Freud/Lynch

Behind the Curtain

Chris Rodley, Carol Owens, Olga Cox Cameron, Andrea Sabbadini, Jamie Ruers, Stefan Marianski, Allister MacTaggart, Richard Martin, Todd McGowan, Tamara Dellutri, Richard Martin, Allister MacTaggart, Todd McGowan, Jamie Ruers, Stefan Marianski, Jamie Ruers, Stefan Marianski

• Publisher: Phoenix Publishing House
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN: 9781912691951
• eBook ISBN: 9781800130647
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Psychoanalysis
• Index: Psychology

The films of David Lynch are sometimes said to be unintelligible. They confront us with strange dreamscapes populated with bizarre characters, obscure symbols and an infuriating lack of narrative consistency. Yet despite their opacity, they hold us transfixed.

Lynch, who once told an interviewer, "I love dream logic, " would surely agree with Sigmund Freud's famous claim that "before the problem of the creative artist, psychoanalysis must lay down its arms." But what else might the two agree on?

Rather than presuming to fill in what Lynch leaves open by positing some forbidden psychosexual reality lurking behind his trademark red curtains, this book instead maintains a fidelity to the mysteries of his wonderful and strange filmic worlds, finding in them productive spaces where thought and imagination can be set to work.

With contributions from scholars, psychoanalysts, cinephiles, and filmmakers, this collection of essays explores potential affinities and disjunctions between Lynch and Freud. Encompassing themes such as art, identity, architecture, fantasy, dreams, hysteria and the unconscious, Freud/Lynch takes as its point of departure the possibility that the enterprise in which these two distinct investigators are engaged might in some sense be a shared one.

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title
• Full Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• About the editors and contributors
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: “Listen, do you want to know a secret?” Lynch stays silent
• Chapter 2: What’s so Lynchian about that? Defining a cultural moment with some notes from Freud and Lacan
• Chapter 3: Dream logic in Mulholland Drive
• Chapter 4: Lost angels in Los Angeles: Lynchian psychogenic fugues
• Chapter 5: “It’s a strange world, isn’t it?” A voyeuristic lens on David Lynch’s Blue Velvet
• Chapter 6: The fragmented case of the Lynchian hysteric
• Chapter 7: Möbian adventures on the lost highway
• Chapter 8: “It is an illusion”: the artful life of David Lynch
• Chapter 9: David Lynch sprawls
• Chapter 10: Waiting for Agent Cooper: the ends of fantasy in Twin Peaks: The Return
• chapter 11: Panel discussion on Twin Peaks: The Return
• Index