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In an obsessively detailed and illuminating book, art historian Diane O’Donoghue brings a new approach to the study of the material and cultural environment in which psychoanalysis was born, resulting in this remarkable work of intellectual history. Paying close attention to Freud’s ideas in the specific context in which he develops them, O’Donoghue argues persuasively that Freud’s disavowal of his own painful memories contributed to the very way that he conceptualized the structure and the workings of the unconscious. Most centrally, she illustrates many instances in which Freud emphasizes infantile sexuality and obscures the contribution of early trauma and shame as determinants of defensive structures. Using a close reading of his published dreams, examination of his contemporaneous letters, the itinerary of his travels, his encounters with works of art and antiquities, and details from his personal history, she brings to light the complex meanings of specific details that Freud dismisses, disguises, distorts, or leaves out. She usefully incorporates and comments on the work of many scholars and assembles an astonishing amount of evidence from beyond the psychoanalytic literature. O’Donoghue’s meticulous and wide-ranging research leads her to fresh discoveries that add to the persuasiveness of her argument; even
the few places where she resorts to speculation are easy to forgive because of the wealth of thought-provoking material she provides. The book is as thrilling to read as a detective story.
There is an unfortunate body of tendentious scholarship that speculates about Freud’s unconscious motives. What distinguishes O’Donoghue’s approach is the thoroughness of her research and her devotion to detail. She knows what Freud saw when he looked out of his window, and we are invited to see Vienna as a place of meanings that resonate in Freud’s ideas. She shows us photographs of the interior of the shop where he bought the urn that appears in his “dream of conven