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A super-cringey interview with Lemmy Kilmister & Sigmund Freud’s great-grandaughter in bed


The late Lemmy Kilmister hanging out in bed. Photo by Ray Palmer.
 
2021 marks my seventh year here at Dangerous Minds. During my time here I’ve posted over 1200 articles on everything from satanic strippers, Axl Rose threatening to kill David Bowie, puppet porn, a fringe film featuring an adult baby, and on several occasions, the subject at hand today-Lemmy Kilmister. On September 12th, 1987, Motörhead released their eighth studio album, Rock ‘n’ Roll with Phil “Philthy Animal” Taylor back behind the kit. Prior to the release of Rock ‘n’ Roll, Lemmy had played a meaty role in director Peter Richardson’s film Eat the Rich for which Motörhead configuration of Lemmy, Würzel, Phil Taylor, and Phil Campbell had written and recorded the film’s ripping theme tune (which also appears on Rock ‘n’ Roll), specifically for the film. The soundtrack itself is nearly exclusively comprised of Motörhead and if you’ve never seen it (a massive critical flop upon its release, it deserves the cult status it now holds), I highly recommend you add it to your “must view” queue.
 

A still from ‘Eat the Rich’ featuring Lemmy and actor Ronald Shiner.
 
Sadly, like Eat the Rich, Motörhead’s eighth record was also a bit of a letdown for their fans, and even Lemmy has reflected dimly on Rock ‘n’ Roll alluding that it was a “waste of time” (as noted in Lem’s 2002 autobiography White Line Fever). At any rate, regardless of this blip in the vast heavy metal continuum that is/was Motörhead, the point is this—with more than a few silver and one gold record (1980’s Ace of Spades), under their bullet belts, Motörhead were a force to be reckoned with. This was, of course, especially true of Lemmy Kilmister. We’re all familiar with the notion that “looks can be deceiving,” and one should “never judge a book by its cover.” Yet, this is what inevitably happens all the fucking time. Including the time Lemmy got into bed with Emma Freud, the host of the UK television show Pillow Talk, and the great-granddaughter of the founding father of psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud.

And, as the title of this post states, things get really weird and super uncomfortable fast, and stay that way for nine excruciatingly long minutes. The majority of the awkwardness was caused by some of the dumb questions posed to Lemmy by Freud.

Usually, guests of Pillow Talk would wear their pajamas on the show, just like Freud. As I’m pretty sure Lemmy didn’t actually own any PJ’s, Lemmy showed up dressed as Lemmy, fingers full of his signature silver rings, and got under the covers. As the show begins we hear Freud musing about how she selects guests for her show. Such criteria included being “terribly attractive,” “very handsome,” and “extremely sexy.” For lots of people, Lemmy checks all those boxes and I’m not gonna be the one to say he doesn’t because he checks all those boxes for me as well. Unfortunately, the show rapidly becomes super uncomfortable thanks to Freud’s cringey questions. Perhaps she was merely trying to get a rise out of Kilmister or, respectfully, she just didn’t do her research on Kilmister and Motörhead – the latter being a point Lemmy politely takes Freud to task for. As one YouTube commenter noted of the exchange, Lemmy managed to “intellectually spank her while whacked out on speed,” over and over again. This nine minutes from the life of Lemmy Kilmister is one for the ages, folks.
 

 

Previously on Dangerous Minds:
‘Eat the Rich’: Cult rock and roll comedy with Lemmy, Shane MacGowan, Paul McCartney, Angela Bowie
How many moles does Lemmy have? Play the Motörhead trivia board game and find out
Lemmy Kilmister gets ambushed by three of his ex’s on TV in the late 90s
Lemmy alone: Motorhead’s ‘Ace Of Spades’ vocals only
Well that sucks: That time Lemmy passed out after getting too many blowjobs in 1980
Oral: The mysterious all-girl heavy metal band and their (maybe) connection to Lemmy Kilmister

Posted by Cherrybomb
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04.02.2021
04:18 pm
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That time Salvador Dali met Sigmund Freud
01.15.2020
07:04 am
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Before Salvador Dali met Sigmund Freud during the summer of 1938 in London, the great Surrealist artist had tried unsuccessfully on several occasions to meet the revered psychoanalyst at his consulting rooms in Vienna. Dali had lacked the confidence to knock unannounced on Freud’s door and instead had wandered the cobbled strasse holding “long and exhaustive imaginary conversations” with his idol. He had also fantasised about bringing Freud back arm-in-arm to his room at the Hotel Sacher, imagining the great psychoanalyst “clinging to the curtains” while he babbled freely about his dreams, his sexuality, and his fears.

