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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