Abstract
Although Sigmund Freud often presented psychoanalysis as a “discovery,” its extension by later generations of analysts has demonstrated that the territory of the Freudian unconscious, focused as it was on the triangular oedipal drama, was a construction of Freud’s own making. The field’s preoedipal and relational turns—as well as feminist, gay/lesbian, and other critiques—have significantly enriched and extended the breadth and depth of psychoanalytic practice and theory. In recent years, the emergent field of Freud studies has increased our understanding of the personal travails and cultural context that shaped Freud’s journey and molded his thinking. To these explorations, Diane O’Donoghue has now added On Dangerous Ground: Freud’s Visual Cultures of the Unconscious, a work of extraordinary depth and nuance that considers the ways in which Freud’s construction was shaped by his visual surroundings and cultural milieu. By focusing on the 1890s, the crucial decade during which Freud established the fundamental outline of psychoanalysis, O’Donoghue engages the particular “originary moments” (p. 2) from which psychoanalytic ideas developed, in the context of the places Freud visited and things Freud saw, as he sought to identify and describe intrapsychic processes. O’Donoghue argues that “visual culture was productive of psychical value,” but notes how this contrasts with Freud’s routine tendency to render physical objects and imagery “inconsequential within the psychoanalytic project” (p. 3). Thus, the challenge she takes on is not only to resituate the origins of psychoanalysis in their time and place, but also to demonstrate the ways in which the visual world did, in fact, shape Freud’s theorizing.
O’Donoghue has devoted her career to understanding the significance and power of the visual. After completing a dissertation on Bronze Age China that required knowledge of archaeology and art history, she served on the faculty and then as chair of Visual and Critical Studies, a Tufts University department based at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts; she is now director of the Tufts Program for Public Humanities. In parallel, O’Donoghue has pursued her deep interest in psychoanalytic theory and practice, evident in her long affiliation with the Boston Psychoanalytic Society and Institute, as well as in her selection as a Fulbright/Freud Visiting Scholar at the University of Vienna and the Freud Museum, a Fulbright Visiting Professor at the Akademie der Bildenden Künst in Vienna, and an Erikson Scholar at the Austen Riggs Center. In 2004 the American Psychoanalytic Association awarded her its CORST prize for an article based on research that eventuated in this book.
On Dangerous Ground, the product of more than two decades of research and writing, reflects its author’s dedication, perseverance, and creative insight in its breadth and complexity. O’Donoghue goes well beyond what Freud published; she seeks to identify the influences and ideas that he left unpublished, some of which may even have been unconscious. This kind of investigation requires exhaustive research that seeks to uncover every possible bit of available evidence, as well as analyses and interpretations by other scholars. On Dangerous Ground is built on analysis and interpretation of primary textual sources (Freud’s publications, lectures, and letters and ephemera), contemporaneous documents (published and unpublished), wide reading in the secondary literature (addressing not only psychoanalysis, but also archaeology, art and cultural history, architectural and urban studies, and Central European history), and on-site examination of the locations Freud visited during those years. The book is filled with information, and my short review can only begin to suggest its richness.
On Dangerous Ground includes five chapters, plus an introduction, a conclusion, and an afterword. Although the chapters are roughly chronological, O’Donoghue weaves back and forth in time to demonstrate how Freud’s choices as he framed psychoanalysis were often shaped by the residue of events that had taken place days, months, or even years earlier.
The introduction argues for the value of research regarding the visual culture and physical objects that formed the context within which Freud generated psychoanalysis. In particular, O’Donoghue explains her strategy of seeking to investigate Freud’s ideas as they were “coming into being” (p. 2), before Freud presented them in polished form in publication. This approach is facilitated for the crucial decade of the 1890s by Freud’s extensive correspondence with Wilhelm Fliess, with whom Freud often shared his early versions of the experiences and ideas that later appeared in print. These letters (collected in Masson 1985), supplemented by Freud’s other correspondence, also allow O’Donoghue to map a close chronology of Freud’s travels, including his trips to Italy in 1897 and the Balkans in 1898. O’Donoghue identifies different “physical presences” (built structures, antiquities, paintings, books, and the like) that she proposes were “generative of affects and associations that preceded what Freud will ‘discover’ as psychical attributes” (p. 2). In a sense, O’Donoghue seeks to identify the full “autobiographical” character of Freud’s framing of psychical processes. This may seem an odd thing to say, as Freud routinely based his claims on his own self-analysis, and The Interpretation of Dreams, the focus of O’Donoghue’s final chapter, has so much autobiographical content. However, O’Donoghue seeks to reach beyond the readily apparent “manifest” content of Freud’s published texts. By analyzing his publications in their physical and temporal contexts, O’Donoghue uncovers a body of “latent” content in the form of interwoven relationships and “exclusionary tendencies” (p. 3) that reveal not only the sources of Freud’s thinking, but also the character of Sigmund Freud himself.