Dali had spent his teens and early twenties reading Freud‘s works on the unconscious, on sexuality and The Interpretation of Dreams. His inability to meet the psychoanalyst in Vienna suggests Dali was in some way terrified of Freud, as if this grand examiner of human behavior was capable of seeing straight through him like a believer might feel when coming face-to-face with God.

When Albert Einstein met Freud in 1927, it was a meeting of equals. Two men who were pioneers in their chosen professions yet who had no understanding of what the other did or why it was important. Einstein later said Freud knew as much about physics as he did about psychoanalysis and claimed he could not understand the point of analysis at all. When offered to be psychoanalyzed by the great headshrinker, Einstein had refused stating he preferred to remain in “darkness” about his own motivations.

Freud fled to London from Vienna after Germany’s annexation of Austria in March 1938. He had heard of how the Nazis had burned his books, but dismissed the seriousness of their actions by saying:

What progress we are making. In the Middle Ages they would have burned me. Now, they are content with burning my books.

His nonchalance was bluster. When there was a sudden rise in anti-semitic attacks in Vienna, Freud quickly made preparations to flee the country. He arrived in London in April 1938.

Because of their interest in dreams and the unconscious, it may have seemed obvious that Dali and Freud would have made natural friends, but Freud’s taste in art was strictly traditional and he was wary of the Surrealists after a run-in with André Breton in 1921.

Breton was deeply enamored with Freud’s work and had been inspired to develop a technique of “spontaneous” writing to give free expression to unconscious thoughts and desires. Unlike Dali, Breton had the confidence to turn-up unannounced at Freud’s door and thrust his genius on the great man. Freud was not impressed. His lack of enthusiasm caused Breton to later dismiss Freud as nothing more than a “general practitioner…an old man without elegance” working away in his shabby consulting rooms.

Despite this, Breton still credited Freud with pioneering work into the unconscious imagination in his Surrealist manifesto in 1924:

Freud very rightly brought his critical faculties to bear upon the dream. It is, in fact, inadmissible that this considerable portion of psychic activity (since, at least from man’s birth until his death, thought offers no solution of continuity, the sum of the moments of the dream, from the point of view of time, and taking into consideration only the time of pure dreaming, that is the dreams of sleep, is not inferior to the sum of the moments of reality, or, to be more precisely limiting, the moments of waking) has still today been so grossly neglected.

 
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Dali did not have a manifesto, but he did have a painting The Metamorphosis of Narcissus which he wanted to show Freud. The meeting between the two men was organized by Austrian writer Stefan Zweig, who was also exiled in London.

Dali was just thirty-four. Freud, nearing the end of his life, was eighty-one. Dali arrived with his wife Gala and the art collector Edward James, who carried The Metamorphosis of Narcissus under his arm.

Dali was intimidated by the “father figure” Freud. His conversation was nervous and stilted. Freud asked if all Spaniards looked like him? If they did, then this might explain the Spanish Civil War. Freud’s joke fell flat. Dali later wrote that he wanted to be seen “a kind of dandy of universal intellectualism,” and be treated as an equal. As if showing his credentials, he presented Freud with a magazine that contained an article he had written about paranoia. Freud barely looked at it. Trying to interest him in the article, Dali explained;

...it was not a surrealist diversion, but was really an ambitiously scientific article, and I repeated the title, pointing to it at the same time with my finger. Before his imperturbable indifference, my voice became involuntarily sharper and more insistent.

Freud just stared “with a fixity in which his whole being seemed to converge.”

Then Dali revealed his painting, to which Freud said:

...in classic paintings I look for the unconscious, but in your paintings I look for the conscious…

Dali was unsure what Freud meant and took his comment as criticism.

