Inside the Freud Museums: History, Memory and Site-Responsive Art 9781350986831, 9781786733054

Table of contents :
Front cover
Title page
Copyright page
Dedication
Table of Contents
Preface
Acknowledgements
Introduction
1 Staging Psychoanalysis: A Hagiographic Museum in London
2 An Archaeological Impulse: Uncovering a ‘Museum within a Museum’
3 On Dreaming and Travelling Through the Unconscious
4 Approaching Trauma: Working Towards a Politics and Ethics of Art Making
5 Autobiographic al Fictions: Intim ate Encounters in the Consulting Room
6 Seemingly Empty: A Conceptual Museum in Vienna
Afterword
Notes
Select bibliography
illustrations & credits
Index

Citation preview

joanne morra is Reader in Art History and Theory at Central Saint Martins, University of the Arts London. She is the founder and principal editor of the Journal of Visual Culture.

‘In this sparkling book, Morra integrates a thorough re‑visiting of psychoanalysis, an in-depth study of a number of contemporary art works as installed in a museum not meant for art and, most importantly, she demonstrates the fruitfulness of revising the relationship between site and the art installed there. The concept of “site-responsivity” will transform our thinking about that special spatiality without which art cannot reach its audiences.’ mieke bal, university of amsterdam

‘Rugs and couches, videos and photographs – all play important roles in Joanne Morra’s impressive and thoughtful book. Both a cultural and a material history of psychoanalysis, Inside the Freud Museums “works through” the charged sites of the two “personality museums” devoted to this titanic figure, via the impressive roster of contemporary artists who have engaged with these historic yet deeply personal sites. For anyone interested in the pervasive influence of Freudian psychoanalytic ideas within conceptual art, this is an important read.’ caroline a. jones, department of architecture, massachusetts institute of technology

for Marq and Cara

Published in 2018 by I.B.Tauris & Co. Ltd London . New York www.ibtauris.com Copyright © 2018 Joanne Morra The right of Joanne Morra to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by the author in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a review, this book, or any part thereof, may not be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher. Every attempt has been made to gain permission for the use of the images in this book. Any omissions will be rectified in future editions. References to websites were correct at the time of writing. International Library of Modern and Contemporary Art 6 HB ISBN 978 1 78076 206 7 PB ISBN 978 1 78076 207 4 eISBN 978 1 78672 305 5 ePDF 978 1 78673 305 4 A full CIP record for this book is available from the British Library A full CIP record is available from the Library of Congress Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: available Designed and typeset in 11 on 14 Dante by illuminati, Grosmont Printed and bound in Great Britain by T.J. International Ltd, Padstow, Cornwall

Contents

preface

vi

acknowledgements

ix

introduction

1

1 staging psychoanalysis: a hagiographic museum in london

29

2 an archaeological impulse: uncovering a ‘museum within a museum’

73

3 on dreaming and travelling through the unconscious 121 4 approaching trauma: working towards a politics and ethics of art making

142

5 autobiographical fictions: intimate encounters in the consulting room

181

6 seemingly empty: a conceptual museum in vienna

226

afterword

261

notes

268

select bibliography

292

illustrations & credits

299

index

303

Preface

The idea for this book took shape on a beach in the south of France. Thinking about my ongoing interest in art and psycho‑ analysis as different yet related practices, I began mapping out the research and teaching I was engaged in as a means of formulating a book project. Three events were at the forefront of my mind. The first was a paper I had given at the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute in 2007. The lecture was on Freud’s conception of working through, and I was particularly interested in bringing together this psychoanalytic process as it occurs within the consult‑ ing room as a space of therapeutic practice, with the gallery as a site of curatorial and art-historical thinking, and the study as a location for reflection and writing. As I considered this constellation of very different sites of practice, I became increasingly interested in Freud’s technical papers – the texts he wrote about the practice of psycho‑ analysis. In these, Freud introduced a series of recommendations to psychoanalysts concerning the beginning of a treatment, thoughts on transference between patients and analysts, the importance of dream interpretation, the idea of working through, and the interminability of analysis, all of which are crucial to the process of psychoanalysis. In this particular text, I concentrated on working through and examined its relevance as a mode of understanding how we encounter, curate, interpret and write about artworks. At this time, I was also teaching an undergraduate seminar for Fine Art students at Central Saint Martins on ‘spaces of practice’.

The focus was once more on sites of practice: the studio, gallery, study and consulting room. In preparing this seminar I was very attuned to the students’ work as artists. As a result, I combined a discussion of these spaces with what takes place within them, and we considered different processes through which a work of art is made: beginnings, endings, failures, digressions, for instance. The conjunc‑ tion precipitated discussions around these processes within various spaces of practice. The preparation and delivery of this seminar was a palpable instance of the importance that my institutional and peda‑ gogic setting has on my research. The art school is fundamentally a place of practice. Surrounded by artists, designers and writers, the act of making is key. This relationship to making – to practice – is also key to the approach I take in this book: whether the practice is the production of an artwork, the curatorial strategies of exhibiting work, the interpretation of both, or the practice of psychoanalysis as a therapeutic process, is vital to my thinking and writing. The third event that motivated this book was artist William Cobbing’s exhibition Gradiva at the Freud Museum London in 2007. I was invited to contribute to the exhibition catalogue. This opportunity had two consequences. I had the privilege of talking to the artist about his show before it took place, thus garnering insight into the Freud Museum as an exhibition space and the meanings that ensue in the placement of work within such a space. I was also reminded of the Museum’s extraordinary history in hosting contemporary art, and the many exhibitions that I had visited there over the years. In contrast to this, I knew very little about the relationship between contemporary art and the Sigmund Freud Museum Vienna, although I had visited the Museum several years before and had found its rather empty display quite shocking and intriguing. It became clear to me, on that beach in Nice, that my next project was going to focus on both of the Freud Museums and their relationship to contemporary art, and psychoanalysis. Once I returned to England I visited the Freud Museum London and talked to the staff about my idea for a book. I was warmly greeted by them and granted the opportunity to look through the preface & acknowledgement s  vii

Museum’s archives – about 20 file folders filled with press releases, correspondence, catalogues and other paraphernalia related to its exhibition history. I also contacted the Sigmund Freud Museum Vienna, and there too I had the pleasure of talking to the staff and learning a great deal about the Museum and its relationship to contemporary art. And so the book began in earnest. In spending time in both museums and with their archives, certain themes began to emerge, and these have come to form the chapters of this book. In the first instance, the themes are based on the exhibitions themselves and the concerns that a diverse group of contemporary artists have with psychoanalysis. This provided the impetus for an analysis of some vital issues related to psychoanalysis as both a practice and a theory, as well as to its history. Although these artworks were by and large not made with either of the Freud Museums in mind, and thus not site-specific, once the artworks were housed within it they acquired a particular interpretative framework. I have come to call this reciprocal dialogue between site and artwork ‘site-responsive’. In addition to this archival and theoretical work, in the autumn of 2012 I had the opportunity to curate a show at the Freud Museum London. Working on Saying It with artists Mieke Bal, Michelle Williams Gamaker and Renate Ferro gave me valuable insight into how a personality museum functions practically, what issues are at stake in curating and exhibiting work within it, and how this site situates and produces psychoanalytic and artistic knowledge within its environment. In developing this notion of site-responsivity a consideration of the personality museum became vital. The two Freud Museums are at opposite ends of this spectrum in their histories, content and approach to contemporary art. This has resulted in very different interpretations of each museum. It has also given me a chance to think about a general theory of the personality museum. These concerns with artistic and psychoanalytic practice, the spaces within which these processes occur and are exhibited, and the ways in which knowledge is produced through them began this book project, and have remained with it to the end. viii  inside the freud museums

AcknowledgEments

I would like to thank first the staff at both Freud Museums. The London staff have given warm encouragement throughout this project: Carol Siegel, Michael Molnar, Ivan Ward, Rita Aspan, Daniel Bento, Francisco da Silva, Bryony Davies, Lili Spain and Marion Stone. The staff in Vienna have been just as gracious and supportive: Inge Scholz-Strasser, Monika Pesslar, Daniella Finzi, Simona Flaxa and Peter Nömaier. I have had the pleasure of engaging with the work of the many artists and curators who provided both of the Freud Museums with an extraordinary history of art. Each of the museums’ websites provides a brief archive of these exhibitions.1 I have been fortunate enough to research the entirety of this history. However, I have not been able to discuss in this book many of the fine exhibitions held at both museums. This was simply a matter of limited space. Having said that, this book would not have been possible without the work undertaken by each and every artist who has exhibited in these two museums; as such, I owe a great debt and a big thank you to all of these artists. I would like to thank the students I have taught at Central Saint Martins for being so clever and engaged in what they do and with what I bring to the table. Thank you to my kind colleagues at Central Saint Martins who have given me professional and personal advice and support throughout: Mark Dunhill, Graham Ellard, Caroline Evans, Alison Green, Kate Love, Janet McDonnell,

Jane Rapley, Alex Schady, Emma Talbot, Anne Tallentire, Jeremy Till and Chris Wainwright. Thanks to Central Saint Martins and University of the Arts London for providing me generous research funding and a sabbatical which kept the project going and saw it through to completion. I have had the opportunity of delivering talks on the subject matter of this book that were helpful in allowing me to formulate my ideas. For this, I would like to thank: Max Liljefors (Lund University), Julijonas Urbonas (Vilnius Academy of Arts), Paul Coldwell (Freud Museum London), Zoe Mendelson (Wimble‑ don College of Art), Rathna Ramanathan (Royal College of Art), Monika Pesslar (Sigmund Freud Museum Vienna), Jason Bowman (Valand Academy, University of Gothenburg), Young-Paik Chun (International Korean Association of Art Historians), Asbjørn Grønstad and Øyvind Vågnes (University of Bergen), Inside Out Festival (Freud Museum London), Pablo La Fuente and Lucy Steeds (Central Saint Martins), Nina Lager-Vestberg (Norwegian University of Science and Technology), Jacob Lund and Jacob Wamberg (Aarhus University), Fredrick Schwartz (University Col‑ lege London), Carol Siegel (Freud Museum London) and Judy Willcocks (University of the Arts London). Earlier versions of this research were published as: ‘A Resistant Matter’, in the exhibition catalogue for William Cobbing’s The Gradiva Project (London: Freud Museum and Camden Arts Centre, 2007), pp. 24–31; ‘Contemporary Art Inside the Freud Museum: Working-Through Transit Documents, Postmemory, and the Holocaust’, Journal of History of Modern Art 26 (December 2009), pp. 249–73 (English); 274–303 (Korean translation); ‘Site-Responsivity, or Listening, Placing, and Saying It’, in the exhibition catalogue for Mieke Bal and Michelle Williams Gamaker, and Renate Ferro’s Saying It, curated by Joanne Morra at Freud Museum London (London: Occasional Papers, 2012), pp. 9–16; and ‘Seemingly Empty: Freud at Berggasse 19, A Conceptual Museum in Vienna’, Journal of Visual Culture, 1/12 (April 2013), pp. 89–127.

