An Internal Difficulty

An Internal Difficulty showcased the outcomes of a residency funded by the Western Australian Department for Culture and the Arts and the Australia Council for the Arts at The Freud Museum in London, in early 2013. It brought together some of the most innovative mid-career practitioners working from Western Australia to reconsider Sigmund Freud and his work in relation to his domestic context.

The Museum housed the late psychoanalyst’s extensive collections of art, antiquities, textiles, prints and furniture, as well as his library, and an archive of correspondence. Its centerpiece is Freud’s study, maintained just as it was during his lifetime, and contained numerous objects that became famous in their own right through their association to his work, including ‘the’ iconic psychoanalytical couch.

The residency allowed a privileged insight into Freud’s final months, through viewing items from the collection that are not on public display due to their personal nature, including the couch upon which he died in 1939, in addition to his mouth prostheses

and cranial X-rays (showing the throat cancer that killed him).

The exhibition brought together a group of contemporary WA artists who created a curious mix of animal and bird forms, human figures, mythological creatures and hybrid constructions to represent the collections and memories of Sigmund Freud.

The artworks reflected this unexpected insight, and bore a fitting relationship to psychoanalysis, a therapeutic discipline dependent upon an extended intimacy between an analyst and patient. The resulting exhibition provided a quality of intimacy and a new way of relating to one of the most influential figures of the twentieth century.