Maudsley Arts and Psychoanalysis | Visual Culture in Freud's Vienna: Science, Eros, and the Psychoanalytic Imagination - Mary Bergstein

Maudsley Lectures in Psychoanalysis | Arts and Psychoanalysis

Visual Culture in Freud's Vienna: Science, Eros, and the Psychoanalytic Imagination

Mary Bergstein

3rd June 2024

7:30pm - 9:00pm (BST)

Hybrid

In-person at 10 Windsor Walk and online via Zoom.

Recording available for 1 week.

The speakers will be in dialogue with Psychoanalyst Dr Anne Patterson.

Mary Bergstein is the author of Visual Culture in Freud’s Vienna: Science, Eros, and the Psychoanalytic Imagination (Bloomsbury 2024).

In 2010, she won the American Psychoanalytic Association book prize for Mirrors of Memory: Freud, Photography, and the History of Art (Cornell U. Press) Among her other books are In Looking Back One Learns to See: Marcel Proust and Photography (Rodopi/Brill 2014); and The Sculpture of Nanni di Banco (Princeton U. Press 2000). Her current project is entitled, The Milky Skin of Women and Animal Tattoos.

Bergstein has produced important books, articles, reviews, and exhibition catalogues. She has contributed essays to journals including: History of Photography; American Imago; Arion; Afterimage; Visual Resources; Renaissance Quarterly, The Art Bulletin; The Oxford Art Journal; The Burlington Magazine; Arte Veneta, and Rivista d’Arte. Her essays and articles have appeared in edited volumes, such as Image and Enterprise 1999; Photography and the Optical Unconscious 2017; and Orsanmichele and the History and Preservation of the Civic Monument 2012.

Mary Bergstein taught at Columbia University and Princeton University before settling at Rhode Island School of Design (RISD), where she was professor for over 30 years. Bergstein has lectured widely in the UK, the US, and throughout Europe.
 

Summary 

Sigmund Freud’s great modernist invention, the theory and practice of psychoanalysis, occurred in a visual domain where representations of erotic and scientific knowledge were frequently similar, contiguous, or superimposed. The term “psychoanalysis” here refers not only to Freud’s writings directly but should be taken in the spirit of the “whole climate of opinion” that W.H. Auden (1907-1973) spoke of in his memorial poem of 1939.

My new book (Bloomsbury 2024) investigates the social history of what we call “visual culture” around 1900 in Vienna, including image-systems that hover around the uneasy juncture of science and eros. I would argue that photography, film, graphic design, apparel design, illustration, and archaeological photography not only reflected ideas already in force in Vienna around 1900, but established networks of cultural meaning, bringing into being what might be referred to as a “psychoanalytic imagination.”

From Freud’s thinking on the sublimation of libido and his later theorisation of the Life and Death Drives, to Klein’s work on reparation and the recovery of the good object and Winnicott’s ideas of creative living, psychoanalysis has always been interested in creativity. 

In the fourth Maudsley summer series on arts and psychoanalysis, we continue to explore this theme of creativity between internal and external worlds in dialogue with artists from a range of different perspectives: from the natural to the built world and ceramics to literature and theatre.

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