On Dangerous Ground: Freud's Visual Cultures of the Unconscious by Diane O'Donoghue (review)

Originality and Peril

Originality has long seemed mysterious to its beholders, and hypotheses about its genesis have issued forth since antiquity in the form of general suppositions and postulates about individual cases. Plato, for example, in the Ion, invokes a notion of divine inspiration to explain the wonder of poetry; while, miming Homer at the start of the Iliad, Vergil supplicates the Muse shortly after his opening lines in the Aeneid. Curious folk, scholarly and otherwise, never tire of wondering how innovators of all stripes—philosophers, poets, composers, novelists, filmmakers, architects, and theorists—come up with their ideas. Recently, practitioners of neuroscience have entered the fray with their unique battery of experiments and formulae.

The case of Sigmund Freud is exemplary, for, despite the waning of his star in the 21st century, intense fascination with the genesis of his ideas persists, especially within the psychoanalytic community, where, as one might expect, the methodology used to probe this question borrows unabashedly from the very concepts the derivation of which it seeks to discover. Such curiosity about the wellsprings of creativity—when it relies on biographical detail—turns up, more than occasionally, in its wake, little-known and sometimes embarrassing facts about creators, facts which may or may not prove germane to their creativity. In spite of this, however, inquiries into the sources of highly accomplished individuals' accomplishments may, as Freud himself coyly intimates in the opening lines of his brilliant, ever-controversial 1910 essay on Leonardo da Vinci, perform a species of idolatry. If that be so, I cannot but applaud; in our era of broken icons, even qualified admiration for high achievement has fallen out of favor. Amid the rumble of toppling pedestals, I tender bravos to any and all true scholars who write books that bespeak a deep caring for and sensitivity to their subjects.

Art historian Diane O'Donoghue's complex and ambitious new book, On Dangerous Ground, partakes in this genre of inquiry and should be eagerly welcomed by the psychoanalytic community. It is a book of five chapters densely packed with fine-honed data garnered from a wealth of both primary and archival sources (letters, journals, chronicles, lectures) and secondary sources (including very recent ones), in German and Italian as well as English, drawn from wide-ranging disciplines. Specialists and devotées of Freud will surely be rewarded for their efforts in perusing its pages. Citing troves of research that betoken deep dedication, vast investments of time, and ingenuity, O'Donoghue's manifest goal is to demonstrate the effect on Freud's ideas of selected elements in the visual-spatial culture that surrounded him. In this process, the reader is taken digressively from visual culture into related areas, such as gnarled personal history, nuanced linguistic usage and translation, dream interpretation, male sexuality, feminist themes, anti-Semitism, and the depredations of Nazism. The thesis of the book is stated as follows: "Freud's visual and affective experiences of his surroundings were more significant for the creation of psychoanalysis than has been recognized to date" (p. 56). Towards the end of the book, an additional descriptive passage reads: "certain physical presences [are here privileged] as a means to revisit the formulation of psychical concepts and mechanisms" (p. 322). In other words, by extensively probing Freud's visual surrounds and their putative effects on him, emotionally and cognitively, we can achieve a more nuanced understanding of Freud's theoretical moves and choices (the origins of his notion of the unconscious, for example, and—regarding the causes of hysteria—his swerve from a seduction theory to a theory of childhood fantasy) than was heretofore available.

My aim in what follows is to offer a few modest reflections, of a philosophical nature, on the scope and value of such a project, generally speaking. I shall then discuss one particular moment, a moment that occurs early in its pages and echoes throughout—a moment of horror...