While small chat was exchanged between Freud, Gala and James, Dali began sketching. He suddenly saw Freud as a gastropod:

Freud’s cranium is a snail! His brain is in the form of a spiral – to be extracted with a needle!

 
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Dali’s drawing of Freud is now at the Freud Museum.
 
Dali thought his meeting with Freud a failure, but days later, Freud wrote Stefan Zweig:

I really have reason to thank you for the introduction which brought me yesterday’s visitors. For until then I was inclined to look upon the surrealists – who have apparently chosen me as their patron saint – as absolute (let us say 95 percent, like alcohol), cranks. That young Spaniard, however, with his candid and fanatical eyes, and his undeniable technical mastery, has made me reconsider my opinion.

Zweig never showed Freud Dali’s sketch of him, fearing the picture looked more like a skull than a snail.
 

 
Soft Self-Portrait of Salvador Dali (1969) is a made for television documentary that captured the artist in fine fettle as he delighted in performing for the camera. Dali is seen indulging in his trademark mix of showman, clown and serious artist, hammering out a tuneless miaow on a cat piano (Dali associated pianos with sex after his father left an illustrated book on the effects of venereal diseases atop the family piano as a warning to the dangers of sexual intercourse); or sowing feathers in the air, as two children follow pushing the head of a plaster rhinoceros; or, his attempt to paint the sky. Directed by Jean-Christophe Averty, with narration provided by Orson Welles.

Previously on Dangerous Minds:
At home with Salvador Dali
Salvador Dali goes to Hell: Astounding illustrations for Dante’s ‘Inferno’
Salvador Dali’s bizarre but sexy photoshoot for Playboy, 1973
Salvador Dali’s cookbook is every bit as insane as you would expect it to be
Salvador Dali’s strange and surreal illustrations for the autobiography of a Broadway legend
Salvador Dali’s signs of the Zodiac
Salvador Dali: Surrealist Party from 1941
Meet the great ‘English eccentric’ who financed the Surrealists

Posted by Paul Gallagher
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01.15.2020
07:04 am
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‘Freud’s cranium is a snail!’ Salvador Dalí was sure Sigmund Freud had a ‘spiral brain’
10.19.2018
06:06 am
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Sketch of Sigmund Freud by Salvador Dalí (via Freud Museum)
 
If you visit London’s Freud Museum between now and next February, you’ll see an exhibition devoted to the meeting between Salvador Dalí and Sigmund Freud that took place there in 1938, when the house in Hampstead was Freud’s “last home on this planet.” The artist brought his recent painting “Metamorphosis of Narcissus” to show the doctor, and, he later claimed, took the opportunity to sketch the form of Freud’s skull d’après nature (from life).

Like many of the Surrealists, Dalí revered Freud as a towering genius who had solved the riddles of the dream, but Dalí‘s ideas about the shape of Freud’s head were all his own. As he tells it in The Secret Life of Salvador Dalí, the actual meeting between the two men was preceded by a number of fantasy meetings that took place in Dalí‘s imagination during his visits to Vienna. When Freud escaped the Nazis in ‘38, arriving in Paris en route to London, Dalí was eating snails nearby in Sens, and his dinner was interrupted by a shocking epiphany about the involute form of Freud’s brainpan:

Several years after my last ineffectual attempt to meet Freud, I made a gastronomic excursion into the region of Sens in France. We started the dinner with snails, one of my favorite dishes. The conversation turned to Edgar Allan Poe, a magnificent theme while savoring snails, and concerned itself particularly with a recently published book by the Princess of Greece, Marie Bonaparte, which is a psychoanalytical study of Poe. All of a sudden I saw a photograph of Professor Freud on the front page of a newspaper which someone beside me was reading. I immediately had one brought to me and read that the exiled Freud had just arrived in Paris. We had not yet recovered from the effect of this news when I uttered a loud cry. I had just that instant discovered the morphological secret of Freud! Freud’s cranium is a snail! His brain is in the form of a spiral—to be extracted with a needle! This discovery strongly influenced the portrait drawing which I later made from life, a year before his death.

