Something Happens

Thieves try and make off with Sigmund Freud’s ashes from Golders Green Crematorium.

London, 10.38 15 January 2014, Paul Wright

 A small news piece in a London paper, which I came across while reviewing Kristine Alksne’s piece ‘Unrealised Projects’, (sent as an outline ahead of any images) alluded to an attempted theft, earlier this year in London, of an urn containing the ashes of Sigmund Freud.

Police said burglars broke into Golders Green Crematorium, between New Year’s Eve and New Year’s Day and tried to make off with the valuable Greek item, which dates back to the third century.

The urn was presented to Freud by Marie Bonaparte, great-grand niece of Napoleon, and resided in his study before being specifically chosen by his family as the receptacle of his ashes. Its frieze, depicting Dionysus and a maenad, marked Freud’s lifelong dialogue with classical myth. This receptable, of rich provenance and allusion, was a prop in a very carefully staged public display.

Detective Constable Daniel Candler added: ‘Even leaving aside the financial value of the irreplaceable urn, and the historical significance of to whom it related, the fact that someone set out to take an object knowing it contained the last remains of a person, defies belief’.

Like the detective in the case, I struggled to sum up the dense layers of meaning and potential association arising from the physical object, historical legacy, mortal remains, and the narrative of the theft.

The urn holding the remains of the famed psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud has been left severely damaged after thieves attempted to steal his ashes.

A report mentioned shards of the damaged urn left scattered over the floor. In Freud’s early topographical model of the mind unconscious thoughts (desires and ideas that are tied to anxiety, conflict and pain) are not accessible by the conscious, and can only emerge, past its resistances and repressions, heavily disguised and fractured by the process. The shards were what had emerged, what was realisable.

Detective Constable Daniel Candle said it was ‘a despicable act by a callous thief’.

It originally misread the article and thought the urn had actually been stolen. This slip opened up an even greater speculative space where fiction and fact, intention and effect all interacted, where acts were unrealised and partially realised, where speculation had its own currency. It became even more the gap where ‘Something Happens’.

His urn, which also holds he ashes of his wife, Martha, was on public display at the Golders Green Crematorium, where is daughter Anna as also cremated.

This urn belonging to the living Sigmund Freud had a prominent place in his Hampstead study, behind his desk as one of the numerous antiquities he had collected over the years, fascinated by them as the physical debrief o certain ways of thinking, certain ‘casts’ of mind, now abandoned.

But during the attempted theft it was left badly damaged, with a spokesman for the crematorium, saying it had been ‘moved to a secure locality, with security now under review’. 

The crematorium and adjoining mausoleum are part of a huddle of building standing in substantial grounds in a wooded park, surrounded by the sprawl of outer London suburbs. It is peaceful and notorious: Amy Winehouse and Bram Stoker are two fellow residents. Security as a a concept seems odd, after all who can now be harmed, and yet, like many mausoleums, there is something residually fortress like about its heavy damp stone. 

The pioneering thinker, known as the founding father of psychoanalysis, died at the age of 83 on September 23, 1939.

The cast of characters – detective, thief, and psychoanalyst – seem necessary to Kristine Alksne’s piece ‘Unrealised Projects’. The viewer must investigate, piece together the evidence of what is appropriated or stolen, and consider its provenance. The viewer must excavate, turn over the topographical debris, and be open to the site of potential narrative and interplay of associations, of what might be there, and what might now, and finally see if ‘Something Happens’.

Police urge anyone with information to contact them or Crimestoppers anonymously on 0800 6555 111.

Note: the text in italics taken from the original article.