All The Things You Could Be By Now If Sigmund Freud's Wife Was Your Mother

Charles Mingus’ Sigmund Freud-Inspired Song Dedicated to Mothers Everywhere (1961)

And now, ladies and gentleman, you have been such a wonderful audience. We have a special treat in store for you. This is a composition dedicated to all mothers. And it’s titled “All The Things You Could Be By Now If Sigmund Freud’s Wife Was Your Mother.” Which means if Sigmund Freud’s wife was your mother, all the things you could be by now. Which means nothing, you got it? Thank you.

Melanie Klein walking in the garden (1950)

Some rare, silent cine footage shows Melanie Klein walking in the garden of her home in Clifton Hill at about this time. The identity of the filmmaker, and of the gentleman who appears with Klein, are unknown.

+ complementary dark garden music:

Stop Making Sense: Music from the Perspective of the Real

Buy Stop Making Sense here. - Free delivery worldwide

Stop Making Sense offers an original and compelling theory of music 'from the perspective of the real' as this term is understood according to the Lacanian orientation in psychoanalysis. Specific examples and cases discussed include Freud's melophobia, or fear of music; Che Guevara's revolutionary a-rhythmia; John F. Nash's obsession with 'Bach's Little Fugue'; Talking Heads and Asperger's syndrome/autism; Yoko Ono and the sense of 'lack' in the Beatles; the role of 'Imagine' in the murder of John Lennon; Brian Eno and the digital auto-generation of Freud's 'oceanic feeling'; Aphex Twin and the brain-dance of the hikikomori; and the utopian promise of Merzbow.

The first part of the book explains its theoretical and methodological underpinnings that are based in a reading of subjects and symptoms such as amusia. The second and third parts focus on contemporary examples that look at how music has become both a powerful locus of discontent and also a form of orientation in an age of generalized psychosis imposed by neoliberalism as a form of governance. This has been accelerated by the regime of digital telecommunications since the early 1990s, which has seen the emergence of various new symptoms related to the autistic jouissance to which we have been confined with our gadgets and networked computers.

Buy Stop Making Sense here. - Free delivery worldwide

Petite Meller, whose Baby Love was a 2015 anthem, discusses Lacan, quantum physics and how she came to invent ‘nouveau jazzy pop’

Postgraduate philosophy student at the weekends and stylised disco-pop star during the week…

“My thesis is about the sublime and psychosis,” she says. “Schiller was the first to raise this term ‘the sublime’ – he wrote some poetry about this – and then Kant, who I’m writing about. Kant was writing about the sublime of Schiller. The sublime is related to aesthetics and art – the transcendental. Kant says when you look at a drawing or a piece of art and enjoy it, you transcend your mind – you go beyond it to places… it expands your mind. It’s like a joyful game.”

Read more about Petite Meller here: ‘I believe when you want something and imagine it, it happens’

Petite Meller outside the Freud Museum: ‘I believe in unconscious thought… I go to the mic and just let it out.’ Photograph: Island Records

The Velvet Underground playing for the American Society of Clinical Psychiatrists in 1966

The Velvet Underground wreaked havoc at their first gig after hooking up with Warhol, playing "Heroin" with a film of a torture scene with a man tied to a chair. In front of the movie danced a real, whip-wielding guy, Gerard Malanga. The group's friend Barbara Rubin filmed the psychiatrists, at the same time confronting the 350-strong audience with embarrassing questions about their personal sexual behavior. "It was ridiculous, outrageous, painful," said Dr. Harry Weinstock in the New York Times. 'Everything that's new doesn't necessarily have meaning. It seemed like a whole prison ward had escaped.' "You want to do something for mental health?" asked another psychiatrist. "Kill the story."

John Cale, Welshman, and former member of seminal rock band the Velvet Underground was interviewed in the Guardian:

… what about the night Andy Warhol got the Velvet Underground to play a convention of psychiatrists at Delominco’s steak house? The psychiatrists were appalled. “That was revenge – Lou’s revenge,” Cale says, “and I was all for it.” As a teenager, Reed had been given electric shock treatment to “cure” him of homosexuality. “Lou and I were going to put out a record with his psychiatrist’s letter on one side and my arrest record* on the other,”

The Velvet Underground filmed on 16mm by Jonas Mekas at the Annual Dinner of the New York Society for Clinical Psychiatry, Delmonico's Hotel, New York City, January 13, 1966. Also featuring Edie Sedgewick, Gerard Malanga and Andy Warhol. Originally included in the film 'Scenes from the Life of Andy Warhol'.

Excerpt from the book Women’s Experimental Cinema:

On January 13 1966, Warhol was invited to be the evening’s entertainment at the NY society for Clinical Psychiatry’s forty thir- annual dinner, held at Delmonico’s Hotel. Bursting into the room with a camera, as the Velvet Underground acoustically tortured the guests and Gerard Malanga and Edie Sedgwick performed the ‘whip dance’ in the background, Rubin taunted the attending psychiatrists. Casting blinding lights in their faces, Rubin hurled derogatory questions at the esteemed members of the medical profession, including: ‘What does her vagina feel like? Is his penis big enough? Do you eat her out? As the horrified guests began to leave Rubin continued her interrogation: ‘Why are you getting embarrassed? You’re a psychiatrist; you’re not supposed to get embarrassed. The following day the NY Times reported on the event; their chosen headline, ‘Shock treatment for psychiatrists’, reveals the extent to which Rubin’s guerrilla tactics had inverted the sanctioned relationship between patient and doctor expert and amateur.

Arvo Pärt — a music legend beyond time, celebrates 80th birthday

The most famous Estonian and most performed living composer in the world turns 80 today.

Arvo Pärt (born 11 September 1935) is an Estonian composer of classical and sacred music. Since the late 1970s, Pärt has worked in a minimalist style that employs his self-invented compositional technique, tintinnabuli. His music is in part inspired by Gregorian chant.

Björk interviews Arvo Pärt for the BBC program 'Modern Minimalists' (1997)

A photo posted by Freud Quotes (@freud.quotes) on Sep 11, 2015 at 9:42am PDT

Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain

Buy Musicophilia here.

Oliver Sacks’ compassionate tales of people struggling to adapt to different neurological conditions have fundamentally changed the way we think of our own minds. In Musicophilia, he examines the powers of music through the individual experiences of patients, musicians and everyday people – those struck by affliction, unusual talent and even, in one case, by lightning – to show not only that music occupies more areas of our brain than language does, but also that it can torment, calm, organize and heal. Always wise and compellingly readable, these stories alter our conception of who we are and how we function, and show us an essential part of what it is to be human.

Oliver Sacks - Quotes

See also Psychology Summer Reads: 18 Books for Your Beach Bag!

Introducing Wagner: A Graphic Guide

Buy Introducing Wagner here.

Wagner’s operatic works rank with the supreme achievements of western culture. But acceptance of Wagner’s musical genius is tempered by feelings of misgiving and many believe the composer’s underlying ideas to be indefensible. A self-styled social revolutionary, Wagner thought the world could be redeemed through vegetarianism and Aryan philosophy.

Introducing Wagner: A Graphic Guide separates the composer’s art from the ideas and the arrogant destructive personal behaviour of the man.

Opera's Second Death

Buy Opera's Second Death here.

Opera's Second Death is a passionate exploration of opera - the genre, its masterpieces, and the nature of death. Using a dazzling array of tools, Slavoj Zizek and coauthor Mladen Dolar explore the strange compulsions that overpower characters in Mozart and Wagner, as well as our own desires to die and to go to the opera.