 

Dalí‘s ‘Freud à tête d’escargot’
 

‘Morphology of the skull of Sigmund Freud’: Dalí‘s sketch of Freud’s skull as a snail, ‘d’après nature’
 
Nadia Choucha will be giving a sold-out talk on “occult and psychoanalytical theory in the art of Surrealism” at the Freud Museum on Halloween. Below is the trailer for the ongoing exhibition “Freud, Dalí and the Metamorphosis of Narcissus.”
 

Posted by Oliver Hall
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10.19.2018
06:06 am
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What’s left of sexologist Krafft-Ebing’s personal collection of erotica

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Meanwhile, back at the Krafft-Ebing household.
“Ah, Richard, there you are—where have you been?”
“My dearest, I’ve been out…er…shopping.”
“Shopping? I hope you’ve not been buying any more of those dirty postcards with images of sexual congress and strange and unnatural fetishes.”
“Well, em, yes, as a matter of fact, I have.”
“But darling, you promised...”
“I know, I know, but these images of sexual congress and strange and unnatural fetishes are essential for my scientific research!”
“Your scientific research?”
“Yes, my sweet. These are not merely dirty postcards—these are prime examples of diverse sexual practices, which are essential research for the book I am writing.”
“Oh, I see. Well, I suppose that’s all right then.”
“Yes, it certainly is. Now, if you will kindly excuse me, I must…er…examine these new specimens… in private.”

I am sure it was never like that, but then again who knows? As Richard Freiherr von Krafft-Ebing (1840-1902) certainly did have a fine excuse for collecting “French postcards” and assorted erotica during his lifetime. This Austro-German psychiatrist took a keen interest in all aspects of human sexual behavior and wrote an early pioneering book on the subject called Psychopathia Sexualis in 1886. This tome was intended as “a medico-forensic study,” a kind of reference book to be used by psychiatrists or as he described it: “men engaged in serious study in the domains of natural philosophy and medical jurisprudence.” Krafft-Ebing’s study popularized the terms “sadism,” “masochism” and “fetishism,” and was the first medical science book to examine homosexuality, bi-sexuality, necrophilia, pederasty, coprophilia, bestiality, transvestism, and exhibitionism.

However, some of his ideas reflected the mores of the day rather than objective scientific investigation—for example, he considered any non-procreational sex as “a perversion of the sex drive.”

“With opportunity for the natural satisfaction of the sexual instinct, every expression of it that does not correspond with the purpose of nature,—i.e., propagation,—must be regarded as perverse.”

He also thought homosexuality was an “inversion of the brain” caused during pregnancy. So he was far more vanilla than his personal collection of erotica might suggest.

Psychopathia Sexualis was of major importance in its day—but was quickly superseded by the work of an Austrian neurologist, the cocaine-injecting Sigmund Freud, whose studies into sex, dreams and human behavior made him the father of psychoanalysis.

This rather small selection of postcards and photographs is (apparently) nearly all that remains of Krafft-Ebing’s personal collection of erotica. The images deal with transvestism, with some reference to S&M, and mainly feature one particular individual. It is unknown who any of the people are, though two are rather fun examples of the infamous dirty or “French” postcard, which were popular across Europe from the 1880s onward.
 
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More from Krafft-Ebing’s personal collection of erotica, after the jump…

READ ON
Posted by Paul Gallagher
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04.30.2015
09:34 am
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The remarkable rabbits of Sigmund Freud’s niece
03.10.2015
01:50 pm
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These remarkable dreamlike images come from a 1924 book that came out in Germany called Buch der Hasengeschichten (“Book of Rabbit Stories”). The author published under the name Tom Seidmann-Freud, but her given name was Martha Gertrud Freud—her mother, Maria Freud, who went by “Mitzi,” was one of Sigmund Freud’s five sisters. Martha was born in Vienna in 1892 but her family moved to Berlin in 1898. As a teenager she adopted the name “Tom.” In 1920 she met a writer named Jakob Seidmann, whom she married two years later.
 

