’Under Freud’s Couch’ Leif Elggren Performance, presentation and discussion

A  special performance and presentation by Leif Elggren, followed by a discussion between the artist and curator Lucia Farinati, chaired by Freud Museum deputy director, Ivan Ward.  A sold out event recorded at the Freud Museum London on 26 November 2012. Freud’s iconic psychoanalytic couch; an object which besides being a museological symbol that epitomizes the life and work of the father of psychoanalysis, is also a poignant listening device for recording the unheard and the unseen. It was on this couch, which inhabited the consulting rooms of both 20 Maresfield Gardens in Hampstead and Berggasse 19 in Vienna, that patients were listened to; a liminal space where free association and dreams were gathered and, in a certain way, a key listening point for the development of Freud’s analytical work. In this constructed space, a new form of listening was made palpable through the discovery of the unconscious and the birth of psychoanalysis. Using the microphone as a kind of third ear, Elggren’s recording under the couch brings to the forefront the potential to understand musical listening almost like a psychoanalytic treatment. 'Under the Couch' is a new CD release by Leif Elggren on Firework Edition Records with a critical text by Lucia Farinati. Leif Elggren is a writer, visual artist, book publisher, stage performer, and composer based in Stockholm. His varied and prolific output routinely involves dreams, subtle absurdities, and social hierarchies turned upside-down. His audio work, mostly conceptually based, but also often created as the soundtrack to an installation or performance, has been released on labels such as Ash International, Touch, Radium and his own Firework Edition. Lucia Farinati is an independent curator and researcher based in London. She is the Director of Sound Threshold, a long-term research project which explores the relationships between site, sound and text.