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

Author(s) : Mary Bergstein, Editor : Esther Rashkin, Editor : Mari Ruti, Editor : Peter L. Rudnytsky

Reviews and Endorsements

Visual Cultures in Freud's Vienna provides for the first time a serious and comprehensive account of seeing in Freud's Vienna. With the acumen of a brilliant historian of photography and the visual arts, Bergstein meticulously reconstructs the visual ambience of fin-de-siècle Austria, exposing many of the subliminal patterns of seeing in Freud's world. A necessary read for those engaged in understanding how our visual world limits and expands our understanding of psychic processes.
Sander Gilman, Distinguished Professor of Liberal Arts and Sciences, and Director, Program of Psychoanalysis, Emory University, USA

Many critics insist on a change of paradigm in the history of medical therapy, i.e. on the move from the eye (the observation of the body) to the ear (the attention to language). Mary Bergstein's brilliant study is able to correct this view. In offering a glimpse of Vienna's rich visual culture at the turn of the century, she describes photographic portraits and sexually charged images that not only offer themselves for psychoanalytic interpretation, but must have informed its very genesis. Bergstein's book is required
reading for psychoanalytic critics and cultural theorists alike. Liliane Weissberg, Christopher H. Browne Distinguished Professor in Arts and Science, University of Pennsylvania, USA