x  inside the freud museums

I would like to thank Liza Thompson from I.B. Tauris for contracting this book early on in the project and for her en‑ couragement. Anna Coatman took over as the editor and was a touchstone for me as I slowly approached completion. Baillie Card took over the editorial process at a crucial stage of the process, and I would like to thank her for the substantial and incisive com‑ ments on the initial manuscript, which enabled me to transform it in vital ways. This book is markedly better for her generosity and time. Special thanks to Madeleine Hamey-Thomas, my most recent editor, whose comments on the final manuscript and good judgement saw the book go smoothly through its final stages and to publication. And finally to Lucy Morton and Robin Gable at illuminati for having produced such a beautiful and intelligently designed book which delights me no end. Peg Rawes and Fiona Candlin have provided copious amounts of empathetic and intellectual support. As good friends and fellow academics, they have written books themselves, and knew exactly when to push me on ideas or talk about something altogether different. In addition, Fiona kindly read the entire manuscript and gave me a set of perceptive comments and the fortitude to carry on. Thank you to both of them. I would like to thank Adrian Rifkin for reading several chapters of the book and providing me with astute counsel. Special thanks go to Mieke Bal for having read each chapter as it was written, giving me smart, direct and encouraging comments that pushed me forward each step of the way, and taught me how to be a better writer. Thanks to LT for supportive and instructive conversations throughout the research and writing of this book. And finally thanks to my family. Thank you to my sister Marie Morra Fitzsimmons for always being there for me no matter what time of day, and having read through and edited my book, not once but three times. You are the best sister anyone could ever have. And thank you to her children, my nephew Pino for his love of avant-garde and heavy metal music of which he knows a great deal, and my niece Lucia, who is a brilliant fashion designer, preface & acknowledgement s  xi

animator and a fine friend, and all before she has reached the age of 21. Thanks also to their witty father Phillip, who along with the entire family welcomed me to their home in Nivelles for much-needed breaks or space within which to write. Thank you to my mother-in-law, Hertha Koettner-Smith, for taking an interest in this book and translating a set of German texts that were important to this project. And thank you to Jacqui Curran, first our nanny, and now a friend and a member of our family, who with much kindness and humour took care of my daughter Cara while I worked on this book, and taught her perfect comic timing. My mother Lucia and my father Giuseppe Morra have been tirelessly supportive of what I do in my work, and the choices I have made in my life. Although we live on separate continents, our daily phone calls make this gap seem smaller. I am deeply grateful for all that they have given me. Thank you. In the end, it is onto my immediate family that the biggest burden falls, and to which I owe the greatest gratitude. To my partner Marquard Smith, you were there at the beginning of this project, on that beach in the south of France when it was but an idea and were present and intellectually engaged with it through to the end; as always, thank you. And, finally, an enormous thankyou to our 6-year-old daughter Cara: you took many years to join us, but since you have arrived my life is full of irrepressible love and laughter. This book is for them.

xii  inside the freud museums

Introduction

Inside the Freud Museums: History, Memory and Site-Responsive Art has three overarching theses. The first concerns the personality museum, a type of museum dedicated to the life and work of an individual. Although the personality museum was very popular in the late nineteenth century, and experienced resurgences in the 1940s and again since the 1970s, scholarship on it is only now begin‑ ning to emerge. This book shows that the personality museum is a complex site comprising spaces, objects and practices. The practices that constitute it range from the experience of everyday life and the death of an individual, to the individual’s cultural production and its dissemination, and the conservation and curation of the objects that were once owned and used by the individual who resided and worked there. These museums also embody various histories and memories associated with the site and its inhabit‑ ants. The Freud Museums in Vienna and London form my case studies: in their particularity they offer two distinctive views of the personality museum and as such are appropriate bookends to a broader theory of this type of museum. The book’s second thesis advances the idea that the intervention of contemporary art into the personality museum, as well as other institutional spaces, warrants a new category of artistic practice, one that I call site-responsive. For the past 50 years, contemporary art has made its way into institutional spaces other than the white cube gallery. These are often museums, for instance large-scale

historical museums, personality museums, small museums dedi‑ cated to scientific exploration, or human development, or ecology, or archaeology, or astrology, or art museums large, small and independent. The temporary exhibition of contemporary art in these spaces began in the 1960s and 1970s with various forms of institutional critique, conceptual art, performance art, site-specific work, and has proliferated over the past two decades. Discussion of individual artistic interventions has taken place, but it is only recently that scholars have provided a more general overview of this history, offering a critical interrogation of this complicated phenomenon. The concept of site-responsivity is my contribution to this discourse. I offer this term as a means of understanding the generative and reciprocal nature of this form of art intervention that is temporarily housed within a space that is not primarily meant for contemporary art. In this book I consider the conjunc‑ tion of contemporary art and the personality museum, specifically the Freud Museums in Vienna and London, to develop a theory of site-responsive art. Once these art interventions are situated inside the Freud Mu‑ seums, they confront us with some of the most pressing concerns within psychoanalysis today. In a fundamental way, the artworks immediately become framed by psychoanalytic discourse and therapeutic practice. In response to this, as site-responsive inter‑ ventions, the artworks, artistic practices and curatorial approaches come to foreground the importance of psychoanalysis, its history, ideas and practice within our culture. The artistic interventions also challenge and extend our understanding of psychoanalysis by enabling us to think about it differently. Thus, the book’s third thesis is that contemporary art has the ability to demonstrate the importance of psychoanalysis for art and culture while interrogat‑ ing it and presenting it anew. Cutting across these three theses are the figures of history and memory, each considered here in various forms. The his‑ tory of museums and the history of art are paramount. Closely intertwined with these are the ways in which museums and art 2  inside the freud museums

exterior of sigmund freud museum vienna

are constituted through memory: the memory of individuals, of cultures, of nations. I am also interested in the history and memory of psychoanalysis, and the way in which they are bound up with psychoanalysis as a practice and theory. Informing all of the above are historical events and their remembering, moments that alter world history and those that change our individual lives. The remainder of this Introduction opens up these theses and the integral roles played by history and memory. Inside the Personality Museum

Much has been written about the museum.1 These studies have provided us with a wide range of knowledge about this cul‑ tural institution. We are now conversant with the history of the museum, the political nature of its formation, how the museum’s architecture shapes our visit, and the roles played by the director, curator, collector, donor and sponsor. We know how the museum acquires, conserves, classifies and displays its objects, and the way introduc tion  3

view into consulting room, sigmund freud museum vienna

in which these practices impact upon our interpretation of its col‑ lections and the discourses within which these objects function. Given this substantive field of study, it is surprising that so little has been written about the personality museum.2 The personality museum emerged and flourished in the latter half of the nineteenth century and was primarily founded within the homes of writers across Britain, continental Europe and the United States – although one of the first to be established in the United States was not that of a writer but of the politician and first American president George Washington. In the nineteenth century, the pilgrimage to visit the homes of authors became popular and featured as an important part of the practice of liter‑ ary tourism engaged in by the educated classes. Visitors wanted to view the space in which the celebrated individual undertook their work: for instance, much was made of the room that inspired the popular novels of the time, with particular attention being paid to the authenticity of the position of the desk, chair and pen. Aspiring to authenticity meant that the objects were rarely, if ever, rearranged. The staging of these rooms was meant to evoke the sense that the author had just recently put down their pen and left their desk, creating the sensation that although their physical 4  inside the freud museums

freud’s study, sigmund freud museum vienna

body was absent, their aura remained present. A visitor was also granted access to the private spaces of the individual’s life, such as the dining room, or kitchen, or bedroom and even at times the bathroom. In viewing the mundane aspects of everyday life, the voyeuristic desire of a tourist was fulfilled, while at the same time rendering the celebrated person more accessible. This paradoxical institutional practice of both revering and making mundane the individual’s living and working conditions continues to the present day and is fundamental to the personality museum. Having bur‑ geoned in the nineteenth century, interest in them revived after World War II and has done once again since the 1970s. Over the last 45 years, an increasing number of personality museums have been established as a part of the micromuseum boom. During this latter period of growth the Sigmund Freud Museum in Vienna and the Freud Museum London were founded. Sigmund Freud moved into Berggasse 19, Vienna, in 1891. Here he saw nearly all of his patients, wrote the bulk of the major works of psychoanalysis, carried out a lengthy correspondence with col‑ leagues and friends, hosted the significant Wednesday Psychologi‑ cal Society between 1902 and 1922, welcomed guests, and helped raise his family. His daughter Anna Freud began her practice as introduc tion  5

exterior of the freud museum london

a child therapist at Berggasse 19 in 1923 and continued her work there for over 15 years. After the German Anschluss of Austria by Hitler’s Third Reich in March 1938, Freud and his family were forced to flee Vienna. In May 1938, under constant surveillance by the Nazis, their exit visas were approved. The family escaped to London and were fortunate enough to be granted the right to take all of their belongings with them, including the now famous couch, Freud’s desk and unusual chair, as well as his formidable collection of more than 2,000 antiquities. Over three decades later, Vienna finally recognized Freud’s contribution to human knowledge and placed a commemorative plaque at Berggasse 19; in 1971 the Sigmund Freud Museum Vienna was founded at this site. The equally important Freud Museum London is located at 20 Maresfield Gardens, Hampstead NW3. Reconstructed to re‑ semble the working conditions of Berggasse, it was here that Sigmund Freud spent the last year of his life.3 He completed several manuscripts, worked with a few patients, received visitors and continued his correspondence. On 23 September 1939, after a dose of morphine was administered to him by the family physician, 6  inside the freud museums

freud’s study at the freud museum london

Sigmund Freud died in London. Anna Freud continued to live and work in Maresfield Gardens, establishing an international practice in child psychotherapy. She expanded on her father’s theoretical work, developed her own ideas, and formed a loyal following within psychoanalytic circles. Before her death in 1982, Anna Freud ensured that the paperwork was prepared in founding a museum in her father’s name at Maresfield Gardens. The Freud Museum London opened to the public in 1986. A crucial paradox makes the Vienna and London Freud Mu‑ seums valuable cases in thinking about the conditions of the personality museum. The key presence in the Freud Museum London is the couch: that very couch upon which those women and men lay on in Berggasse 19. The key absence in Vienna is that same couch. The Freud Museum London holds the material objects within it that are phenomenologically imbued with the history of psychoanalysis: the couch upon which the famous analysands lay; the desk at which Freud wrote, the chair upon which he sat; the antiquities from which Freud drew his inspiration in conceptualiz‑ ing psychoanalysis as an archaeological hermeneutics and practice; introduc tion  7

