On Dangerous Ground: Freud’s Visual Cultures of the Unconscious (Psychoanalytic Horizons) - Softcover

Diane O'Donoghue

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1501363042 ISBN 13: 9781501363047

Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic, 2020

Synopsis

Winner of the 2019 Robert S. Liebert Award (established jointly by the Association for Psychoanalytic Medicine and the Columbia University Center for Psychoanalytic Training and Research)

In the final years of the 19th century, Sigmund Freud began to construct evidence for the workings of an “unconscious.” On Dangerous Ground offers an innovative assessment of the complex role that his encounters with visual cultures―architecture, objects from earlier cultural epochs (“antiquities”), paintings, and illustrated books―played in that process. Diane O’Donoghue introduces, often using unpublished archival sources, the ways in which material phenomena profoundly informed Freud’s decisions about what would, and would not, constitute the workings of an inner life. By returning to view content that Freud treated as forgettable, as distinct from repressed, O’Donoghue shows us a realm of experiences that Freud wished to remove from psychical meaning. These erasures form an amnesic core within Freud’s psychoanalytic project, an absence that includes difficult aspects of his life narrative, beginning with the dislocations of his early childhood that he declared “not worth remembering.” What is made visible here is far from the inconsequential surface of experience; rather, we are shown a dangerous ground that exceeds the limits of what Freud wished to include within his early model of mind. In Freud’s relation to visual cultures we find clues to what he attempted, in crafting his unconscious, to remove from sight.

About this title

About the Author

Diane O'Donoghue is a visual and cultural historian who directs the Program for Public Humanities at the Jonathan M. Tisch College for Civic Life at Tufts University, USA, where she is also the Senior Fellow for the Humanities and has served as chair of the University’s Department of Visual and Critical Studies. She is a scholar member and on the faculty of the Boston Psychoanalytic Society and Institute, on the editorial board of American Imago, and has been the recipient of the CORST Prize from the American Psychoanalytic Association, the Sigmund Freud/Fulbright Scholar for Psychoanalysis award at the University of Vienna and the Freud Museum, and an Erikson Scholar fellowship.

Edition details

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Publication date: 2020
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1501363042
• ISBN 13: 9781501363047
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 400