Psychoanalysis has proved itself to be a unique method of questioning and cultural enquiry. By taking the unconscious and its effects seriously, and by recognising and exploring human passions and forms of enjoyment, it sheds new light on social and political stasis and change. Psychoanalytic perspectives can allow us to investigate the hidden logic of meanings, behaviours and ideologies, facilitating a deeper understanding of many of the processes and problems that characterise the world today.

Darian Leader

If families, societies and our own psyches would prefer to control our speech; if there is something about free speaking which makes politicians, mothers and censors nervous, then psychoanalysis as a free space invented by Freud where anything, however trivial, suspect or mad can be said  is still essential. It is, after all, where silence is compelled that evil is done. The encouragement of free speaking as a form of dissent and of creativity is crucial in psychoanalysis, just as it is in literature and in life itself, where it is a vital component of human liberty and individuality.

Hanif Kureishi


Two of the most original thinkers in contemporary culture, Darian Leader and Hanif Kureishi, discuss their own work and writing and current thinking in psychoanalysis.

Darian Leader is a writer, psychoanalyst, art curator and founder member of the Centre for Freudian Analysis and Research and Hanif Kureishi is a well known novelist, film maker and playwright.