the table at which he and his family dined. However, the greater part of the histories of these objects and the phenomenological encounters with them during Freud’s lifetime took place within Berggasse 19: a space that now sits emptied of them. The Sigmund Freud Museum Vienna still carries the histories and memories of these phenomenological encounters, within the spaces that once held and shaped them. Essentially, the Freud Museums Vienna and London tell two very different stories, and manifest the polarities of the personality museum genre. The Freud Museum London functions as a space of hagiography, which is rather typical of personality museums: it sustains a powerful idea and narrative about Sigmund Freud’s life and work, and commemorates Anna Freud. The Sigmund Freud Museum Vienna presents us with a radically different understanding of the personality museum. This space is almost entirely devoid of objects, which has prompted the observation that it is ‘not a museum’ at all. But, in contrast to this absence of objects, it is overflowing with history and memory: both imagined and in the form of photographic documentation and facsimiles. At the outer limits of the personality museum genre, the Vienna Museum requires the construction of a new category of the museum, and I conceive of it as a conceptual museum. Ultimately, the questions that arise from these two particular museums are significant for a general understanding of the per‑ sonality museum. In transforming any of the spaces in which an individual lived and worked into a museum, it is important to ask: what is to be done? Which objects should be conserved and displayed? What narratives will be told about the past and present? To whom will these be conveyed, and for what reasons? And how will these tasks be accomplished? Inside the Freud Museums answers these questions in a multitude of ways, but for now I would like to introduce some key ideas about the personality museum as a site that is fundamentally constituted by diverse spaces, objects and practices.4 The personal‑ ity museum is bound by its primary purpose: to honour the life and work of an individual. Life and work are different from one 8  inside the freud museums

another and yet they are inextricably bound. On the one hand, the personality museum celebrates the work of an individual writer, film-maker, artist, architect, scientist or collector – or, in the case of the Freud Museums, the founder of a discipline and practice. It aims to present an authentic space in which the individual practised their trade: where an author wrote, where they sat, what inspired them; where an artist placed their easel and stored their tools; where a scientist developed their inventions. In the case of the Freud Museums in Vienna and London, they represent the spaces in which Sigmund and Anna Freud saw their patients, wrote up their case histories, and theoretically extrapolated from them in the formation, and extension, of psychoanalysis as a therapeutics and theory of the human subject. This semblance of authenticity within the personality museum is crucial as it gives the space in which these activities took place an aura. On the other hand, the personality museum also represents the home – the space in which the mundane aspects of everyday life are undertaken. For instance, the dining room where the family gathered for meals, or the living room in which friends were greeted and celebrations took place, or the intimate atmosphere of the bedroom is re-created. The home may also embody the traumas of life. It is the place in which a family bereavement may have occurred, or it may be the final home of the individual being commemorated, or the site may represent the intertwining of per‑ sonal and historical trauma. In the case of both Freud Museums, they are haunted by the anti-Semitism that led the Freud family to flee from Vienna, and are also deeply touched by the historical event that Sigmund Freud was never to witness, but that greatly affected the family members who lived on in Maresfield Gardens: the Holocaust, which was responsible for the death of four of his sisters and their families. Although not all personality museums are so closely connected to historical trauma as the Freud Museums, the relationship to death is often important. The personality museum can fall into the condition of being a mausoleum – a museum dedicated to the introduc tion  9

life and work of an individual who has died in the location being commemorated. It can also become a tomb, preserving the lifeless objects of its now deceased owner. In examining this, we can elicit the aid of Theodor Adorno’s critique of museums, in which he calls them ‘the family sepulchers of works of art’. Adorno writes: The German word museal has unpleasant overtones. It describes objects in which the observer no longer has a vital relationship and which are in the process of dying. They owe their preservation more to historical respect than to the needs of the present. Museum and mausoleum are connected by more than phonetic association. Museums are the family sepulchers of works of art.5

Adorno takes issue with the way in which the museum pre‑ serves artworks as historical objects rather than works living in the present. This results in a situation in which the observer no longer has a vital relationship to the artwork, as the object is in ‘the process of dying’. And yet, in this same essay, Adorno also argues that the museum is essential. It is the place in which the dying artworks are encountered by a viewer and become vital once again. Adorno sets up a dialectic between the negative way in which a museum functions and the impact this has on its collections, and the necessity of having museums as a space in which the viewer is granted access to these same objects, which thus enlivens them. The personality museum is caught within this condition. Rep‑ resenting the life and work of the individual who lived and or died within it, this museum is a family sepulchre. For instance, in visiting Sigmund Freud’s consulting room and study at 20 Mares‑ field Gardens, we are informed by the Museum’s audio guide that Freud died while lying on a cot in this space and that the items we encounter are exactly as the psychoanalyst left them upon his death in September 1939, thus making clear the space’s and the Museum’s relationship to death. Created as a monument and memorial to an individual’s life and death, the objects within the personality museum often need to remain static to maintain their 10  inside the freud museums

authenticity, and are thus rarely rearranged. And yet the museum is necessary because it opens up these spaces and objects to the public. Following Adorno, having visitors enter the museum initi‑ ates the vital relationship between these objects and the present; they become enlivened by our presence. Sigmund Freud made a short cryptic observation about space that is helpful in thinking about the psychic conditions of the personality museum, and the roles played by both the person who originally inhabited the space and the visitor. In the year preced‑ ing his death, in exile from Berggasse and living in Maresfield Gardens, Sigmund Freud noted that ‘space may be the projection of the extension of the psychical apparatus. No other derivation is probable. … Psyche is extended; knows nothing about it.’6 For Freud, space is constituted by and imbued with the subject who resides within it. More precisely, the subject’s psychic apparatus is projected onto the space consciously as well as unconsciously. We constitute our space with our psychic life, and it constitutes us. For Freud, space was very precisely related to the psyche and one can imagine Freud referring to the way in which the subject’s dreams, perceptions and desires constitute and transform it. In following Freud’s observation on space, the personality museum, which is founded within the spaces in which an individual lived, worked and died, is imbued with a rich psychic complexity. In the first instance, the psychic apparatus of the individual personality to which the museum is dedicated is embodied within the space. This is notice‑ able in a room’s decor: the arrangement of furnishings in Freud’s consulting room, on view at the Freud Museum London, tells us a great deal about psychoanalysis, as the distinctive placement of the couch and the analyst’s chair is still key to psychoanalytic practice today. This is but one example, and there are many other instances that corroborate the way in which our individual subjectivity is represented through the spaces in which we live. Beyond our individual self, we share space with family, friends, colleagues, and these psyches also constitute our space. Thus, the psychical projec‑ tions into and out of a space are multiple. In the case of the Freud introduc tion  11

Museums, for instance, they are always linked to Sigmund Freud, but the figures of his analysands are also crucial. The founding of psychoanalysis as a therapeutic practice and theory is dependent upon those patients who visited Sigmund Freud: the women and men who sought him out to relieve the symptoms that made it difficult for them to function in their everyday lives. The history, memory and legacy of psychoanalysis, all that followed on from Freud and what we call post-Freudian practice and theory, are also indebted to many more analysands and their analysts. These, too, resonate within the Freud Museums. In considering this legacy, it is valuable to turn to social histo‑ rian Michel Foucault’s discussion of the impact of Freud’s work, which he considered to be much more profound than the books that Freud wrote. He calls Freud (and Karl Marx) ‘founders of discursivity’ who ‘have established an endless possibility of dis‑ course’.7 In his view, Freud not only founded psychoanalysis, its techniques and theories, but, importantly, in going back to Freud we are able to modify psychoanalysis itself. In effect, Freud’s writ‑ ings are generative of ‘heterogeneity’ and ‘change’ within the field he established.8 The legacy of Freud’s contribution to knowledge, as a founder of discursivity, resonates within the Freud Museums. His original work is embodied within the sites as well as the extension and rethinking of, and opposition to, Freud’s ideas. The most significant materialization of this history and its contemporary revisions is by the Freud Museums themselves. The ways in which they narrate their histories and curate their spaces are forms of what Foucault called a dispositif, their ideology. For Foucault, a dispositif is the coming together of the workings of a heterogeneous ideological constellation that may include ‘discourses, institutions, architectural forms, regulatory decisions [etc…] – in short, the said as much as the unsaid’ in order to inscribe ‘a play of power’ which has a ‘strategic function’ of ‘de‑ veloping’, ‘stabilizing’ and ‘utilizing’ its institutional, disciplining ideological regimes.9 This takes place in all personality museums, and the Freud Museums in London and Vienna are no exception. 12  inside the freud museums

Thus the history of any individual personality museum, as well as its objects and spatial arrangements, along with the museum’s guides and websites, all work together to strategically mythologize the museum’s constitutive elements and tell a singular story about their authenticity and primacy. The strategic play of power re‑ quired in creating, reproducing and maintaining the myth around the spaces is such that it demands a specific understanding of its own formation, and importantly its repetition, in order to seal the personality museum’s history and consolidate its meaning as unchanged, unchanging and unchangeable.10 The ‘stabilizing’ function of the dispositif returns us to the personality museum’s resistance to change in order to maintain its authenticity, and also reminds us of Adorno’s concern with the inanimate nature of the museum – its association with the mausoleum and the death of its objects. However, this condition is not irrevocable. In order to activate and transform a space and enliven its objects we must enter it. In moving through a place, in participating and encountering its objects, the space becomes animated. What a visitor brings to the personality museum is de‑ cisive: what a viewer knows about the individual being celebrated, his or her work, historical context, contemporary relevance, and what the person being honoured means to a viewer are essential. A visitor adds a further layer of meaning and psychic projection onto the museum. With each visit he or she brings to life the objects, histories and psychic constitution of these spaces, and transforms the mausoleum into the vital spaces that form the personality museum. In addition to the visitor, one of the most remarkable ways in which this complexity is activated and interrogated is through contemporary art. By introducing site-responsive art into the personality museum, its ideological narratives are disrupted. As we shall see, site-responsive art engages, challenges and modifies the myths created and maintained by the personality museum, and, in the case of the Freud Museums, the discourse of psychoanalysis itself is enlivened and extended. The richness of the personality introduc tion  13

museum’s spaces of practice and the diverse conditions that con‑ stitute it are fully examined in this book by way of site-responsive artistic and curatorial practices. Site-Responsive Art

