Mirrors of Memory: Freud, Photography, and the History of Art (review)

We know so much of what Sigmund Freud thought that it is a refreshing surprise to learn more about what he saw and how he saw it. A connoisseur of art, Freud adorned his walls with pictures and covered his desk and shelves with artifacts. Mary Bergstein, Professor in the History of Art and Visual Culture at the Rhode Island School of Design, reminds us that Freud matured during the early years of photography. Jean-Martin Charcot, an important mentor, used the camera to record and study seizures and hysterical expressions and postures. G.-B. Duchenne (1806–75), neurologist and electro-physiologist who worked with Charcot, sought to understand normal people and neuropsychiatric patients through photographs of faces and body postures. Freud owned the 1876 (French) edition of Duchenne’s human physiognomy. Bergstein’s knowledge of Freud’s library as well as his art collection is impressive, as is her perspective on what he saw, cherished, studied, and put to use.

In the spirit of Reading Freud’s Reading (Sander L. Gilman, New York, New York University Press, 1994), Bergstein posits a reading of his visual imagination. The first chapter “explores the idea of photography as involuntary memory and the metaphorical role of photographs as fantasms and dreams” (3). Chapter 2 takes the Michelangelo Moses as focus for a survey of Freud’s interest in classical and Renaissance visual culture; he published an essay on it in 1914. Chapter 3, based on Freud’s 1907 paper on Jensen’s Gradiva, asks “How did photographs provoke art-historical fantasies . . . how is a photograph like a memory or a dream?” (4) Chapter 4 focuses on the ethnography of Egyptians and Jews, including anti-Semitism and “Orientalism.” The book concludes with Freudian ideas, including myths, about photography.

Bergstein considers photography an “organizing metaphor” taking on the “guise of memories and daydreams” (9) in Freud’s writings, e.g., a view of Rome’s Tiber and San Pietro that had long been represented in engravings, then photographs. Freud’s passion for Rome is well known. With travel by car and train, scenes change rapidly, sometimes “leaving the dreamer both anxious and desiring” (9, 13). Photographs present a truer record of paintings and sculpture than drawings, and for Freud the camera was an instrument of truth like the microscope and telescope while, like the unconscious, preserving the past for expression in the present. Freud’s engagement with Greek and Roman art and architecture was an intellectual and emotional leap away from the religious and cultural orientation (Hebrew and Yiddish, not Greek and Latin) of his father Jacob—perhaps related to Oedipal guilt in Bergstein’s view.

Psychological speculation aside, the great value of this book is the way it illuminates Freud as a person in the context of old art and new science. The longest discourse is about Pompeii, the setting for the novel that Freud addressed in Delusions and Dreams in Jensen’s Gradiva. Pompeii was the perfect psychoanalytic-archeological “metaphor of burial and excavation” that “became a paradigm of forgetfulness and retrieval that has shaped much of modern thought” (184). Bernstein argues that photographs, like memories, “are always subjective constructions with unconscious as well as conscious content . . . the images are not transparent windows to an objective reality; and yet they were frequently used as if they were endowed with the ability to present the visceral truth” (172).

While Freud’s scientific ambitions were not realized, his efforts to uncover and interpret hidden motivations affected world culture for a century, and still engage intellectuals, thinkers, artists, and ordinary folk. Most Freudians do not share Bergstein’s estimation of Moses and Monotheism as a great work, but her focus on Freud’s preoccupation and identification with the prophet and leader is apt. Her book is suitable, indeed valuable, for nonspecialists. General readers will learn much about art, its role in cultural change and intellectual history, and how one genius was moved by it and...