Freud’s Great-Grand-Daughter Psychoanalyzes Celebrities

I get up really early in the morning. Mostly, it’s nice to start my day quietly with just me and the cats chilling in the pre-dawn darkness. Sometimes I throw something easy to watch on TV and snooze, and sometimes I scroll through social media looking for interesting things. I like this Sandwiches of History guy, even when the ideas seem gross. The Wonder of Science account also usually has some pretty good morning content like this video of a tardigrade taking a walk:

A microscopic tardigrade going for a stroll through some algae.

Credit: Sinclair Stammers

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— Wonder of Science (@wonderofscience.bsky.social) August 23, 2025 at 7:38 PM

Occasionally, I come across something so weird that I believe I dreamed it for most of the day. For example, I read an article about The Rock and Benny Safdies upcoming film, Lizard Music, and thought I hallucinated the idea of The Rock playing a 70 year old man whose best friend is a chicken, until I read Andrew’s article about it later that day. Can you blame me? None of those words make any sense together.

I had a similar experience yesterday when someone on Threads posted a New Yorker article about Freud’s great-granddaughter, Bella, hosting a podcast where she performs psychoanalysis on celebrities and their fashion choices.

The podcast is called Fashion Neurosis. It’s an offshoot of Bella Freud’s fashion brand. Which is something I feel deserves its own unpacking. Having worked with Vivienne Westwood in the ’80s gives her fashion line an air of legitimacy, but you still wouldn’t catch me paying $120 for any of these T-shirts.

According to her website’s biography page, the sixty-four-year-old has been very busy.

Since establishing her namesake label in 1990, Bella Freud has moved between the mediums of clothing design, interior design, perfume making, filmmaking and publishing – redefining what it means to be a designer. Along the way she has collaborated with leaders in these respective fields, shooting three films directed by the actor John Malkovich; printing a magazine entitled Memo with the late Anita Pallenberg; realising a penthouse at the Television Centre home and office complex in London with architect and interior designer Maria Speake, the co-founder of the Retrouvius, and designing limited edition knitwear with singer-songwriter Nick Cave. Her own clothing designs meanwhile have garnered a cult following amongst the likes of Kate Moss, Little Simz, Juliette Lewis, Zadie Smith, Sienna Miller, Olivia Wilde and Rebecca Hall.

This is all dilettante behavior, but I’m sure it’s fine because her great-grandfather is the one who invented psychoanalysis. So, she must know a lot about it, right? Oh, she only got halfway through The Interpretation of Dreams, I see. Well, surely she has some sort of credentials for psychoanalysis. She’s been through it herself. Wonderful, yes, that definitely qualifies her to get people on a couch to discuss their feelings as they relate to their clothing choices.

I tried to watch the episode she produced with Lorde’s session, and it’s almost bearable if you watch it at 1.5x speed. Any faster and they both sound like chipmunks, any slower and it will put you to sleep.

In true psychoanalytic fashion, Lorde lies down on a couch, with the analyst out of view, answering questions. But she has a mic and a camera in her face the whole time. She’s very calm about it, but it’s a weird visual. She talks about her gender fluidity and how it is reflected in both her sense of style and her chosen stage name. She talks about working with David Byrne and borrowing his bike for the summer. She also dives into her experimentation with MDMA and psilocybin therapy to overcome stage fright.

I also watched the John Malkovich session. Freud and Malkovich are old friends and have collaborated on past creative projects, so there’s a strong sense of familiarity in the interview. And Malkovich is a notoriously fashionable dresser who often has interesting things to say about clothes and fashion, so I figured the discussion would be lively.

I think Malkovich is an interesting person who has a lot more experience being interviewed than Lorde. He’s obviously more comfortable talking about himself and fashion. He speaks candidly about his family, his education, and his previous romantic relationship with Michelle Pfeiffer, among other topics. It’s still weird to watch him being interviewed with a top-down view of him lying on a couch, but it’s an interesting interview and worth a listen if you’re a fan.

I didn’t dive any further into the few other sessions Freud has posted to her YouTube channel. I’m a fan of celebrity interviews. I like watching them on late-night talk shows and round-table discussions. But, I think it’s a little weird to bear one’s most private, intimate thoughts for YouTube views. Something about it doesn’t feel right to me. I don’t want to judge, but I also don’t want to know this much about anyone. And I think it’s weird that Bella Freud’s friends and collaborators are so keen on allowing her to play at being her great-grandfather on a monetized channel.

But, she has a significant number of subscribers on YouTube (132k), with over 2,000 subscribers to the Fashion Neurosis Substack, and over a thousand followers on Instagram. Obviously, this content is for someone.

In his book Civilization and Its Discontents, Freud wrote, “…Future ages will produce further great advances in this realm of culture, probably inconceivable now, and will increase man’s likeness to a god still more.”

I wonder if this is what he had in mind. I also wonder what he would have thought about the header picture for this article.