Site-responsivity is a new category within artistic and curatorial practice, which is produced when contemporary art enters a space that is not primarily a site for the exhibiting of artwork: a space that is not a white-cube gallery.11 For instance, we have seen art in‑ tervening, in the most productive ways, inside large and small-scale historical museums, natural history museums, literary museums, science museums, personality museums, archive museums and, of course, art museums.12 This form of art intervention is also a growing phenomenon within the personality museum. One of the primary aims of these site-responsive interventions is to render historical space contemporary, to engage critically with the museum, its collection, display strategies, narratives and history, or to open the space up to a broader cultural context that includes artistic practice. This was certainly the case with the initial charter of the Freud Museum London, which aimed to include historical exhibitions within 20 Maresfield Gardens; exhibitions that by 1994 came to include regular shows of contemporary art.13 Throughout this book, I examine the way in which site-responsive art produces alternative roles for the personality museum, often ones that embrace the contemporary in activating potential narratives that exist in the margins of those that the museum wishes to tell. As a result of this activation, the contemporary art exhibited within the personality museum often responds to the complexity of the site and enables us to understand it differently. At the same time, the museum initiates a set of unique readings of the artworks. There is a clear reciprocity at play. Site-responsivity acknowledges the way in which the artworks and space dynamically relate to, and respond to, one another. At times, site-responsive art employs various strategies and tactics that we have seen in site-specific work, or art practices 14  inside the freud museums

that are involved in institutional critique, or conceptual art, or performance art or relational practices. Take, for instance, sitespecific artworks. Although related to site-specific art, there is something uniquely different about site-responsive work. We know that site-specific art requires its situation in order to maintain its integrity. It is often a permanent artwork made for a particular location and requires both the site and the spectator to complete the work. Scholars have mapped for us three overlapping and nonchronological types of site-specific work. The first is work that is made for a ‘literal site’, one that remains there permanently and is phenomenological in orientation. Richard Serra’s Titled Arc is often referred to as an example of this form of site-specific work. The second is work that is dedicated to a ‘functional site’ that the artist understands to have a specific cultural context although the artwork does not privilege the site; rather its relationship to it is based on process, information, photographs or recordings that are exhibited within the gallery. The work of Robert Smithson is important, as is the institutional and social critique of Hans Haacke, Marcel Broodthaers, Daniel Buren, Michael Asher and Mel Bochner. Finally, there is site-specific art that is nomadic in character and concerned with an expanded understanding of discourse and the work’s interpretative field, and thus has multiple meanings depending on the specific site in which it is exhibited. Often considered an extension of its predecessors, this form of art practice includes the work of Mark Dion, Andrea Fraser, Renée Green, Christian Philip Müller and Ursula Biemann, for example.14 Although closely aligned with these practices, site-responsive art nevertheless features several unique attributes and thus warrants its own term. Site-responsive interventions are not permanent, as is often the case with site-specific work, and they are not made for a particular site whether it be a personality or historical museum, such as the Freud Museums. Site-responsive artworks and exhibi‑ tions have often been shown elsewhere, even travelled to several galleries before arriving at their responsive site, and then travel introduc tion  15

again afterwards. Even when they are made for the site in which they will be exhibited, once inside the Freud Museums these artworks and exhibitions form a temporary, critical interjection that responds to and casts a new light onto the site. More broadly, I think of site-responsive artworks and exhibitions as interrup‑ tions that temporarily stimulate the site, rather than permanently engage with it. Once the site-responsive intervention leaves the museum, it is often the case that the site reverts to its normative interpretative and ideological function. In this way, it is rare that a site-responsive exhibition has a long-lasting impact on the site. However, it does enable a temporary reconsideration of the site, its displays, narratives and meanings. It was clear to me from the beginning of this project that an exhibition held inside a personality museum or any other space in which displaying art was not its primary purpose was crucial to my argument. When an artwork is exhibited inside a personality museum, the meaning of the artwork is both framed and expanded by the context. This occurs because these museums are multi-purpose spaces formed out of a complicated intermingling of their own histories and memories, as well as what we bring to them. The complexity of these spaces engages with and activates the work of art. In a way, the personality museum has too much context. This makes us profoundly aware of the conditions of art’s display and its meanings. Inside such a laden space, an artwork complements or competes with the meaning of the space. In the case of the Freud Museums, the objects within them are imbued with Freud’s practice, his legacy and the history of psychoanalysis. What these objects mean to the viewer is highly dependent on what he or she brings to the space. Entering a space in which ‘the couch’ is based is fundamentally different to entering any other space in which art is exhibited. Artworks displayed inside the Freud Museums are immediately framed by psychoanalysis. This results in a productive series of alternative interpretations for the artworks and their making. In turn, having the artworks within this context shifts how we think about these 16  inside the freud museums

museums, about psychoanalysis, and how artworks impact upon the site in which they are exhibited. The Sigmund Freud Museum Vienna had its first contemporary art exhibition in 1989, when it acquired and displayed 7 conceptual works of art. A further 6 were added and shown in 1997. Together, the 13 works form its permanent Contemporary Art Collection. In 2002 the Museum initiated a series of temporary solo installations. The selection of artworks included in the permanent collection and those chosen for the temporary exhibitions programme form a tight and coherent body of conceptual art. As for the Freud Museum London, a part of its initial remit was to host exhibi‑ tions and run a research programme dedicated to Freud’s life and work. Soon after it opened, the Museum’s programme began to include contemporary art exhibitions. Since that time, it has held 90 interventions, displaying work by emerging national and inter‑ national artists. The Freud Museum London has not limited the type of art it has shown, as the Vienna Museum has. Rather, the London Museum has exhibited a diverse range of contemporary art. These differences in the Museums’ policies on contemporary art are important in understanding the differences between the spaces and the various ways in which a personality museum is constituted, and will be considered in this book. Through an analysis of the artworks as well as the curatorial strategies employed in the contemporary art interventions that have taken place within the Freud Museums, I have begun to develop a grammar of site-responsivity. I offer a series of active verbs or tropes that bring to light the enactments made by these artworks and their curation. The artworks and interventions are ‘inserting’ or ‘juxtaposing’ themselves within the Museum’s collection, thereby interrupting our normative reading of the space. Or site-responsive interventions may take on characteristics associated with psychoanalysis as a therapeutic process by ‘acting out’ or ‘dreaming’ or ‘voicing’ or ‘excavating’ their discontent. These psychoanalytic readings are encouraged because they are situated within the Freud Museum. introduc tion  17

For instance, the use of insertion within one exhibition saw objects of popular culture placed into Freud’s collection of antiqui‑ ties. These site-responsive artworks and curatorial strategy became the impetus through which Freud’s passion for collecting objects from popular culture during his time – antiquities – was invoked. This in turn opened up an inquiry into his abiding interest in archaeology as a metaphor for understanding the formation of the subject through repression and the exaction of these buried treasures within the consulting room through psychoanalytic treatment. In a separate intervention, the site-responsive curatorial juxtapo‑ sition of an artwork next to a painting given to Freud by one of his patients – the Wolf Man’s dream painting – occasioned an analysis of this case history and the artist’s practice that prompted me to read the exhibition in relation to Freud’s notion of nachträglichkeit, or afterwardsness, a concept he proposed in his analysis of this particular patient. By thinking through this curatorial juxtaposi‑ tion, in this particular site, I came to align the temporality of afterwardsness, which is the re-emergence and revision of an earlier experience in the present, with the artist’s working practice. In another intervention, the stripping back of the Museum’s own objects and its filling up of an artist’s writing on her psychoanalysis and her psychic and emotional life produced an environment that played out the psychoanalytic concept of acting out, which involves aggression and retreat. It was the artworks and the density of their curation, as well as the site, that created this tussle known as acting out. Insertion, juxtaposition, acting out: these are but three of the tropes that enact the site-responsive relationship between art, curating and site. These examples are particular to the Freud Museum London, but site-responsivity is a means of understanding the dialogical relationship that occurs when art intervenes into many other museological sites. As the curator of the exhibition Saying It, which took place in the Freud Museum London in 2012, I asked myself a series of 18  inside the freud museums

questions that I imagine the curators and artists before and after me ask. How are works of art to intervene within this space? How are they to do so with critical intimacy?15 And how to interrupt in such a way as to introduce different ways of understanding the museum, its various spaces of practice and the artworks on show? How to activate the museum? How to rethink the artworks? Each artist, each curator, each artwork that has made an intervention inside the Freud Museums has accomplished this in different ways. Often, listening is necessary. Listening to both what is already in the museum and to the artworks that are installed. But this is not a one-way street. In fact, the personality museum is itself a living, contemporary organism, and it, in return, sheds new light onto the artworks and the interventions staged within it. The artwork animates the site; the site responds to the artwork, and vice versa. In a site-responsive exhibition, there is a reciprocity and dialogue that ensues between the artworks, their context and visitors. This is generative of new meaning. Site-responsivity creates for us alternative roles from which to inhabit and view the museum, and contemporary art. Psychoanalysis and Contemporary Art

The Freud Museums Vienna and London are dedicated to the history, practice and theory of psychoanalysis. Both Museums have selected artworks to exhibit and the Vienna Museum has collected artworks that have some connection to these discourses. Already invested in the discourse of psychoanalysis to some extent, upon entering the Freud Museums, these artworks become further endowed with psychoanalytic meaning. The history of this al‑ liance between museum, psychoanalysis and contemporary art is noteworthy because it represents a unique and long-standing relationship, and speaks to how contemporary art reanimates the history and practice of psychoanalysis. The radical difference between the Museums, and their contrast‑ ing relationship to contemporary art – the focus of the Sigmund Freud Museum Vienna versus the expansiveness of the Freud introduc tion  19

