In Our Time With Melvyn Bragg Folgen

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss role of Freudian analysis in understanding the great works of literature. Freud said, “The poets and philosophers before me discovered the unconscious. What I discovered was the scientific method by which the unconscious can be studied”. Psychoanalysis has always been more than a ‘talking cure’ and it has strong ties to literature, but one hundred years after the publication of the first great work of psychoanalysis, The Interpretation of Dreams, critics are putting the scientific basis of Freud’s work in grave doubt and he is in danger of being pitched in with poets. The great American critic Harold Bloom has said “Freud, the writer will survive the death of psychoanalysis”, and the analyst and writer Adam Phillips seems to go further in his new book Promises Promises where he writes, “I think of Freud as a romantic writer, and I read psychoanalysis as poetry, so I don’t have to worry whether it is true or even useful”.So what is the relationship of psychoanalysis to literature, and if it is to be reclassified as literature itself can it still be practised as a talking cure?With Adam Phillips, author of Promises Promises: Essays on Psychoanalysis and Literature; Malcolm Bowie, Marshal Foch Professor of French Literature, Oxford University; Lisa Appignanesi novelist and co-author of Freud’s Women.

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss Evolutionary Psychology. Richard Dawkins redefined human nature in 1976, when he wrote in The Selfish Gene: “They swarm in huge colonies, safe inside giant lumbering robots, sealed off from the outside world, communicating with it by tortuous indirect routes, manipulating it by remote control. They are in you and me; they created us body and mind; and their preservation is the ultimate rational of our existence…they go by the name of genes and we are their survival machines”. Potent ideas like this have given birth to a new discipline, ‘Evolutionary Psychology’: It claims that all of human behaviour can be understood in terms of a single compulsion - we must sexually reproduce so that our genes will live on. How has this idea developed, what can it tell us of how we behave, and can it be trusted? With Janet Radcliffe Richards, Reader in Bioethics, University College, London; Nicholas Humphrey, Professor of Psychology, New School for Social Research, New York; Professor Steven Rose, Professor of Physic, Open University.

Melvyn Bragg and guests discusses the Tudor State. In 1485 Henry Tudor slew Richard III and routed his army at The Battle of Bosworth Field. It was a decisive victory which founded a bold new dynasty; and this date like 1789 and 1066 has been taken by historians to be one of the great ‘year zeros’ of history: Suddenly the muddled Medieval World with its robber barons, feudal barbarism and bloody Wars of the Roses was banished, and the modern age of centralised government and King’s Justice was ushered in. But were the Tudors as instrumental in reshaping the British state as historians have liked to make out, and did their reign throughout the 16th century really lay the political foundations of our own age? With John Guy, Professor of Modern History, University of St Andrews; Christopher Haigh, Tutor of Modern History at Christ Church College, Cambridge; Christine Carpenter, Fellow in History at New Hall, Cambridge.