Maurice Olender. Race and Erudition. (Jane Marie Todd, Trans.) Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009. 240 pp. $39.95 (cloth). ISBN-13 978-0674034044

✍ Scribed by Fredric Weizmann

• Book ID: 102340174
• Publisher: John Wiley and Sons
• Year: 2011
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 96 KB
• Volume: 47
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 0022-5061
• DOI: 10.1002/jhbs.20487

✦ Synopsis

Mary Bergstein is a scholar of Italian Renaissance art and professor in the history of art and visual culture at the Rhode Island School of Design. She has published extensively on the impact of photography on art history and historiography as well as previously on photography and Freud (Bergstein, 1995(Bergstein, , 2000(Bergstein, , 2003a(Bergstein, , 2003b)). Mirrors of Memory is a bold treatise, examining an entirely new aspect of Freud's world: photography and its impact on his life and work. Bergstein believes "that examining Freud's photographic resources in their cultural context can open fresh perspectives on both the history of early twentieth-century Central Europe and on the birth of psychoanalysis" (pp. 1-2). This is no easy task, for Freud wrote next to nothing about photography and thus one must rely primarily on the "visual resources in Freud's library" (p. 2) and our knowledge of how this medium was received and used at the fin-de-siècle to draw cogent conclusions.

Bergstein's five chapters can be read as stand-alone essays. The first "introduces photography as a cultural system in the Europe of Freud's times" and "explores the idea of photography as involuntary memory" (p. 3). The second focuses on Freud's treatment of Michelangelo, specifically Freud's art history and his use of classical and Renaissance visual culture. Her third chapter tackles Freud's reading of Jensen's Gradiva, specifically how a photograph is like a memory or a dream. The fourth chapter addresses what the author terms "Uncanny Egypt and Roman fever"-Freud's "apprehension of Egypt[ian and Roman art] through photographic material" (p. 4). A fifth, concluding chapter uses magic and religion to unite these studies "of fields of visual knowledge and the workings of the visual imagination" in order to explore "the efficacy of photographic surrogates as charms or talismans in terms of Freud's emotional life" (p. 5).

Bergstein argues that "Freud's theoretical work, which was so frequently visual in its language, was closely allied with the photographic culture that prevailed across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries" (pp. 19-20). Moreover, "through photographic illustrations, Freud's knowledge and visualization of mythic forms was far more varied, and memorized in a more graphic form, than the examples he would have known directly from his personal collection, the Vienna museums, or other collections he visited" (p. 175). She establishes the case for the importance of this new visual medium both conceptually and in terms of Freud's working practices: "Photography, like archaeology, art history, and psychoanalysis, was a 'new science'and a science that was also an art. The process of deep scientific image-reading in dream analysis, connoisseurship, and iconology, was a modern activity that the psychoanalyst and the art historian shared" (p. 33). She draws many analogies between Freud's endeavor and this new medium: "In a metaphoric sense, photographic images could be received as involuntary mirror images, or memories" (p. 15)-hence the book's title and dominant motif. Bergstein is well aware of the tenuous quality of her conclusions and is generally wary of stating these too forcefully: "It is likely that the dream language between 1860 and 1930 was somehow in tune with the hushed chiaroscuro structure of black and white photography" (p. 134, my emphasis). This is indeed novel, as is her reading of the significance of ancient art within the Weltanschauung of Freud's generation: "Photographs of Hellenistic sculpture have served as