Eros in Vienna: Dreams/ Archaeology/ Photography/ Film

In exploring the representation of eros in Freud's Vienna, a few important precepts from the social history of visual culture deserve to be reiterated. First, that the past really is different from the present. Second, that visual culture is everywhere, like the air we breathe. And third, that social habits (including sexual mores) vary from one society to another, historically and culturally. Furthermore, with a nod to cultural anthropology, it ought to be the rule rather than the exception that the bulk of visual production, from the most profound to the most banal, be interrogated with the special attention we typically reserve for that which was long ago or faraway.

At the turn of the twentieth century, the erotic lure of the “statue-come-to-life” prevailed as a Romantic ideal in Europe's Classical tradition. The theme of “living sculpture” was expressed in archaeology, psychoanalysis, photography, cinema, daydreams, and dreams. The Pygmalion myth flourished in 1903, when Wilhelm Jensen published the novel, Gradiva: a Pompeiian Phantasy, about a repressed archaeologist, Norbert Hanold, whose libido is awakened by a sculpture come-to-life, whom he meets in the ruins of Pompeii. Freud famously glossed this novel in 1907 with his Delusion and Dream in Jensen's Gradiva (pp. 7-93). In Freud's analysis, Hanold's archaeological interests acted at the service of a complex hysterical delusion, serving as an intellectual pretext for unconscious erotic desires.

When Freud examined Hanold's case history he located several pathologies, among which were voyeurism and fetishism. The famous Gradiva relief (Vatican Chiaramonti) come-to-life awakened the libido of the repressed archaeologist, who was otherwise stifled and numbed by the aridity and obsessive focus of academic life. Freud identified closely with young Hanold's dedication to professional study, and his particular association