This article takes as its starting point the various versions (1919 and 1920) of Beyond the Pleasure Principle. In these versions, different and sometimes contradictory biological theories and principles play a crucial role in the argumentation. In the first version of the text, the references to Lamarck and Haeckel in particular are meant to support a metapsychological reflection starting from the clinical problem of traumatic neurosis. In the second version of the text, and with the introduction of a new drive theory, the focus shifts to an endogenous productive principle (the life drives). This shift implies a clear nuance and perhaps even undermining of the biological principles on which Freud oriented himself in the first version, and the significance of trauma and repetition. In the two versions of the text, Freud positions himself in different ways in the debates of his time in biology and the philosophy of the life sciences – between mechanistic and vitalistic approaches.
This special edition of Psychoanalysis and History emerges from two queer encounters that took place at the Freud Museum London in early 2025: a tour focusing on Anna Freud and Dorothy Burlingham's shared life in the house that became the Freud Museum, and a symposium the next day that considered the representation of their relationship in the film Freud's Last Session. Against a backdrop of increasing global fascism, the contributions to this edition interrogate the erasure and ambiguity surrounding this historic relationship, situating questions about it within psychoanalysis' complicity with and potential for resistance to normative forces around gender and sexuality. The contributors work with Kleinian, Lacanian, Laplanchean and psychosocial theory through a queer historiographic lens to explore how archival gaps, fantasies, cinematography and dyadic creativity can unsettle ossified narratives about psychoanalytic history and open space for alternative futures. By interrogating the binaries between repression and radicalism, concreteness and ambiguity, insiders and outsiders, the encounters set in motion by the contributions to this edition align with broader efforts to queer psychoanalysis, confront its colonial and normative legacies, and imagine a psychoanalysis that is responsive to contemporary struggles for gender, sexual, racial and disability justice. In doing so, it asks: what might psychoanalysis yet become in times of political regression?
The house in Hampstead that is, today, the Freud Museum London is best known as the last home of Sigmund Freud and his wife Martha. For nearly four decades, Anna Freud shared this home with Dorothy Burlingham, a fellow child psychoanalyst. A special guided tour of the museum in 2025, the centenary of Freud and Burlingham's first meeting, focused on their personal and professional relationship. Part I of this article reproduces this tour through vignettes, photographs and an edited version of the tour notes. In Part II, we critically consider the tour as an experiment in queering the Freud Museum London. We suggest that contemporary readings of Freudian theory, which emphasize the unpredictability of desire and the instability of identity, can enrich the recent 'queering the museum' movement (Sullivan & Middleton, 2021). We consider the repressed queerness of the family tree of psychoanalysis and propose the tour as an encounter with a 'ruined museum' (Landau & Pohl, 2021) with many absences and presences. Finally, we consider what these queer interactions with museums and museum objects might mobilize, as complex psychic experiences involving societal and cultural norms about gender and sexuality. We ask, what happens if we encounter the Freud Museum as the queer family home of psychoanalysis?
In this article, I explore my personal fascination with the historic relationship between Anna Freud and Dorothy Burlingham through the lens of queer historiography, 'lesbian ghosts feminism', and Laplanchean psychoanalytic theory. Mobilizing Derrida's Archive Fever and Saketopoulou's traumatophilia, I interrogate my compulsive fascination with archival absences and the temptation to construct 'infantile sexual theories' about liminally queer figures in psychoanalysis. Drawing on an autoethnographic account of my interactions with archival fragments, biographical material, and the representation of Freud and Burlingham's relationship in the film Freud's Last Session (2024), I argue for sustaining the enigma of their relationship rather than resolving it. Thickening this theoretical approach, I illuminate how encounters with incomplete psychoanalytic archives stimulate creative theorization, revealing intersections of sexuality and mythosymbolic structures in the traumata of the history of psychoanalysis. Ultimately, I suggest that embracing unsettling engagements with ambiguity in psychoanalytic history can enliven and support queering and decolonizing practices within the contemporary psychoanalytic clinic.
Starting from a supervisee's declaration that: 'psychoanalysis is lesbian!', this article narrates the complex history between psychoanalysis, non-normative gender and homosexuality. Touching on Anna Freud's long relationship with Dorothy Burlingham, Sigmund Freud's letter to the mother of a homosexual, Magnus Hirschfeld's pioneering research into gender and sexuality in Berlin, queer theorist Leo Bersani's difficult experiences in psychoanalysis, gay psychiatrist John E. Fryer's appearance in a mask at the annual convention of psychiatrists in 1973, and Paul B. Preciado's report to French psychoanalysts in 2019, the author argues that Freud forced us to think 'otherwise' about sexuality, but that psychoanalytic institutions have, instead, often reinforced normative assumptions about gender and sexuality. Considering Freud's familial nickname for his daughter Anna 'Antigone', and reading alongside Judith Butler's reframing of the myth of Antigone, the article suggests that the lesson of Anna-Antigone for psychoanalysis might be found at the threshold between life and death, in an 'other-sexuality', a difference that is not bound to identity.
This essay interrogates John Forrester's analysis of Jewish tenacity, and the relation of the latter to Freud's logic of ruin, memory and destruction. Forrester elucidates especially the connection that Freud draws between Jewish diaspora or exile following the destruction of the Second Temple of Jerusalem and the rise of Jewish high intellectuality as a ‘civilized value’, ultimately exhibiting Freud's conflicting relationship to Jewish nationalism and Zionism. This essay unravels what remains unexamined in both Freud and Forrester's discussions about statue and fragment, monument and remnant, dispersal and survival – that is, the legacies of violence and destruction for the natives of Palestine, who are absented from the textual and archaeological layers, and from Freud and Forrester's aims to reconstruct and replace a narrative of violence with a narrative of tenacity and survival.
