Ivan Ward Whacking and Strumming: A Freudian Perspective

Freud called it the ‘primal addiction’, but is there a more positive way of looking at masturbation from a Freudian perspective?

Ivan Ward is Deputy Director and Head of Learning at the Freud Museum London and manager of the museum’s conference programme. He is the author of a number of books and papers on psychoanalytic theory and on the applications of psychoanalysis to social and cultural issues. His latest publication is ‘Parsifal as Castration Drama’ (2017) in a special issue of The Wagner Journal based on a conference organised by the Freud Museum in 2016.

Solitary Pleasures in art and psychoanalysis is a day-long conference to accompany Solitary Pleasures, a group exhibition at the Freud Museum.

The conference, like the exhibition, reveals masturbation as a topic that can transform our understanding of human subjectivity and sexuality. Perhaps the most common form of human eroticism, it is also one of the least theorised. The conference will explore our complex sexual, erotic, and intimate encounters with ourselves and one another by viewing masturbation as an all-inclusive practice – gay, lesbian, heterosexual, bisexual, trans, queer, +, offering possibilities of a shared exchange and an intimate encounter between couples, lovers and strangers in ways that redefine desires and eroticism’s possibilities.

Conference themes:

History – the cultural history of masturbation
Talking – masturbation in clinical practice and literature
Educating – masturbation in sexual health and wellbeing
Making – masturbation in creativity and art practice