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Michael Molnar brings a decades-spanning career at the Freud Museum and its archives to this ruminative set of essays. Each of the 10 photographs is a case history and detective story, with Molnar unearthing clues to their respective dates and contexts. In turn he uncovers their intellectual and personal significance by attention to the most particular of details; his investigation reminds us of the gentle affinity of the psychoanalytic case history and the detective story. (‘You know my method,’ says Sherlock Holmes in The Boscombe Valley Mystery, ‘it is founded upon the observation of trifles’, Conan Doyle, 2008, p. 168.)
This book is a substantial contribution to the history of psychoanalysis, and an important testament to the extraordinary and as yet relatively unexplored photographic archive at the Freud Museum - it would have served its purpose even if it merely whetted the appetite of the researcher. But Molnar's explorations take us further and this book joins a tradition of texts that maintain a more oblique relationship with psychoanalysis, investigating more deeply the relationship between photography, psychoanalysis, memory and desire. The two most prominent of these would surely be Susan Sontag's On Photography (1977) and Roland Barthes's Camera Lucida (1981). Indeed, Molnar launches the book by recognizing that the image of the photographic negative was taken up by Freud himself as an analogy for the relationship of unconscious to conscious life in ‘A Note on the Unconscious in Psycho-Analysis’ from 1912. Molnar too points to Oliver Freud's amateur photography, and Molnar's own prepubescent fascination with the art.
Photography, as Susan Sontag notes, is a way of certifying experience, yet she adds that it is also a way of refusing or moderating it, placing the camera between our consciousness and a more disorienting, rough-edged reality (Sontag, 1977, pp. 6-7) (her classic example is the tourist, and many