As in all scholarly investigations of this type, certainty is rarely achievable. O’Donoghue is a careful scholar who acknowledges the sometimes speculative character of her claims. What makes her work more than conjecture, however, is the amount of evidence she compiles and the many directions from which she builds each of her arguments.
Her discussion begins with the city of Vienna, the primary focus of chapter 1. Her analysis turns on the contrast between the unchanging appearance of certain significant buildings, and the significant transformations of their meaning as time passes. O’Donoghue recounts how the Ringstrasse, lined with monumental civic and institutional structures, was initially understood as the embodiment of Austrian liberalism and an open city. In particular, the visual character of the neo-Gothic Rathaus (City Hall), derived from the secular Gothic of the town halls of Brussels, Antwerp, and Bruges, was seen as a symbol of liberalism, but after 1895, when the city government was captured by the anti-liberal, anti-Semitic Christian Social party, it came to represent liberal “ruin”—unchanged in appearance, but transformed in meaning. Similarly, in 1886 Freud moved into a neo-Gothic apartment building in the shadow of the Rathaus, aligning himself with liberal Vienna. By spring 1891 he was planning his move to Berggasse 19 (a move that took place that fall). Then, in May 1891, his patient Pauline Silberstein, the wife of his childhood friend Eduard, committed suicide by jumping from a balcony in the interior of the apartment house (likely before or after a session with Freud). The building itself was unchanged, but its meaning for Freud was now doubly transformed. A simultaneity of events—Freud’s preparation and presentation of “The Aetiology of Hysteria” (1896) and the culmination of Vienna’s crisis of liberal politics—leads O’Donoghue to consider the cluster of circumstances that brought Freud to choose the archaeological analogy to introduce his analytic procedures. In particular, she demonstrates how Freud’s invocation of the Latin aphorism “saxa loquuntur” (stones speak), was likely meant, and understood by his audience, as a double entendre referencing both his analytic procedures and the changed meaning of the “stones of Vienna,” as well as the changed circumstances of the liberal intelligentsia—including Freud and his colleagues. Although other scholars have addressed the impact of the changed sociopolitical context (Schorske 1980; McGrath 1986) and Freud’s use of the archaeological analogy (Kuspit 1989; Corcoran 1991), O’Donoghue’s unique contribution is to place Freud’s developing ideas in their architectural, social, and political contexts as these inform Freud’s personal history, circumstances, and fascination with words and language.
Chapter 2 considers Freud’s shift from the seduction theory to a theory of childhood sexual fantasy and the contemporaneous origins of his antiquities collection. Although others have written incisively about the collection (Gamwell and Wells 1989; Corcoran 1991; Barker 1996; Burke 2006) and suggested its links to Freud’s thinking (Spitz 1989; Armstrong 2005), O’Donoghue uses her knowledge of archaeology and museology to analyze and determine exactly how Freud began his collection during his visit, in September 1897, to the Umbrian hill town of Orvieto and the Etruscan tombs located just below its cliffs. The site of the tombs, which had lain undisturbed since antiquity, was then owned by Riccardo Mancini. Mancini maintained some tombs intact, but scavenged others for objects that he sold in a “showroom” at his home. Freud visited the tombs and went to Mancini’s home, where he purchased the first item in his collection; Freud believed it to be a cinerary urn, but it has since been shown to have been a simple ceramic food container. O’Donoghue suggests that a collector’s ability to conceptually reframe objects extracted from their original physical contexts likely influenced the Freudian model of analysis as a search for meaningful shards of memory; she points to Lacan’s comment that the Freudian unconscious is like a “cluttered storeroom” (p. 106). O’Donoghue suggests that the process by which Freud built his theory of early sexuality on the evidence of fragments of memories was “indebted to the manner in which material ‘antiquities’ were selected and assigned value in the marketplace” (p. 90). O’Donoghue proposes further that Freud provided himself with an “intrapsychical rescue” (p. 111) by focusing on the importance of universal childhood sexuality, as he would not be required to face the personal traumas of his own childhood; as he would describe it, there was “nothing worth remembering” (p. 123).
The next chapter addresses the period after Freud’s return from Orvieto, when he began to collect his own memories. Through his self-analysis Freud framed the constituents of the Freudian unconscious: the universals of early childhood sexuality and the oedipus complex. In support of his claims, Freud pointed to his experience in 1859 of being aroused at the age of two and a half by seeing his mother’s naked body while on a train. O’Donoghue proves that this event could never have happened as Freud claimed. The railroad would not introduce the private sleeping accommodations that would have allowed his mother to disrobe until the 1870s; in 1859 passenger cars on the Leipzig line were all public coaches. Moreover, Freud’s mother was then five months pregnant. Perhaps Freud saw his mother in the family’s lodgings in Freiburg or Leipzig. As O’Donoghue points out, placing this event on a train allowed Freud to draw on then popular tropes of train travel, sexuality and danger, while simultaneously deflecting attention from the personal childhood trauma of his family’s economic decline and forced migration—uncontrolled external forces masked by the universalized intrapsychic condition that was Freud’s focus.