Tom Seidmann-Freud
 
In 1924 Seidmann-Freud published Buch der Hasengeschichten through the Peregrin Verlag (Peregrin Publishing Company). Over the next few years, she published a number of incredibly distinctive children’s books, the most famous of which is Die Fischreise (The Fish’s Journey) of 1923. As Marjorie Ingall writes in Tablet, “She hung out with Berlin’s avant-garde crowd, as well as with her family’s academic and Zionist friends. … Her style involved outlining folk-art-y, simple illustrations precisely in ink, then filling them in with watercolors. She frequently used stencils and paint together in a bright, lively technique called pochoir.”

In the space of few months, both Tom and Jakob committed suicide for reasons stemming from financial troubles. Sources differ on the exact reason—German Wikipedia says blandly that they had founded Peregrin Verlag, which ran into difficulties when the global financial crisis that started in 1929 arrived. Ingall isolates the problem with a separate venture called Ophir Verlag, which was to be a publishing company specializing in Hebrew books for children. That story involves a third party named Chaim Nachman Bialik, whose failure to live up to his obligations led to their suicides. Ingall cites a letter from 1925, suggesting that the money problems had been going on for a while, although the culpability of Bialik is simply not established in her account. Whatever the reason, it was clearly financial in nature; Jakob hanged himself in October 1929 and, now suffering from depression, Tom died of an overdose of sleeping pills in February 1930.
 

 
According to Ingall, during the Nazi regime her children’s books became destroyed in great numbers as part of the purge of Jewish authors—we’re lucky that her works survived the Third Reich, thanks for Seidmann-Freud’s family members as well as art lovers. 

Will Schofield calls the book “whimsically apocalyptic,” which seems entirely apropos—I’m a little puzzled for his use of the term “rabbit dreams,” which seems a little misleading. Seidmann-Freud was trained as a Jugendstil artist, and her vibrant, imaginative, purposefully “flat” images definitely have a powerful, untethered, dreamlike quality all their own. 
 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 
via 50 Watts

Posted by Martin Schneider
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03.10.2015
01:50 pm
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Writers are curious people: A rare interview with author Robertson Davies

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The great author Robertson Davies felt he never quite belonged. To what? or to whom? he never made quite certain, but he described an itinerant childhood in Canada that made him feel distant which gave him a necessary ruthlessness and watchful quality that made him more agreeable towards the solitary toil of writing.

His father was a newspaperman, a publisher and editor, who became a politician. To escape from under his father’s strong and domineering personality, Roberston decided to focus on his own strengths and ambitions. At first he decided to be an actor. He moved to England, studied at Oxford University. But when he returned to Canada, he worked for twenty years as a newspaperman. He still harbored his own ambitions. At night, he started writing the plays and books that made him one of the twentieth century’s most respected writers.

At the time of this interview in 1973, Davies had completed Fifth Business and The Manticore, the first 2 volumes of his brilliant Deptford Trilogy, and was working on the third World of Wonders. The trilogy hangs on one incident that has dramatic and far-reaching consequences on a group of townspeople at the turn of the 20th century.

Davies was a genuinely learned man. His novels are filled with jokes, allusions, literary references and themes, that give bountiful pleasures to the reader.

In this interview, you will find him gently poking fun at himself and other scribes with this description of his trade: 

‘Writers are curious people, in that they tend to be withdrawn, they tend to be rather grumpy and unhappy, they tend to take offense very readily, and they tend to harbor grievances more than a great many people do, and they tend to be hypochondriacs.’

Davies had a great interest in psychology. He was influenced by Jung, but thought Freud had a dreadful reductive quality. Yet, he felt neither gave a full or satisfactory answer to what is experienced in life.

This interview wanders around its subject, encompassing his acting, his father, his childhood, his writing, his journalism, and his academic life. It is a rare look at one of fiction’s most intelligent writers.
 

 

Posted by Paul Gallagher
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08.12.2012
08:08 pm
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Sigmund Freud’s ‘thinking cap’
09.20.2010
03:30 pm
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Hand-sculpted illustration by artist Jessica Fortner.

Freud Puts On His Thinking Cap

(via EPICponyz)

Posted by Tara McGinley
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09.20.2010
03:30 pm
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