EROS IN VIENNA: ARCHAEOLOGY / PSYCHOANALYSIS / PHOTOGRAPHY / FILM

The female nude in photography has a complex history in Freud’s Vienna. This paper first examines photographic images of nude women and girls in the published art-historical studies of classical sculpture. Jokes about sculpture come to life, and nude women posing as statues, were also present in several of Johann Schwarzer’s “Saturn” films. Freud’s ideas on statues come to life (Gradiva), hypnotism, and scopophilia, were all hiding in plain sight in the culture of Schwarzer’s erotic comedies, which supposedly reflected the everyday lives of Viennese men and women. Books on the “sciences” of health and well-being by authors like Carl Heinrich Stratz and Paul Schultze-Naumberg reproduced many photographs of nude women and children, especially young girls. Such visual material comes to bear on Freud’s case-history of “Dora” as well as other contemporary writings on psychoanalysis.

Mary Bergstein is Professor in the department of Theory and History of Art and Design at RISD. She is the recipient of the American Psychoanalytic Association “Courage to Dream” Book Prize for Mirrors of Memory: Freud, Photography, and the History of Art (Cornell University Press, 2010). Among her other books are In Looking Back One Learns to See: Marcel Proust and Photography (Rodopi/Brill, NY and Amsterdam, 2014) and The Sculpture of Nanni di Banco (Princeton University Press, 2000). She is currently working on a new book, Science and Eros, about visual culture in Freud’s Vienna.

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