Museum London – has meant that the artworks and exhibitions associated with each of them form useful barometers for both the persistence of psychoanalysis within contemporary art and culture and its most significant critical concerns. While spending time within the Museums’ archives, I found that particular ideas recurred within and across a group of artistic interventions, their responses to the two sites, and the history, theory and practice of psychoanalysis. From these themes, I created a structure and narrative for this book. As a consequence, Inside the Freud Museums is divided into six chapters, and each is devised around one of these themes: the consulting room, archaeology, dreams, trauma, autobiography, the conceptual museum. My starting point for each chapter is multiple, and layers of storytelling and analysis intersect to form my argument. Each chapter is firmly based upon the close reading and analysis of various artworks, exhibitions and curatorial strategies related to the theme under discussion, and the site within which they respond. Throughout the book, I consider Freud’s life and work, and the histories and legacies of psychoanalysis. I also take into account the Museums, their structures, contents, histories and the psychic projections that fill these spaces. In addition, the vital role of a visitor, such as my own encounter with the artworks and exhibitions, is considered and interpreted. In effect, each chapter analyses the productive dialogue between the artworks, the space and viewer.16 Chapter 1 is concerned with the Freud Museum London and its staging of the principal space of psychoanalysis – the consulting room. The Museum’s primary interest in this space provides a hagiographic narrative dedicated to Sigmund Freud. Theatrical, evocative and functioning as a time capsule, the construction and maintenance of Freud’s consulting room at 20 Maresfield Gardens provide us with the fantasy that Freud has just left the room, mo‑ mentarily, only to return soon. But this mythology is challenged by the Museum’s own history, which opens up this hagiographic ideology and takes us back through a series of historical accretions 20  inside the freud museums

to Berggasse: the site upon which Maresfield Gardens is built and to which it always returns. At the same time, the hagiographic fantasy is dissipated once more by a set of exhibitions dedicated to the consulting room and the psychotherapeutic practices that take place within it. These interventions engage with the history of the psychoanalytic object par excellence, the couch, taking us back to the seventeenth century and forwards to the present. In presenting this genealogy, the exhibitions pick up on the layers of medical, moral, gendered and racialized dimensions of the couch while also turning our attention to contemporary psychoanalytic practices radically divergent from those set up by Freud. All in all, the hagiographic intent of the Freud Museum London is both generated and undone. Chapter 2 begins once more within the consulting room. This time, I focus on exhibitions that engage with Freud’s collection of antiquities and uncover what I call the archaeological impulse within psychoanalysis. This impulse is manifest in three ways: materially, metaphorically and phenomenologically. In terms of materiality, I consider what takes place when Freud’s precious antiquities collide with art made of ordure, refuse, found objects, and the inexpensive toys from mass culture, and what happens to our understanding of museum collections when they encounter these objects. I then turn to a group of archaeologically inclined artworks and practices that invoke Freud’s metaphorical use of archaeology as a means of understanding the formation of the subject through layers of history and memory, and the archaeo‑ logical excavation of that same subject through the practice of psychoanalysis. Finally, I offer an account of the phenomenological role that Freud’s antiquities played in his work, turning them into ontological objects. Freud used his antiquities with patients during analytic sessions, for instance as a prompt for transference. At the same time, his ‘old and grubby gods’, as Freud called them, were vital to his solitary work. I discuss the ways in which his antique interlocutors, in keeping him company, inspired his thinking and writing. introduc tion  21

The book that Freud considered to be his most important, The Interpretation of Dreams, forms the basis for Chapter 3. Working with The Interpretation of Dreams and a set of exhibitions dedicated to dreams, I propose that dreams are a form of travelling through the unconscious as a means of better knowing ourselves. For Freud, dreams are the product of an unconscious transformation that turns experiences from our everyday life or half-forgotten and repressed memories into alternative images that we dream. What we dream, then, is not what it seems because unknown antecedents haunt our dreams. This is why dreams are crucial to psychoanalysis: they speak to us about our unconscious desires. In this chapter, I reflect upon a set of site-responsive interventions that use the dual structure of dreams as a form of artistic practice or curatorial strategy in order to consider the complex temporal‑ ity of dreams and their problematic character. For instance, one exhibition invoked Freud’s work on the way in which a traumatic dream may be repressed and form a knot within our unconscious, making it difficult to move forward, and requiring psychoanalytic treatment. Two other interventions follow Freud’s suggestion that our dreams become a metaphorical form of travelling to as yet unknown places, both from our past and into the future. As a result, we may dream to travel – literally going to another place – or we may find ourselves seeking a past we vaguely remember, or a future not yet known. In the end, we come to see that the world of dreams is temporally out of joint: past, present and future collide in the dream-image. Chapter 4 reflects upon the ways in which artistic practice can be a means of approaching the history, memory and experience of trauma. In it I focus on a group of exhibitions that approach what it means to live with inherited trauma. In all three cases the artist’s parents experienced trauma as a result of the rise of European fascism and the Holocaust. When these artworks come to reside in the Freud Museum, they invoke a set of psychoanalytic and philosophical ideas that frame the site-responsive claims made by the interventions. The first claim is the paradoxical proposition 22  inside the freud museums

made by Adorno that after the Holocaust art is forbidden and yet must continue to be made. The second is a psychoanalytic account of trauma that recognizes a difficult duality: although an attempt can be made to work through trauma, it is impossible to do so completely because its traces remain inscribed in the subject. The third is that trauma can be inherited intergenerationally, so that survivors may pass on the resonances of their trauma to their children. When operating on this complex artistic and theoretical terrain, what emerges is the crucial way in which we can approach trauma through art making itself. As a result, art making becomes a means of understanding the political and ethical dimensions of approaching trauma. The art practices that I analyse differ from one another in terms of medium – from painting to sculpture to moving image work – as do the psychoanalytic parameters to which they subscribe, but what is shared is an understanding that art making is the means by which we can get close to and rework trauma to positive effect. All of the artistic practices considered in this chapter offer us the political means by which we may ethically confront, abide by and live with the other. A different form of autobiography is examined in Chapter 5. Rather than looking at traumatic experience that ruptures the functioning of the human subject, I consider the experiences of everyday life. These are the experiences that attest to the human condition that Freud called ‘common unhappiness’. In the act of representing our experiences and memories of everyday life, a fic‑ tion is revealed. We revise our experiences and memories, making changes that transform them into something else; something that may be more manageable, or more truthful, or closer to our under‑ standing of them at a particular moment in time. Freud was aware of and conflicted about this fact when he noted that his own case histories read like fiction. Artists that work with autobiographical material also know this. I call this form of representation autobio‑ graphical fiction. When these artworks enter the Freud Museum they become deeply embedded within psychoanalysis. They enter the consulting room and become candidates for psychoanalysis. introduc tion  23

The result is a set of lively dialogues between artists, artworks and their analysts. Through these dialogues we, for example, step into a first psychoanalytic session with Sigmund Freud in which an artist reveals her history. We are invited to join Anna Freud in working through difficult childhood memories that have formed around certain rituals that are repeated within adult life. In analy‑ sis with Melanie Klein, a passive and aggressive form of acting out is performed as we experience the return of the repressed. Meanwhile, a love letter to Sigmund Freud results in all of the hallmarks of a positive transference. Although closely aligned to the psychoanalytic process, these exhibitions and artworks remain separate to it; it is the difference between art and psychoanalysis that forms their singularity and gives them authority. The final chapter focuses on the Freud Museum Vienna. Berggasse 19 is the space in which psychoanalysis as a practice and theory was established and from which it developed. The history of psychoanalysis, its cultural importance and our per‑ sonal relationship to it are all in some way inscribed within this space. However, it is also a space of trauma. The personal trauma inflicted upon the Freud family and the historical trauma of the Holocaust are also embedded within it. This duality is embodied in the fact that Berggasse 19 is full of history and memory, and yet is emptied of objects. The Freud Museum Vienna actively maintains the contradictions of this duality. Taking a close look at its history, its display and its relationship to contemporary art, its emptiness is not what it seems. In fact, it offers too much. It is too full. In this chapter, I analyse this type of space and characterize it as a conceptual museum. Cutting across these chapters and the book’s three theses – on the personality museum, site-responsive art and the urgency of psychoanalysis today – are history and memory. History and Memory

History and memory are central to this book. My interest in his‑ tory, historiography and memory is long-standing. This long-term 24  inside the freud museums

concern has been motivated by a curiosity in meta-discursive con‑ siderations of how we understand, write and engage with history, and the way in which memory is formed within the human sub‑ ject and articulated through individual and communal practices. Considering the formation, function and analysis of both history and memory has taken me to a wide range of disciplines, from history and historiography to critical, literary and postcolonial theory, to feminism and queer studies, to art history, philosophy, psychoanalysis and trauma studies. What these disciplines have taught me is that history and memory are deeply intertwined and their boundaries are mobile and quickly blur into one another. This makes defining them and pulling them apart difficult. Even the most common definition of history, taken from the Oxford English Dictionary, attests to this complexity. History is defined as a narrative or story recounting events related to a group of people or a person’s life; this story professes to be true, but it can also be constituted by imaginary events. Memory is defined as the action or process of commemorating, recollecting or remembering; and we know from psychoanalysis that memory is always revising the story it tells. The slippage between them is fundamental: in order to recount events one has to remember them; and in the narration a form of fiction creeps into the story. With both history and memory we are on both solid and unstable ground. With their differences and entwinement in mind, I would still like to suggest that there are four main ways in which history and memory are constituted and put to use in this book. History and memory are employed throughout this book in relation to the history of museums and the memories they inhabit and provoke. As I have outlined above, this book is premissed on the understanding that the museum, in particular the personal‑ ity museum, is a complex space of diverse practices, objects and conditions. The history of these museums, how they emerged, what took place within them, and what is at stake in each of them is of great importance to my analysis. This same interest is also shown to the history of Freud’s life and his writing wherein I rely introduc tion  25

on a variety of histories and memories related to the psychic lives of those who lived, worked and visited Berggasse and Maresfield Gardens. For example, I pursue Freud’s passion for collecting antiquities, his curation of the objects on his desk and in his study and consulting room. By referring to his diaries, postcards and letters, I am able to trace where he purchased them and with whom he wished to share his excitement. In his writings on dreams, he mentions how important his favourite antiquities were to him and how he took them on vacation with him as they assisted in his thinking and writing, and through them he dreamt of travelling to their place of origin. Or, I consider how an event that may seem wholly historical, such as the founding of the Sigmund Freud Museum Vienna in 1971, is immediately bound up with various forms of history and memory: there is the Viennese government finally making a decision to commemorate Sigmund Freud’s work, the role of its first director in making it happen, the coinciding of its opening with the first meeting since 1938 of the International Psychoanalytic Society, the significance of Anna Freud’s first and only visit to Vienna after the family’s exile in 1938, the German Anschluss of Vienna in 1938, Berggasse 19 as a site of individual and cultural trauma, and the emergence and the role of the Museum today. Connected to this particular set of histories and memories as embodied in both Freud Museums are the artworks that approach trauma, and the way in which individual and cultural memory are interlinked through artistic practice itself. Working in between history and memory, these artists consider the significance of the Holocaust as a limit point in understanding humanity and the very specific ways in which this impacted on their families and their own lives. A second relationship that I reflect upon is between the work of art and its connections to history and memory. My understanding of art history is one that is based on a deeply expanded field that can easily accommodate the ideas proposed in this book. Art is a product of the individual artist and his or her historical milieu; and once inside the Freud Museum, it is framed by psychoanalysis. The 26  inside the freud museums

