Freud Memorial Lecture 2026 with Josh Cohen

The Compromised Unconscious: Ambiguity and Shame in Psychoanalysis, Art and Politics

In his early trilogy of works on the forms of unconscious life - dreams, jokes and slips - Freud frames compromise as nothing less than the very medium through which psychic life expresses itself. I want to argue here that the psychoanalytic conception of compromise concentrates the many different senses the word has come to assume in the course of its history: among many other meanings, the mature mind's recognition of competing claims or a shaming lack of integrity or principle. The word compromise is thus itself a compromise, signalling both the ambiguity that protects us from exposure, and the traumatic state of exposure itself.

This lecture will explore some of the clinical and theoretical implications of conceiving the psyche as destined to compromise, using examples from the consulting room, art and political life.

Image: Guston 'Caught', Denver Art Museum