When Art and Psychoanalysis Meet: Critical Adventures Inside the Freud Museum London

In this article, the author considers the extent to which site-responsive contemporary art can impact upon our understanding clinical psychoanalytic practice. In order to achieve this, the author asks: What are the effects of having contemporary art exhibited inside various museological spaces whose primary purpose is neither to house nor to exhibit it? Why place contemporary art in the Freud Museum London? Why engage with psychoanalysis? What is to be gained for the museums and for the history, practice, and theory of psychoanalysis? What becomes of the artworks, and our understanding of them?

The author concludes that the various affects of bringing together contemporary art and psychoanalysis is to provide us with a reciprocal alliance between these two practices that extend, critique, and disrupt one another.