result of this intermingling is such that my analyses of artworks are always layered and function on multiple levels. For example, a work of art may contingently refer back to the artist’s childhood experiences; once inside the Freud Museum those autobiographical references may very well activate psychoanalytic debates about the differing theories around the formation of the subject in childhood. Alternatively, if an artist exhibits contemporary photographs of psychoanalytic consulting rooms in the Freud Museum London, the artworks would immediately open up a discussion of the history of this mise-en-scène as a psychotherapeutic environment and as a museological space. The function of memory within both spaces is called upon, as is the working dynamic between analy‑ sand and analyst in the consulting room. When artworks that are concerned with collecting are shown in the Freud Museum they invoke a discussion of Freud’s antiquities, the status of archaeology within psychoanalysis and the state of the Museum’s collections. I consider these art-historical discussions to be intrinsic to the site-responsive nature of having artistic interventions within the Freud Museum. My third appeal is to the history and memory of psychoanalysis. Much of this book concerns the history of psychoanalysis as a theory and a practice – a history that is bound up with various forms of memory. So, for instance, I consider Freud’s works, and those of his colleagues and successors, such as Anna Freud and Melanie Klein. Various contemporary psychoanalysts also figure throughout the book. Because this theoretical work is so deeply embedded in therapeutic practice, it seems almost banal to say that memory – of patients and analysts – is foundational to these theories. That said, therapeutic practice is key to my work in this book, and I often use this practice to think through artworks and vice versa. As a part of this, I explore the history of psychoanalytic ideas. For instance, Freud’s use of archaeology is given a great deal of attention. Several exhibitions engage with these ideas and activate my analysis of archaeology as an important theoretical metaphor for understanding the formation of the human subject introduc tion  27

and as an embodied analogy for the practice of psychoanalysis as an archaeology or excavation of the repressed memories of that same subject. A fourth and final way in which history and memory are taken up in this book has already been mentioned, but it is worth highlighting. I am referring to historical events, whether largescale or minor, and their remembering. We know from Freud and contemporary cultural theorists that history plays an important role in forming the interrelationship between psychic or individual memory and cultural memory. The chapter on trauma is relevant here, as is the work that takes place within the consulting room – specifically, the analysis of dreams, or the ways in which minor histories and memories that condition and constitute one’s life are the basis of understanding autobiography. In the end, I ask the reader to step inside the Freud Museums with me and engage in an experience that offers distinctive ways of thinking about the personality museum, its objects and practices, as well as granting the conditions of possibility to contemporary art. This particular experience is singular, and yet it is key in locating how contemporary art functions within spaces primarily intended for other purposes. As site-responsive, contemporary art is granted a new function and with it accrues a new under‑ standing of how it works, what it means and what it can provide us. Eliciting alternative interpretations through the site, art also reciprocates and offers back to the museum new readings of the space, its objects, histories and practices. In the case of the Freud Museums, the site-responsive interventions also endow us with new knowledge that is vital to our understanding of psychoanalytic practice and theory. Ultimately, in having site-responsive art inside the Freud Museums we are offered a unique vision of the central place of art and psychoanalysis in our culture.

28  inside the freud museums

1 Staging Psychoanalysis: A Hagiographic Museum in London

[Freud’s] old-fashioned horsehair sofa … had heard more secrets than the confession box of any popular Roman Catholic father-confessor in his heyday. This was the homely historical instrument of the original scheme of psychotherapy, of psychoanalysis, the science of the unravelling of the tangled skeins of the unconscious mind and the healing implicit in the process. Hilda Doolittle 1 Psychoanalysis … cannot fail to take into account the fact that it is itself also present, in a privileged way, in that ‘culture’, which has been in-formed and transformed by its very intervention. Jean Laplanche 2 A Museum’s Aura and Our Fantasy

Walking down Maresfield Gardens in Hampstead, North London, is a pleasant experience. A quiet street, Maresfield Gardens is lined with lofty, two- and three-storey homes built during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries for the well-to-do middle classes. The front garden of 20 Maresfield Gardens is exquisitely manicured with a dazzling array of flowers and handsomely cared-for rose bushes. Upon arriving at the front door, a sign stating simply ‘Please walk in’ warmly welcomes any visitor. The sizeable cloak area opens up onto a striking double-storey portico into which sunlight streams. What is most noticeable about this space is its stillness; even with a host of visitors in the house all

that is heard is quiet whispers, an etiquette that is observed within most galleries and museums. The remarkable stillness is accentu‑ ated as we approach Freud’s consulting room and our excitement and anticipation grow. Historian Simon Goldhill describes this experience well when he writes: The theatrical sense of buildup is fulfilled by the drama of entering Freud’s lair. … To turn into Freud’s study is to take a vertiginous step back into a history: it is a strikingly memorable experience. The rooms are now housed into a cool shadedness, even in the summer sunlight, by the closed curtains and soft lighting. This darkness is for conservation, we are told, but the theatricality of the rooms was part of Freud’s original design. The room is luxuriant and filled to overflowing. On the floors are lush oriental carpets; the walls are lined with old bookcases, and brought from Vienna, and everywhere the collection of what Freud called his old gods crowds the eyes. I had seen many pictures of the old Berggasse apartment, and many pictures of the collection, but the anatomized snaps do not prepare you for the overwhelming embrace of the space, the sense of entering into a world, Freud’s world, where you have no role but the one the room creates for you. The very richness of the scene makes you look here and there, trying to take in the objects as well as the overall atmosphere. But the eyes are drawn repeatedly to the center stage where Freud’s couch and desk are placed, and specially lit up.3

Goldhill’s visceral and emotive description of Freud’s consulting room and study is fitting. Certainly, Freud created one of the most theatrical spaces within which the work of psychoanalysis took place. In it, we find the famous couch, draped with oriental carpets and cushions, which remains haunted by those ‘absent presences’, as cultural theorist Marina Warner calls Freud’s patients: Anna O., the Wolf Man, the Rat Man, Dora and H.D., to name but a few.4 The rooms are also filled to the brim with Freud’s significant collection of antiquities. The objects crowd display cases, tables and plinths, ledges and cabinets. On Freud’s desk is a collection of his favourite ‘old and grubby gods’; it was the function of this 30  inside the freud museums

freud’s study at the freud museum london

selection to keep him company while he worked, sitting upon his peculiar anthropomorphic chair, a gift from his daughter Mathilde, and made especially for him by architect Felix Augenfeld.5 Adorning the walls are many images. We find, for instance, an Egyptian mummy portrait in tempera on wood dated to the Roman period c. ad 250–300, a colour print of The Great Temple of Ramses at Abu Simbel from a watercolour by E. Koerner, a repro‑ duction of Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres’ painting of Oedipus with the Sphynx, and the famous lithograph from the painting by P.A. Brouillet entitled Une leçon du Docteur Charcot à la Salpêtrière showing one of Freud’s mentor’s, neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot, holding court and lecturing to medical staff about hysteria, while next to him one of his female patients, Blanche Wittmann, swoons.6 Accompanying these images are the many honours and awards that Freud received for his groundbreaking work. Freud’s book collection frames the space. In it we find titles from a wide range of subjects: art, literature, history, philosophy, as well as archaeology, medicine, psychology and psychoanalysis. A more intimate portrayal of Freud can be gleaned from the s taging p sychoanalysis  31

bookshelves in freud’s study at the freud museum london

framed photographs that punctuate the book collection: his wife Martha Freud is present, along with his friends and colleagues Lou Andreas-Salomé, Yvette Guilbert, Marie Bonaparte and Ernst von Fleischl. Upon entering this theatrical space, we are immediately attuned to its status: legendary, mythic and almost sacrosanct. I share Goldhill’s affective experience of walking into Freud’s consulting room. I imagine others who visit Maresfield Gardens feel it as well. But, in a way, I think that we are intensely drawn to the image that Goldhill recounts for us because we want these spaces in particular to touch us in these ways. We anticipate, expect and even wish for it to be so. And yet we are also aware of the fact that these heightened sensations are the Freud Museum’s and our own greatest fantasy. In this chapter I consider the ways in which the aura and our fantasy of Freud’s consulting room and study are produced and disseminated. The build-up of the affective nature of this space is a product of what we bring to it: our expectations and knowledge 32  inside the freud museums

of Freud’s life and work, and the history of psychoanalysis as a theory and practice. It is also the result of the Museum’s staging of the space, and the ways in which this directs our experience of the site. Here I turn to what Foucault has called the workings of the dispositif, which I discussed in the Introduction to this book, and demonstrate how this is integral to the formation and function of the personality museum by analysing the Freud Museum London. The breakdown of our fantasy takes place in two significant ways. The first is through the historical accretions that constitute the Museum and at the same time disseminate the primacy of 20 Maresfield Gardens. As we are slowly taken forward to the emergence of the Freud Museum London in 1986, and back to Berggasse 19 in 1891 and the half-century of work that Freud undertook in Vienna, the singularity of Maresfield Gardens disperses. Second, the greatest provocation in disturbing and expanding the Museum’s own narrative has been made by the contemporary art exhibitions that have intervened within it. With 90 contem‑ porary art exhibitions of work by international, national and emerging artists from a great diversity of practices, the narratives created by these interventions have proliferated our understanding of the Freud Museum London, and any ‘singular role’ resulting from the hagiographic awe that we may have experienced within it, as Goldhill suggests, is scattered. These interventions have created alternative roles for us, different ways of thinking about Freud’s consulting room and study, about psychoanalysis, about the Museum. In this chapter, I turn to six site-responsive exhibitions that focus on the Museum’s centrepiece, Freud’s consulting room and couch, in order to extend and dissipate the ‘singular role’ the Museum seems to create for us. Anne Deguelle’s intervention Sigmund’s Rug (2011) opens up the complex history of the psychoanalytic couch as an object that can be traced back through a variety of social and medical discourses to the seventeenth century. Santiago Borja’s installation Divan: Free-Floating Attention Piece (2010) and Ellen Gallagher’s s taging p sychoanalysis  33

Ichthyosaurus (2005) examine the often unacknowledged gendered and racialized histories of psychoanalysis, while Claudia Guderian’s exhibition The Magic of the Couch (2004) and Nick Cunard’s Head Space: Photographs of Psychotherapeutic Environments (2004) establish the importance of the mise-en-scène of the consulting room. Looking back at the formation that Freud introduced as a part of the talking cure over 125 years ago and that persists to this day, Cunard’s photographs also point to the various roles played by analyst and analysand both inside and outside of the consulting room. Finally, remaining within the psychotherapeutic space, Mieke Bal and Michelle Williams Gamaker’s Sissi in Analysis (2012) offers us the opportunity to think about the parameters that Freud set for psychoanalytic treatment and the way in which they have been extended by therapists deeply committed to helping patients whom Freud believed would not benefit from psychoanalysis. By focusing on the interventions that deal with the role of the couch within psychoanalysis, this fundamental psychoanalytic object becomes a vehicle for considering both the establishment of psychoanalysis as a practice and its importance as a significant and viable therapeutics. An analysis of these installations also enables me to consider the troubled history of the way in which gender, race and extreme forms of mental illness have been repressed or displaced within psychoanalysis. A History of Accretions: its Production and Disruption

