Research Catalog

Title

Mirrors of memory : Freud, photography, and the history of art / Mary Bergstein.

Author

Bergstein, Mary.

Publication

Ithaca [N.Y.] ; London : Cornell University Press, 2010.

Items in the Library & Off-site

Details

Description

v, 335 pages : illustrations; 21 cm.

Summary

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. Sigmund Freud's library was filled with individual photographs and images in books. According to the author, these photographs profoundly shaped Freud's thinking in ways that were no less important because they may have been involuntary and unconscious. She argues that studying the man and his photographs uncovers a key to the origins of psychoanalysis. In Freud's era, photographs 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. The author 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.

Series Statement

Cornell studies in the history of psychiatry

Uniform Title

Cornell studies in the history of psychiatry.

Subject

• Freud, Sigmund, 1856-1939
• Freud, Sigmund, 1856-1939
• Psychoanalysis and art
• Art and photography
• Photography > Psychological aspects
• Memory > Psychological aspects
• Freudian Theory > history
• History, 20th Century
• Medicine in the Arts
• Memory
• Photography > history
• Psychoanalytic Interpretation
• Art and photography
• Memory > Psychological aspects
• Photography > Psychological aspects
• Psychoanalysis and art
• Psykoanalys och konst
• Fotokonst > teori, filosofi
• Minnet

Bibliography (note)

• Includes bibliographical references and index.

Processing Action (note)

• committed to retain

Contents

Introduction : reading Freud's visual imagination -- Memories and dreams -- Freud's Michelangelo : the sculptural meditations of a Hellenized Jew -- Delusions and dreams : Freud's "Gradiva" and the photography of ancient sculpture -- Uncanny Egypt and Roman fever : Freud's ethnographic quest -- Sympathetic magic and conclusion.

ISBN

• 9780801448195
• 0801448190

LCCN

• 2010001345
• 3161822
• 99937959818

OCLC

• 475444395
• SCSB-10749467

Owning Institutions

Harvard Library