Freud’s 4pm Session: Abécédaire

Organised by:

Freud Museum London

Description

ANNA. MY SISTER

Sharon Kivland will read from her book Abécédaire (MOIST, 2022), written for five days a week over a year, no longer than the length of a psychoanalytic hour. She followed Freud’s model of train travel for his theory of free association, acting ‘as though, for instance, [you were] a traveller sitting next to the window of a railway carriage and describing to someone inside the carriage the changing views which [you] see outside’. As for her characters, many of their names begin with A: ‘Anna, Anne, Ann, all those women who are not my sisters, who are my sisters’. She will read extracts in which a certain Anna F. goes dancing and ice-skating, renounces marriage, writes and dreams, walks her clever dog, nurses her dying father, sews and weaves. Weaving, as we know, may be a metaphor for psychoanalysis, and weaving, as also we know, may be done and undone. ‘Kivland must lose the thread of Anna Freud’s life. Her vignettes and readings invite other vignettes and readings, which in turn invite others’ (Louis Lüthi). This afternoon she will be in the company of Simon Wortham.

Book tickets