Tom Derose

What can psychoanalysis offer to public and political life, and what happens when a discipline built on the consulting room tries to step outside it? Tom DeRose is Research Manager at the Freud Museum, the house in Hampstead where Freud lived out his final year and where, uniquely in Britain, an institution has made it its mission to bring psychoanalytic ideas to a general audience. Barry and Mustafa talk with him about the museum in its fortieth year: its history and independence as a charity, and the resistances it meets; the sense that psychoanalysis is arcane, elitist, sex-obsessed and prohibitively expensive, even as its vocabulary seeps quietly into everyday life. Tom makes the case for the unconscious as Freud's most radical discovery, and for objects as a way of giving abstract ideas physical, resonant form; the museum as a site of memory and experience rather than mere knowledge transfer. The discussion turns, finally, to neutrality and politics: how an institution holds space for opposing views amid the field's own factions and the conflicts of the wider world, and why Tom is wary of psychoanalysis as a macro-political force even as he insists it should inform how we live and govern.