Preface

“It is precisely this function of reassurance that the Vienna Freud Museum cannot fulfill.”

—Lydia Marinelli, “‘Body Missing’ at Berggasse 19”

If, as Hamlet observes of his counterplot against Rosen-krantz and Guildenstern, “O, ‘tis most sweet / When in one line two crafts directly meet,” Shakespeare's tragedy shows that the commingling of “mighty opposites” can also have all the bitterness of a poisoned chalice. And so it is with this issue of American Imago, which owes its existence to the inspiration and tireless efforts of Professor Diane O'Donoghue.

For, in response to the devastating news of the suicide of Lydia Marinelli, Research Director at the Sigmund Freud Museum in Vienna, on September 8, 2008, at the age of forty-three, Diane came forward with the suggestion that we do an issue of American Imago dedicated to Lydia's memory, with contributions by four former Fulbright/Freud Society Scholars of Psychoanalysis, who would have known and worked alongside Lydia during their tenure of their grants in Vienna. It is, accordingly, the Freud Museum that is the point of intersection here, and the conjoined destinies are those of our authors, each of whom was fortunate enough to spend four months under Fulbright auspices in Vienna, and the immensely productive yet tragically foreshortened life of Lydia Marinelli.

The reader should immediately be made aware that an eloquent obituary of Lydia, by her scholarly collaborator and indefatigable champion, Andreas Mayer (2009), has already appeared in Psychoanalysis and History, edited by John Forrester, along with a beautiful posthumous paper of Lydia's, “Fort, da: The Cap in the Museum” . In addition to my debt to Diane O'Donoghue for being the “only begetter” (in the phrase of the publisher's dedication to Shakespeare's sonnets) of this issue, I wish to express my thanks to Andreas Mayer for making available not only his own masterful synthesis of Lydia's multifaceted