Psychoanlaysis: The unconscious in everyday life

The Science Museum exhibition Psychoanalysis: The unconscious in everyday life ran from October 2010 to April 2011, celebrating psychoanalysis as a body of knowledge and as a treatment. It explored the broad contemporary relevance of psychoanalysis in an accessible way, focusing on a key concept of psychoanalysis – how the unconscious is manifest in everyday experience and in artefacts, both historical and contemporary.
 
Visitors experienced the subject of psychoanalysis through a range of modern and historical objects, contemporary artworks, digital animation and audio interpretation of key exhibits by psychoanalysts. Find out more in the digital catalogue.
 
Highlights included artworks by leading artists such as Grayson Perry and Tim Noble and Sue Webster which took inspiration from psychoanalytical ideas. The exhibition also featured artworks specially created for the exhibition in collaboration with leading psychoanalysts.

The exhibition also displayed a wealth of artefacts from collections at the Science Museum, Wellcome Library, and Freud Museum. Notable objects included a cabinet belonging to Sigmund Freud containing ancient statuettes from Greece and an Egyptian death mask. Visitors also saw a selection of children’s drawings from the Melanie Klein Archive, which had never been on public display before.
 
Other items included a selection of body casts of masks, feet, eyes and phalluses, brought out of the Science Museum’s storage rooms especially for the exhibition.
 
The exhibition was supported by The Institute of Psychoanalysis and was curated by Dr Caterina Albano, Artakt, Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design, University of the Arts London.
 
2010 marked the centenary of the foundation of the International Psychoanalytical Association.
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