What Freud Saw

In Mirrors of Memory, Bergstein takes us on a voyage to a world of dreams and suppressed desires evoked by the work of nineteenth and early twentieth-century photographers. She is a master at showing us how the magic of photography helped shape public imagination and fostered interest in the fields of archeology, art history, and medicine. The many photographs Bergstein has chosen for her book make clear how important that medium had become in Freud’s lifetime. They bring to life the uses of the camera by Charcot and Bourneville and Regnard in studying hysterics, by Lowe in putting forward a theory of classical sculpture, by Muybridge in studying animal locomotion, and by ethnographers and archeologists.

Freud himself had a large collection of photographs: in books, on postcards—some framed, many not. Photographic images are, after all, closely linked to memory, capturing the past in the present, illuminating a moment never to be repeated with the same exactness. And for Freud, photographs, at times, depicted a longed for future. Well before he visited the city, Freud dwelt on photographs of Rome (where he once imagined retiring). In those days, Bergstein points out, “published photographs almost always anticipated the experience of the object itself” (p. 242). She links this cultural practice of preparing for a journey by studying images of the place to the experience of the uncanny and of déjà vu that Freud describes during his travels. There is always a disconcerting difference between the object one has constructed in the mind with the help of photographs and its tangible presence. A variety of associations, conscious and unconscious, have been stimulated by the image. A visit to the real thing can be disturbing, for while the experience is entirely new, it nevertheless, according to Freud, leads back to the old and long familiar. Bergstein explores the ways in which the study of an image can reinforce the sense of the uncanny: one has seen and not seen the object before the fateful visit to the real thing.

Bergstein shows how memory, dreams, and material objects intertwine in our minds as they did in Freud’s. She points to the image in Freud’s Rome Dream (Freud, 1900, p. 194) that is an almost exact replica of a popular postcard image of the time that Freud must have seen countless times.

We are our culture in so many ways. We soak in what we see. People did not report dreaming in color when movies and photos were in black and white. With the advent of Technicolor, people began to report dreaming in color.

Bergstein describes Freud’s conflicted feelings about Jewish identity—something he did not wish to deny, but also that he countered though his attachment to Rome (not Jerusalem) and to ancient antiquities. Like generations of secular Jews, Freud grappled with “how to be a ‘Jew’ without ‘Judaism’—how to live . . . without simply becoming a worshipper . . . bent to this cult” (Kazin, 2011, August 18, p. 52). Bergstein suggests that the sculptures on Freud’s desk—“a very personal lararium” (p. 39)—as well as plaster casts of classical statuary in home, and the images on his walls—were all expressions of his inner conflict about Jewish identity, as well as his aspirations to uncover a hidden world. She is at her best when she analyzes the art objects in background photos of Freud himself. These inanimate objects, whether chosen for inclusion intentionally or not, tell us as much about the man as his physiognomy.

Bergstein devotes a portion of her book to placing Freud’s essay on “The Moses of Michelangelo,” first published in Imago in 1914, in the context of his Jewish identity, his Oedi-pal conflicts and the cultural uses of the photographic study of sculpture in his time. The Moses essay was, as he himself noted, initially an orphaned ‘non-analytic’ love child whose paternity was not claimed by him until 1924. His reluctance to acknowledge authorship was based on it being “only a joke,” its...