Time: 2 pm EDT
Admission: $8 - Tickets HERE

Part of the Psychoanalysis, Art & the Occult series of events, curated by Dr. Vanessa Sinclair and Carl Abrahamsson

This lecture will take place virtually, via Zoom. Ticket sales will end at 12 pm EDT the day of the lecture. Attendees may request a video recording AFTER the lecture takes place by emailing proof of purchase to info.morbidanatomy@gmail.com. Video recordings are valid for 30 days after the date of the lecture.

Ticketholders: a link to the conference is sent out at 12:30 pm EDT on the day of the event to the email used at checkout. Please add info.morbidanatomy@gmail.com to your contacts to ensure that the event link will not go to spam.

PLEASE NOTE: This lecture will be recorded and available for free for our Patreon members at $5/above. Become a Member HERE.

This event will consist of discussions with Miss Anna Biller, Writer and Director of The Love Witch & Viva, and Mary Wild on Taxidermy in Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho

Anna Biller states, “In my work, I try to combine pure cinema with authentic experience. When I say authentic experience, I mean that I try to directly translate my experience of living in the world into form. My specific concerns are with the lived day-to-day experience of the female. Years ago when I was first starting out as a filmmaker, I became interested in trying to create a cinema based on visual pleasure for women.  

In the interest of pure cinema or ‘proper art’ (which James Joyce defines as art which elicits a state of aesthetic arrest), I try to control everything that goes into the film frame. Thus in my work, I am trying to do something most unusual: to create “proper” art films masquerading as popular films. So while I am quoting genres, I am using them not as pastiche, but to create a sense of aesthetic arrest and to insert a female point of view.”   

Taxidermy in Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho with Mary Wild

A secretary, on the lam after stealing from her employer, travels on the back roads to avoid the  police. She stops for the night at the ramshackle Bates Motel, where she meets the polite but highly  strung proprietor Norman Bates, who has an interest in taxidermy and a difficult relationship with  his mother. 

This talk will focus on the psychoanalytic significance of stuffing and mounting the skins of animals  with lifelike effect in Alfred Hitchcock’s 1960 horror-thriller film Psycho. The proposition is that  the taxidermy impulse is aligned with the ‘deadly’ maternal element played out in Norman Bates’s  fantasy life. 

Anna Biller is a writer and director who creates unique, female-focused, highly visual films. She has a BA from UCLA in art and an MFA from CalArts in art and film. Her first feature Viva played in film festivals all over the world and gained minor cult status, and her second feature The Love Witch won acclaim for its elaborate visual style and feminist themes, and has screened at numerous film festivals worldwide.

Mary Wild is the creator of the PROJECTIONS lecture series at Freud Museum London, applying psychoanalysis to film interpretation. Mary also co-hosts the Projections Podcast.

The Psychoanalysis, Art & the Occult series of events, curated by Dr. Vanessa Sinclair and Carl Abrahamsson, is dedicated to exploring the intersections and integration of psychoanalytic theory, the creative arts, occult practices, and folk magic traditions. By inviting psychoanalysts, philosophers, artists, writers, and occult practitioners from a variety of theoretical orientations and worldviews to discuss their work, personal experiences, and areas of research interest with one another, dialogue is opened up between practitioners in fields of study that traditionally rarely engage with one another though often operate in similar and complementary ways.