Unsettling Memory

Paul Coldwell and Bettina von Zwehl’s site-responsive exhibition Setting Memory presents us with a series of evocative objects that work to unsettle memory. The exhibition evokes: Sigmund Freud’s use of archaeology as a metaphor within psychoanalysis; the clinical work of psychoanalysis and Anna Freud’s understanding of this as a creative process; and the difficult conditions under which Freud emigrated to London from Vienna in 1938, and the historical tragedy that thereafter ensued in Europe. By considering the critical intimacy between the evocative artworks within Setting Memory and the history and memory embodied in Berggasse 19, this talk will explore Freud’s insistence that memory is something ‘that is still alive’ in the present, undergoing ‘rearrangement’ and ‘retranscription’ from time to time, and that the work we do in the consulting room, unsettles our memories, as we slowly uncover and ‘translate’ the living traces of our fragmented