and dirty laundry

Yesterday I went to see the Korean film 'I'm a cyborg but that's ok' at the ICA. By the same director, Chan-wook Park, that directed 'Old Boy'. A young woman believes she is a cyborg and is admitted to a mental hospital where she develops a relationship with a young man who can steal souls. The film is aesthetically pleasing, with subtle pastel colours, but has little plot. It's as if someone is transcribing a dream to film. The time line is confusing to Western minds, with flashbacks and forwards unclearly delineated. But some Asian languages do not have tenses for their verbs and I mused upon whether this is a factor that influences Asian film editing, in that it is not linear.

Jean-luc Godard was the first director, I believe, as part of the 'Nouvelle Vague' to employ jumpy editing in 'Au bout de souffle'. Studying for my degree in cinema at the Sorbonne-Pantheon, we spent hours studying Godard's films and I hate his wanky self-referential stuff. (Madonna is citing him as an influence for her recent film, probably why it's got such terrible reviews).

Dreams, glamour, drugs, water, diving, film and photography are all ruled by the planet Neptune in astrology. Christian Metz talks about film being a popular and seductive art form, the essence of glamour, due to films ability to capture the transitory and fragmentary nature of dreams and the unconscious. One of my favourite films is by Wim Wenders 'Until the end of the world' in which a machine is invented that can record your dreams. The protagonists in the film become obsessed and trapped in this circular reality in which they dream, record their dreams, watch their dream recording which in turn influences their future dreams. The manga film 'Paprika' also has a dream 'catching' machine.

I found 'I'm a cyborg' hard to relate to emotionally, hard to care about what happened to the main characters, but was interested that the two people in our discussion group that did connect to the film were, in fact, from Asian backgrounds. I ventured that perhaps there is a code or allusions within this film that us as Westerners cannot understand. When today we look at medieval paintings, we cannot interpret them as people did at the time, for the symbols and meanings, apart from the obvious ones, are largely lost to us. Seeing Mike Leigh and Ken Loach films in Paris, I realised that there were a whole host of references that the French could not pick up upon, despite their admiration for these directors.

That day the full moon was in Scorpio. Leaving the cinema, I got the urge for a 'truth and reconciliation' style confrontation. A few years ago, while undergoing a stimulating but devastingly abusive relationship, in my efforts to extricate myself, I slept with this man's best friend, J. Bad idea. Especially when the next morning he said he'd rather fuck my 10 year-old daughter. Stunned and hurt, I gasped, winded from shock "You can't say that to me". We were in Norfolk so in tears, as you can well imagine, I jumped into my car and drove back to London.

In London I spoke to mutual friends who said they also had seen this guy, J, behave inappropriately around children. J was a larger than life and charismatic character, like Henry VIII on crack, constantly causing trouble in his street.

Once he decided it would be a good idea to be able to visit his neighbour more easily and drilled a large hole through the fireplace straight into his neighbours living room. The neighbours' wife was particularly vexed. He also took the roof off his kitchen so that he could cook under the stars (a lovely idea but rather impractical in Britain). There were nightly projections of his films on to neighbouring blocks of flats. The front door was never locked, and J often wandered around partially nude, laughing loudly and booming outrageous comments. Eventually he burnt his own house down.

He also had a quite sensitive and creative side but this was gradually subsumed by 'water on the brain' in his words or more prosaically, mental illness.

I avoided him after that but heard sad stories of his breakdown, and subsequent stays, sometimes voluntary, often compulsory, in hospital. After the 7/7 bombings he left me a message to ask if I was alright, which touched me.

Hearing from mutual friends last night that he was very depressed and lonely, I went to see him for the first time in 4 years.

"I need to talk to you" I said.

We sat down. I was struck by how he had aged and his Guantanamo Bay orange pyjamas, apparently a memento from a local mental ward.

"You hurt me. Your remark about me and my child really hurt me. I've not come here to fight or criticize or judge, I just want to discuss this with you".

He looked shocked and said that I was making this incident up. I persisted, calmly, standing my ground

"No J you did say that, and you hurt me. I'd like you to apologize. I don't believe that you really wanted to have sex with my daughter (that big scarey word paedophile) but you need to be aware that your consciously outrageous behaviour and your lack of boundaries can hurt other people".

He made hot chocolate in a chipped cup. We sat while he talked about his time in mental hospitals, how sex meant nothing to him, how he'd been abused as a child by his parents' friends. He said he had sex with women whilst in mental hospital; wards are not separate for men and women. I have female friends who have been sectioned and who have had sex with male patients whom under normal circumstances they wouldn't have anything to do with. It's part of their illness and they are vulnerable.

He said he couldn't remember having sex with me, or being in Norfolk or making those remarks about my child. He also could not remember that I knew his brother, who I had met whilst travelling through Peru some time ago. He said the drugs they gave him, anti-psychotic drugs, wiped clean his memory. But he did remember, and we laughed together, how the erstwhile boyfriend (who styled himself as a fan of 'Free Love'), tried to prevent us from leaving for Norfolk by letting down the tyres of my van and calling the police in Hackney and Norfolk to say that I had been kidnapped by J. (I guess the free love stuff only applied to him not me.)

It seemed J's memory loss was rather selective.

At the end of this, however, it felt to me that we had come to some kind of peace and I shook his hand and took my leave.