Sharon Kivland
An Agent of the Estate
A revised version of a conference paper given in ‘Defining Space’, at University College Dublin, in October 2007 and published in Haecceity Papers
Psychoanalysis and Space, Volume 4 / issue 1, Fall 2008
Guest Editors: Tim Martin and Lorens Holm
Sharon Kivland has followed Freud from Trieste to Athens, in a vain attempt to reconstruct a moment of melancholy that is not her own, and to re-experience a disturbance of memory that is not hers either. She has haunted the Freud Museums in London and Vienna, more at home on the unhomely stairs, as though in lingering improperly and listening at doors, an alien guest, she might find more than a petrified spectre of psychoanalysis. In An Agent of the Estate she invites the reader to follow her tour of properties, with some detours through stations and board games. Adept in ventriloquism and other uncanny tricks, she offers a buyer’s guide to some of the dwelling-places of psychoanalysis, while reminding the reader that the ego is not master in its own house.