In chapter 4, O’Donoghue looks to the genesis of Freud’s first paper on unconscious processes, “The Psychical Mechanism of Forgetfulness” (1898), which, in a revised version, became the first chapter of The Psychopathology of Everyday Life (1901). The narrative of Freud’s paper points to his journey in the fall of 1898 to Ragusa (Dubrovnik) and a forty-mile trip from there to Trebinje, Bosnia, during which he forgot the name of the painter of frescoes he had seen the previous year in the Orvieto cathedral. Freud first recounted this event in a letter to Fliess, so there are actually three versions of this narrative (the letter, the paper, and the chapter). In addition to her meticulous research to uncover the details of Freud’s Bosnian journey, O’Donoghue shows how the narrative was reshaped in each rewriting to make it conform more closely to the requirements of the Freudian unconscious centered on childhood sexual fantasy. O’Donoghue notes that the story, as Freud told it, left out any consideration of the visual impact of the Luca Signorelli paintings themselves. In fact, she points out, Signorelli’s frescoes present Jews and “Saracens” as enemies of the Catholic doctrine of Corpus Christi (transformation of the Eucharistic host into the body of Christ) and therefore destined for eternal damnation. A chapel nearby includes frescoes from the fourteenth century (in Freud’s time recently restored) that presented medieval fantasies of Jewish enmity to the Eucharist and punishments that followed. Given that the last years of the century saw rising anti-Semitism (witness the Dreyfus Affair from 1894 to 1899 and an anti-Semitic political party’s gaining control of the Vienna city government in 1897), O’Donoghue suggests that a more likely basis for Freud’s forgetfulness was his reexperiencing the affective impact of his encounter with the visual presentation of anti-Semitism in the cathedral. After all, Freud was a cultured individual, able to appreciate art, but his narrative says nothing of the content of the frescoes, instead turning to his construction of a universalized psychic process of repression that can be decoded by an analysis of words.
In her final chapter, O’Donoghue presents The Interpretation of Dreams (1900) as the culmination of Freud’s creation of the fundamental outlines of the psychoanalytic project that began with “The Aetiology of Hysteria.” As he was writing the dream book, Freud had already cast off the significance of historical recollection to focus on unconscious sexual fantasy. He had identified a process of uncovering the unconscious by decoding selected fragments of memory, and proposed the universal oedipal drama. In the Signorelli narrative, he had turned completely away from the visual. Thus, it was a small step for Freud to devalue the “manifest” visual imagery of dreams that might reflect “day residues” or serve political or social purposes, in favor of a focus on the “latent” meanings that connected to the unconscious as Freud had constructed it. However, to write a convincing narrative, Freud needed to rework his stories to reinforce his theorizing. O’Donoghue analyzes selected dreams, again comparing their original versions as presented in the Fliess letters with the revised versions that appear in the text. She investigates the origins of certain dreams, for example “Close the Eyes,” “Irma’s Injection,” “Biographical Monograph,” and “Uncle with the Yellow Beard”—material that Freud often did not reveal. She suggests that Freud’s focus on “hidden reality” was a deliberate choice to distance his work from the popular, often anti-Semitic dream books then circulating in Vienna. Thus, by the end of the 1890s the Freudian unconscious had been determined to operate autonomously, producing meaning from within, and in dreams capable of both “generating imagery and rendering it inconsequential” (p. 306). O’Donoghue does not challenge the latent significance of dreams; what she contests is Freud’s determination of the irrelevance of their manifest visual content.
In her conclusion, O’Donoghue suggests that Freud’s framing of psychoanalysis was shaped, consciously and unconsciously, by a wish to remain in control and not to face either the trauma and vulnerability of his lost childhood, or the increasing vulnerability of his position in the Viennese sociopolitical context. As Carl Schorske, the eminent scholar of Viennese cultural history, has noted, Freud reduced “his own political past and present to an epiphenomenal status in relation to the primal conflict between father and son” (1980, p. 203). What Schorske put in general terms, O’Donoghue has now parsed in extraordinary detail, relating Freud’s choices step by step not just to the political situation but also to his childhood traumas, sorrows, and losses.
Woven throughout the book is also a consideration of Freud’s theorizing from the perspective of today’s postcolonial discourse. O’Donoghue is particularly sensitive to the imperialist mindset of the nineteenth and early twentieth century intelligentsia, who framed the world in terms of Eurocentric “universals” to the exclusion of the personal and the local, and she suggests that such a perspective may have unconsciously shaped Freud’s thinking.
O’Donoghue says only a few words about the continuing impact of Freud’s choices for the present day. Her comments are gentle, recognizing that psychoanalysis has expanded well beyond its original Freudian boundaries. Nonetheless, she asks, might it be possible for psychoanalysis to engage more fully with the physical and societal environment?