It is a hundred years since the tragic loss of Freud’s daughter, Sophie Halberstadt-Freud, to the Spanish flu shortly after the end of World War One. In this lecture which, due to Covid 19, has been postponed from Freud’s birthday to the day of his death, Jacqueline Rose will argue that this historic moment – of grief, pandemic and war – had an even more decisive impact on Freud’s meditations than has previously been recognised. Freud’s writings on the death drive collide with, and are fuelled by, an increasingly urgent engagement with our innermost psychic and biological relationship to the past and, at the same time, with the cruelty and injustice of the world. Today, as we confront the darkness of the hour, psychoanalysis has never been more urgently needed. What can we still learn from Freud’s thought about how to live and how to die in our own troubled times?
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