In considering a museum’s layout and display, conservation and public information, we are confronted with the production of what Foucault has called an institution’s dispositif or ideology. Foucault’s understanding of a dispositif is useful in thinking about the person‑ ality museum because it opens up the site to an analysis of how the strategic play of power is required in creating, reproducing and maintaining the site’s myth and hagiography. In the case of Freud’s consulting room at 20 Maresfield Gardens, the layout is such that it is dependent upon a specific understanding of its own formation and the repetition of this narrative in order to consolidate and 34  inside the freud museums

maintain the Museum’s history as unchanged, unchanging and unchangeable. At the Freud Museum London, its dispositif works to produce a hagiography of Sigmund Freud’s life and work. With an earnest and comprehensive pedagogic approach, the Museum takes Freud’s consulting room and study as a point of origin and offers us an overwhelming amount of information as a means of consolidating and retaining the space’s aura. This in turn provides the hagiographic affect that is the basis of the Museum’s power. The literature offered by the Museum is extensive. There are information boards throughout, while the wide-ranging audioguide includes a wealth of information about Freud’s private life, his fascination with antiquities and archaeology, his ideas on psychoanalysis as a theory of the human subject and as a therapeutic practice, his mentors such as Charcot, the position of women within psychoanalysis, and so on. The Video Room upstairs in the house offers us three films to watch: the remarkable Sigmund Freud: Home Movies, 1930–39, the documentary Sigmund Freud: His Offices and Home, Vienna, 1938 by Gene Friedman, and an excerpt from Freud’s 1938 BBC interview. The Museum’s web‑ site introduces us to the history of the Museum, and includes a comprehensive set of research provisions, including a bibliography of Freud’s work; secondary literature; provisions for primary, secondary and tertiary education; an extensive photo-library; an archive that catalogues around 10,000 letters, 1,600 documents and 1,500 press cuttings; as well as a separate archive dedicated to its contemporary art exhibitions. All of this is complemented by a substantial guidebook, 20 Maresfield Gardens: A Guide to the Freud Museum, which can be purchased at the shop on the ground floor. To work through this highly informative and engaging literature would take many lengthy visits. The overwhelming nature of the information results in an overpowering sense of the importance of Freud and, in turn, the Freud Museum itself. In stark contrast to the theatricality of Freud’s study and con‑ sulting room and the abundance of information around it and his work, Goldhill states that ‘[a]fter the study, elsewhere in the house s taging p sychoanalysis  35

feels empty, even thin’.7 The fullness of Freud’s workspaces and the emptiness of the remainder of the house only emphasize the aura and importance around the former. This emptiness is heightened by many factors, including the limited furnishings throughout the remainder of the house. Dotting the dining room, hallway, landing and Video Room are a few choice pieces of Biedermeyer furnishings that Sigmund and Martha Freud favoured and several large pieces of nineteenth-century Austrian peasant furniture that Anna Freud preferred. There are a few paintings of the Austrian countryside, and several portraits of Freud. What was the bedroom belonging to Freud’s sister-in-law Minna Bernays has been turned into the Video Room, while Martha and Sigmund Freud’s bedroom is now the dedicated Exhibition Room. Of course, there is also the Anna Freud Room, a space devoted to her life and work. Originally this room belonged to Anna Freud’s lifelong companion, the analyst Dorothy Burlingham. Anna Freud’s consulting room was up one floor in the adjacent section of the house, which is now an office for the Museum staff. The display in the Anna Freud Room includes her analytic couch with its rather plain blanket (in contrast to Freud’s lush oriental rugs). Anna’s worktable is on show, and represents her pioneering work on child psychology and psychoanalysis, which includes Introduction to the Technique of Child Analysis (1927) and her influential The Ego and the Mechanisms of Defense (1936). Also on exhibit are a selection of photographs of her work at the Hampstead Child Therapy Course and Clinic, family portraits, a selection of the books in her library, including a book on Marilyn Monroe, and on the walls hang the various awards she received throughout her life for her innovative work in child therapy. The Museum’s guidebook 20 Marefield Gardens states that ‘The Freud Museum commemorates the work of both Sigmund and Anna Freud’, but, in reality, Anna’s life and work is subsumed under the weight of Sigmund Freud’s career in the layout of the Museum, on its website, and in the audio guide and guidebook.8 The focus for the Freud Museum London is on what it calls its ‘centrepiece’ or ‘heart’: Freud’s consulting room and study, 36  inside the freud museums

preserved just as it was during his lifetime. This is our fantasy as well. This is why we experience that overwhelming embrace when we enter it. However, this fantasy is disseminated by the site’s own history, which zigzags back and forth to Berggasse and the present and historical moments in between. In recognizing these accretions and understanding their role in the creation and maintenance of the Museum’s dispositif, we are able to disrupt the Museum and our fantasy of 20 Maresfield Gardens as the primary keeper of Sigmund Freud’s life and work as we are always drawn back to Berggasse 19. No. 20 Maresfield Gardens was purchased by Sigmund Freud’s son, the architect Ernst, in July 1938, soon after the Freuds arrived in London. The house cost £6,500. Ernst made a few changes to the house, including putting in a lift for the elderly Freud, knocking down the wall between the two front rooms to create a combined consulting room, study and library, and adding a loggia on the ground floor at the back of the house, which provided a shaded lei‑ sure area in the garden for the Freud family. On 28 September 1938, approximately four months after arriving in London and having stayed at 39 Elsworthy Road in Primrose Hill, the Freud family moved into Maresfield Gardens. The Freud family’s housekeeper Paula Fichtl, Ernst Freud and psychoanalyst Ernst Kris, who was visiting from New York, helped to arrange the consulting room and study; the idea was to replicate Berggasse. What we come to realize is that Maresfield Gardens is not a replica of Berggasse. The spatial arrangement of the long open room at Maresfield Gardens versus the two conjoined spaces at Berggasse produced several differences. Freud’s desk, for instance, was set up directly across from the couch, whereas in Berggasse they were in separate rooms. The Gradiva bas-relief that was so important to Freud’s work on archaeology and psychoanalysis, and was above the foot of the couch in Vienna, was now on the door jamb when you entered the room in London. The image of Charcot and his patient now took pride of place above the centre of the couch in London, whereas in Berggasse it was in s taging p sychoanalysis  37

the consulting room but out of the patient’s sightline.9 Although these variations may not amount to much, besides perhaps changes in Freud’s personal taste or alterations due to the vicissitudes of architectural design, we are expected to take a leap of faith and believe that this space in London is a replica of Berggasse. This belief in their likeness constitutes Maresfield Gardens as a privileged site comparable to Berggasse. Even though Freud spent but one year of his life here, we are being asked to believe that Maresfield Gardens has become Berggasse, and, with that, it has acquired Berggasse’s gravitas and longevity. This is our fantasy as well. We want the London site to become the Berggasse space. In reality, the formation of the London space as a replica of Vienna is based on a series of historical accretions that, in the end, establishes Maresfield Gardens as a museum dedicated to the Viennese space, and to Freud’s life and the immense work he accomplished during his time at Berggasse.10 There are several other historical accretions that are equally important in creating and maintaining the aura and fantasy of the Freud Museum London. After Freud’s death on 23 September 1939, the story that is told and retold is that the consulting room and study were preserved totally intact. Their protection and conservation were paramount. Freud’s wife Martha continued to live in Maresfield Gardens until her death in 1951. Their daughter Anna remained in the home for 43 years after her father’s death. Wife and daughter kept the rooms exactly as Freud left them. Nothing was touched or changed. Freud’s final cigar, the last manuscript he was working on, his spectacles and letter opener, the figurines on his desk that kept him company and inspired his writing are just as Freud left them. With this extraordinary layer of mythology surrounding the space, another historical accretion is added to the hagiographic narratives: one that promotes the fantasy that Freud has just stepped out of the room; it is as Sigmund Freud left it. Unlike most personality museums, where we are meant to believe that the individual commemorated has just left the room, even though we know it is a reconstruction, in the Freud Museum London we are told that 38  inside the freud museums

everything is as it was upon Freud’s death. Here, there is no leap of faith, there is only historical fact, and as such we are asked to accept that it is true. In 1980, two years before her death, Anna Freud sold the prop‑ erty to a registered English charity and bequeathed the contents of the home to it, turning 20 Maresfield Gardens into a permanent museum. In 1986 the Freud Museum London was established and opened to the public. The objectives of the Museum are ‘to promote, encourage, improve, advance and disseminate knowledge and awareness of the life, work, medical, psychoanalytic and other scientific activities and intellectual and current cultural legacy of the late Sigmund Freud, and knowledge and awareness of their relevance to contemporary society’. In addition the Museum will ‘maintain and safeguard the collection’, ‘advance the appreciation of the historical nature of the property’ 20 Maresfield Gardens, assemble an archive related to the intellectual legacy of Sigmund Freud, and ‘conduct’ and ‘disseminate’ ‘research into the life, work and legacy of Sigmund Freud’.11 In clearly defined terms, these museological practices are key to the Museum’s strategic role and its institutional dispositif: they form the epistemological and ideological basis of the Freud Museum London and consolidate the significant and vital role of Sigmund Freud within contemporary culture. Even with this history of the multiple historical and ideological accretions that constitute the Freud Museum London, it still seems like Goldhill was correct in stating that the theatricality and drama of Freud’s workspaces create an overwhelming embrace that af‑ fords us a singular role within it. This singularity made Goldhill feel the urge to resist it. He was also niggled by something that Freud had written. Upon arriving in London in 1938, Freud made a note in his diary reflecting on his antiquities and his own life: ‘Of course the collection is now dead, nothing will be added to it, and the owner is almost as dead…’ For Goldhill, upon ending his visit to 20 Maresfield Gardens, the overriding feeling was that he had spent time with dead relics. Personality museums do s taging p sychoanalysis  39

have this effect on people. As I pointed out in the Introduction, Adorno found the epistemological resonances between museum and mausoleum redolent with meaning, and the basic premiss of the personality museum – to honour the work, life, and with that the death, of an individual – activates this connection. There are also other ways of perceiving the personality museum as a site haunted by death. Michael Molnar, a former director of the Freud Museum London, has suggested an alternative response to Freud’s comment concerning the death of his collection and his own death. For Molnar ‘[t]here is no way of by-passing the owner: this is how it still has to be viewed, seventy years after his death. Though the collection no longer grows physically, the narratives around it proliferate; the antiquities continue haunting the imagination.’12 Indeed, it is the ability of the narratives around Freud’s consulting room and study to haunt the imagination and proliferate that is of interest to me. This ability to provide alterna‑ tive stories about the space and to animate the imagination ensure that the ‘singular role’ of hagiographic awe that the Museum creates for us, as Goldhill suggests, is challenged by interrogat‑ ing the Museum’s staging, recognizing its historical accretions, and its constitution as a dispositif and, most importantly, by the intervention of contemporary art within its space. With this in mind, let’s turn to site-responsive interventions that have dissipated this ‘singular role’ that the Museum seems to have created for us. The Couch

