Mirrors of Memory: Freud, Photography, and the History of Art (Cornell Studies in the History of Psychiatry)

Mirrors of Memory: Freud, Photography, and the History of Art (Cornell Studies in the History of Psychiatry) Review

Photographs shaped the view of the world in turn-of-the-century Central Europe, bringing images of everything from natural and cultural history to masterpieces of Greek sculpture into homes and offices. Sigmund Freud's library--no exception to this trend--was filled with individual photographs and images in books. According to Mary Bergstein, these photographs also profoundly shaped Freud's thinking in ways that were no less important because they may have been involuntary and unconscious. In Mirrors of Memory, lavishly illustrated with reproductions of the photos from Freud's voluminous collection, she argues that studying the man and his photographs uncovers a key to the origins of psychoanalysis.

Photographs in Freud's era were viewed as transparent windows revealing objective truth but at the same time were highly subjective, resembling a kind of dream-memory. Thus, a photo of a ruined temple both depicted the particular place and conveyed a sense of loss, oblivion, of time passing and past, and provided entry into the language of the psychoanalytic project. Bergstein seeks to understand how various kinds of photographs--of sculptures; archaeological sites in Greece, Rome, and Egypt; medical conditions; ethnographic scenes--fed into Freud's thinking as he elaborated the concepts of psychoanalysis. The result is a book that makes a significant contribution to our understanding of early twentieth century visual culture even as it shows that photography shaped the ways in which the great archaeologist of the human mind saw and thought about the world.

Freud: An Introduction to his Life and Work

Freud: An Introduction to his Life and Work Review

Many of Freud's views were forged out of a reflection on his own experience. It follows that an adequate understanding of the man and his work can be reached only by studying both aspects in conjunction with one another. Drawing upon both published an

The Naked Heart (Bourgeois Experience: Victoria to Freud, Vol. 4)

The Naked Heart (Bourgeois Experience: Victoria to Freud, Vol. 4) Review

The 19th century was intensely preoccupied with the self, to the point of neurosis. During the decades of the most sustained campaign for mastery of the world, the bourgeois devoted much time to introspection. This book, fourth in a series of five, deals with the inner life and charts this struggle for inwardness. Philosophers from Hegel to Nietzsche, psychologists like Wundt and Charcot, and Marx and Freud are included, but it is the ordinary bourgeois who occupy centre stage.

Lucian Freud

Lucian Freud Review

Lucian Freud Feature

• ISBN13: 9780847829521
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This volume, with more than 400 reproductions, will be the most comprehensive publication to date on Lucian Freud, covering a span of seventy years and including many works not previously reproduced. The result is a corpus of great works that reveal him to be the premier heir today of Rembrandt, Courbet, and Cézanne. The book includes not only Freud’s paintings but also his sketches, woodcuts, and powerful etchings. While the bulk of his paintings are female nudes, his cityscapes, plant studies, and interiors, executed in his distinctive muted palette and visible brushwork, are all included. Freud, who has lived in London ever since his family left Berlin in 1933 when he was ten, has achieved preeminence through his ruthless perception of the human form. His importance has long been recognized in England, but his present super-celebrity status dates from a retrospective at the Hirshhorn in Washington, D.C., in 1987. William Feaver, painter and for many years art critic for The Observer, provides a unique account of Freud’s preoccupations and achievement. Startling, moving, profoundly entertaining, the book lives up to Freud’s advice to students when getting them to paint self-portraits: “To try and make it the most revealing, telling, and believable object. Something really shameless, you know.”

Martha Freud: A Biography

Martha Freud: A Biography Review

Who was Martha Bernays, the Hamburg-born woman who, after a long and turbulent engagement and against the opposition of her mother, married the Viennese doctor Sigmund Freud and lived at his side for more than fifty years as wife and mother of six? How did she feel, coming from a traditional Jewish family but living in a household with no religious background? How did she cope with the challenge of being married to the man whose work revolutionized our ways of thinking about human sexuality?

In this, the first biography of Martha Freud, Katja Behling portrays this remarkable woman, whose loyalty and steadfastness contributed in no small measure to the extraordinary success of psychoanalysis as it went from strength to strength and spread from Vienna to the four corners of the earth.

Freud, Psychoanalysis, Social Theory: The Unfulfilled Promise (S U N Y Series in Social and Political Thought)

Freud, Psychoanalysis, Social Theory: The Unfulfilled Promise (S U N Y Series in Social and Political Thought) Review

Discusses the reasons for the decline of the cultural influence of psychoanalysis.

Between Philosophy and Psychoanalysis: Lacan's Reconstruction of Freud

Between Philosophy and Psychoanalysis: Lacan's Reconstruction of Freud Review

By using the concepts developed by Lacan to analyse the inner logic of Freud's thought, Robert Samuels provides a bridge between Lacanian theory and traditional categories of psychoanalytic theory and practice. In Between Philosophy and Psychoanalysis he constructs a stucture of subjectivity that accounts for the three major types of psychopathology - psychosis, neurosis and perversion - in terms of the different way each type tries to avoid the imposition of social imperatives. While these three dimensions, which Samuels names the existential, the phenomenological and the structural, were never developed to a significant degree by Freud himself, the author demonstrates that they underlie Freud's thinking. Moreover, by articulating these three dimensions in terms of the three registers of subjectivity formulated by Lacan - the real, the imaginary and the symbolic - Samuels demonstrates the way in which Lacan's work is a return to Freud. Samuels argues that Freud's work offers a response to many questions that have dominated Western philosophy and that, with Lacan, Freud's philosophical presuppositions and solutions become more evident. By turning to philosophy to explain psychoanalysis, Lacan was able to break down some of the differences between these two disciplines in France, and this book is intended to extend the dialogue between psychoanalysts and philosophers internationally.