Remembering Three Essays on Shame, Penny Siopis, Freud Museum, London 2005

Abstract

The year 2005 marked the centenary of one of the most scandalous and important of Sigmund Freud's books, Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality . This book is interesting both for the challenges it posed (and still poses) to conventional concepts of human sexuality and for the form it took: a trio of essays. The essay form is the opposite of the monumental monograph or exhaustive study. Informed, rigorous and thought-provoking, the essay declares its authorship, the point of view from which it is written. In that same centenary year, Penny Siopis held an installation exhibition at the Freud Museum in London titled Three Essays on Shame . The installation, curated by Jennifer Law, thus also claimed its status as a series of ‘essays’ and as work that emerged openly and intentionally from a point of view. Three Essays on Shame was made a decade after South Africa's formal transition to democratic majority rule in 1994. In the intervening years, South Africans had passed through the fire of the country's Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC). This extraordinary process performed, in the political sphere, a gesture as radical as psychoanalysis itself performs in the private sphere. Pain was spoken and witnessed, and crimes were confessed in a process that was not judicial and judgemental, but rather sought to create the conditions of a collective, political, and interpersonal ‘working through’. The concept of Durcharbeiten or workingthrough, formulated by Freud in 1914, marks the major shift in his understanding of psychological transformation, from his earlier idea of abreaction to the truly psychoanalytical innovation that focused on dynamic interaction. This involves displacing all sorts of compulsions and blockages, and embracing a will to remember that alone allows for the possibility of real change. The TRC represents a remarkable conjunction of a political dream or hope for radical change and the necessity to remember rather than repress, and also to be heard even in situations that lacerate the subject's own psyche with the worst after-affect of violation: shame. The Freud Museum in Hampstead occupies the last home in exile of Sigmund Freud and his family, and it was here that he died in 1939.