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This book is another contribution to the growing history of visual culture in relation to psychoanalysis, along with Bergstein's previous Mirrors of Memory: Freud, Photography, and the History of Art (Cornell University Press, ) and Diane O'Donoghue's On Dangerous Ground: Freud's Visual Cultures of the Unconscious (Bloomsbury Academic Press, ), which appears in the same Psychoanalytic Horizons series as the book under review.
At first it might seem a paradox that so much interest in the visual emerges from a fundamentally verbal practice, one that Freud himself declared could not be witnessed by a third party (much to the disappointment of the medical students who attended his first lectures).1 Though a weird science of the hidden, repressed, and the occluded, nonetheless psychoanalysis is embedded, informed, and enriched by a variety of visual disciplines and practices, as these two scholars have illustrated at length. Bergstein focuses on photography, arguing in her first book that “the visual culture that Freud shared with his contemporaries and followers was largely photographic,” a culture that combined new applications of photography to medicine as well as to art and archaeology (p. 1). The first book established just how mediated the visual imagination was (and is) by photography, in ways often left unexamined, as if photography were a transparent medium requiring no critical reflection.2 The new book continues this exploration but has a focus on “the social history of visual culture around 1900 in Vienna” and the role photography and film played in establishing “networks of cultural meaning,” leading to something Bergstein is content to label broadly as a “psychoanalytic imagination”
(p.1). The book comprises three chapters, the titles of which mark their distinctive itineraries: 1) “X-ray Photography and the Visual Imagination in Vienna”; 2) “Freud, Saturn, and the Power of Hypnosis” (Saturn here being a reference to the early “Saturn films,” short burles