A couch is the psychoanalytic object par excellence. Beginning with the couch always initially means Sigmund Freud’s couch, the one that is now housed in the Freud Museum London. A couch is the centrepiece of psychoanalytic practice and its theorization, and has held this principal position ever since Freud made the decision to use one in his consulting room, and requested his patients lie down on it. This posture was important because it induced free association. In addition, Freud believed that having his patients lying down meant that expressions on his face would not interfere 40  inside the freud museums

freud’s consulting room at berggasse 19, 1938

with the sessions, and personally it alleviated his dislike of being looked at all day.13 A psychoanalytic couch is never found on its own: a chair always accompanies it. Thus, a couch and a chair, two everyday pieces of furniture, come together to form the central decor of the consulting room’s unique mise-en-scène. Freud’s couch has an intriguing history of its own, and one worth telling. In 1886, five years after qualifying as a medical doctor, Freud began using an ottoman as a part of his therapeutic practice, and requested that patients lie down during their sessions with him. However, it was not until 1891, when he moved into Berggasse 19, that he was presented with the iconic couch that is now in Maresfield Gardens. This couch was a gift, apparently offered to Freud by his grateful patient Mrs Benvenisti. By bestowing a central position to the couch in his office, and by placing his chair adjacent to it, Freud constructed a new mise-en-scène for his psychotherapeutic practice. In 1896, a decade after his patients began reclining on the couch, Freud gave his method a name, calling it ‘psycho-analysis’.14 s taging p sychoanalysis  41

One of Freud’s patients between 1933 and 1934, American poet and author Hilda Doolittle (H.D.), wrote an engaging memoir of her psychoanalytic work with him entitled Tribute to Freud. In it, H.D. captured what it was like to lie down on the couch in apartment 6, Berggasse 19, Vienna. To repeat the epigraph that begins this chapter, H.D. remembers being on [the] old-fashioned horsehair sofa that had heard more secrets than the confession box of any popular Roman Catholic father-confessor in his heyday. This was the homely historical instrument of the original scheme of psychotherapy, of psychoanalysis, the science of the unravelling of the tangled skeins of the unconscious mind and the healing implicit in the process.15

The sofa, the secrets spoken and heard, the schema of psycho‑ therapy, and the therapeutic dialectic embodied in the unravel‑ ling and healing so eloquently and succinctly described by H.D., constitute the layout and workings of the psychoanalytic process. On the couch, the patient remembers, resists, acts out, repeats, transfers and works through personal history. The analysand may speak or remain silent, laugh or cry, listen or refuse to cooperate. The psychoanalyst listens, reflects, counter-transfers and sometimes speaks.16 Supported by this setting, the dramas, banalities, discoveries, repressions, desires and stumbling blocks of the psychoanalytic process, the ‘talking cure’, are enacted.17 Freud’s couch has been the concern of several contemporary artists, and these site-responsive interventions open up a varied history of this object and its connotations within the consulting room and for psychoanalytic theory. Anne Deguelle’s intervention Sigmund’s Rug (2011) held at the Freud Museum London focused on Freud’s couch and his carpets. The artworks included images of various couches and carpets from a variety of disciplines that told the complex history of these objects before and during Freud’s use of them in his consulting room. For instance, in a series of collaged photographs, known as Composites, Deguelle juxtaposed Freud’s carpets, representations of couches from the world of medicine 4 2  inside the freud museums

and psychoanalysis, Edmund Engelman’s 1938 black-and-white photographs of Freud’s consulting room and study at Berggasse 19, and paintings from the history of art that are known for their inclusion of carpets. So, for instance, in Composite 2, two fragments from Hans Holbein’s The Ambassadors (1533) frame two reproduc‑ tions of Engelman’s photographs, one of Freud’s antiquities and the other of his carpets. Or, in Composite 5, a detail of Holbein’s painting of Henry VIII (1537) and a colour reproduction of one of Freud’s carpets are combined with an alarming nineteenth-century black-and-white photograph of a woman enduring electroshock therapy. The documentation used in bringing together the Composites, appropriately called Documents, was also included in the show. These archival sources exposed the historical, medical and ev‑ eryday contexts of the psychoanalytic couch. Juxtaposed with Deguelle’s artworks they produced some charged associations. In one of these Documents, the artist used archival imagery from the Freud Museum London, and placed a photograph of a Qashqai carpet from c. 1920 belonging to the Freud family, together with a photograph of Freud’s couch stripped back to reveal the white sheet that lies beneath the famous carpet, with a second photograph of the couch exposed in its entirety and showing the ‘naked’ and wellworn chaise longue, stains and all.18 In addition to these, Deguelle displayed another image from 1896 of Freud’s friend the French singer Yvette Guilbert posing rather provocatively and knowingly on a couch in the Savoy Hotel in New York City, thereby echoing the personalized photograph of Guilbert that Freud had hanging on his bookshelves in his study in Maresfield Gardens and before that in Berggasse. Connecting Freud’s practice of using a couch to the genealogy of psychoanalytic practice in the Documents, Deguelle provided a photograph of a consulting room in Berlin from 1910 that included a chaise longue covered with an oriental rug that could pass for one of Freud’s carpets. And, finally, the photograph of a young woman undergoing electroshock therapy that the artist used in Composite 5 was also displayed here. By s taging p sychoanalysis  43

anne deguelle, composite 5, in anna freud room, sigmund’s rug, 2011

bringing together this eclectic series of photographs within the Composites and Documents, Deguelle’s intervention points to the medical history of the psychoanalytic couch, its use and abuse, its sexual connotations, and its associations with oriental carpets. In thinking through Deguelle’s invocation, it is helpful to turn to the fuller history of these objects offered by the exhibition The Couch: Thinking in Repose (2006), curated by the late Lydia Marinelli, research director at the Sigmund Freud Museum Vienna. What we learn from Marinelli’s show, and was echoed in Deguelle’s intervention, is that historically the couch as a piece of furniture has travelled far and wide and has a long and expansive history within modernity that begins in the seventeenth century and continues to today. Bringing together a large array of objects, 4 4  inside the freud museums

anne deguelle, documents–sigmund’s rug, displayed on the dining room table of the freud museum london, 2011

documents and photographs, as well as artworks and documentary films, Marinelli’s exhibition provided us with a comprehensive depiction of the couch’s travels. The exhibition made clear that, from its social and moral associations to its medical, scientific and aesthetic connotations, the couch was transformed by its various contexts. Marinelli wrote in the catalogue that Freud’s choice of an ‘examination bed’ for his practice opens up a wide spectrum of experience between dreaming and waking, dissoluteness and moral control. It serves as a therapeutic instrument, as a site of free association and as a vehicle of poetic production. In a prone position, the clear certainties of thought can be diverted from their course into a twilight state of drowsiness and further into the anesthetized state of sleep or into the depths of illegitimate sexuality.19 s taging p sychoanalysis  45

Perhaps, as cultural historian and feminist Marina Warner has argued in an essay on Freud’s couch, these ‘confessional and erotic associations of the oriental sofa’ used by Freud were ‘deliberate’. ‘Perhaps something of these remain, from a sense of mischief and provocation on Freud’s part.’ Warner explains that the couch as a site of pleasure, reinvigoration and emotional well-being can also be traced back to the seventeenth century. Here the divan as a daybed was attributed to storytelling, study, quietness and reflection. It was also the site for daydreaming, gossiping, smok‑ ing and lovemaking. Through these latter associations, the couch invoked issues of moral and social rectitude, so that women needed to be watched closely as they reclined upon it. Warner’s analysis reinforces Marinelli’s view that the couch may lend itself to the ‘depths of illegitimate sexuality’, and this is drawn out in Deguelle’s exhibition, for instance in her inclusion of the image of Freud’s ‘naked’ couch in the Documents, as well as the photograph of the sexually charged actress and cabaret singer Yvette Guilbert posing on a couch. But there is also more to Freud’s couch. The sexual and racialized implications of Freud’s couch are invoked by Warner’s analysis of its history when she notes that ‘Freud’s couch is a Victorian chaise longue, but with a differ‑ ence’;20 it includes ‘that flying carpet for unconscious voyaging’.21 By paying particular attention to the rugs on Freud’s couch in her photographs and documentation, Deguelle’s intervention also brought to the foreground Freud’s serious and abiding interest in oriental rugs. Moritz Freud, who married his cousin Maria (Mitzi) Freud, Sigmund’s sister, was a rug importer living and working in Berlin. Moritz and Mitzi presented Sigmund and his family with carpets as gifts. In addition, Moritz advised and assisted his brother-in-law in buying various carpets as furnishings for his office and residence at Berggasse. What Deguelle’s show revealed was that the Freud Museum London has over 20 carpets in storage: this quantity attests to Freud’s interest in rugs as useful objects within his work spaces, and to the family’s custom of having them within their domestic setting. At the time of Deguelle’s show, 46  inside the freud museums

the public had only ever viewed a few of these carpets. Deguelle and curator Yvan Poulain rightly took the opportunity to bring a dozen of them out of storage, and included them as a dynamic and material context for the artist’s exhibition. Hung on various walls, placed on furniture, and resting on floors throughout the Museum, these carpets gave us first-hand evidence of their appeal to Freud and his family, presumably as functional items, as well as aesthetic objects with their own stories to tell. Warner develops the narrative and storytelling aspects of the rug that is draped over Freud’s couch. This carpet is not from Smyrna as Freud thought, but a Qashqai textile woven by women from a nomadic tribe of the Fars province situated on the borders of Iran and Turkey. Each of these rugs is made while the women share stories, and each carpet has an individual narrative woven into it. For Warner, this is crucial, and she argues that this aspect of the carpet was not lost on the psychoanalyst: Freud shows awareness of these relations between the structures of the unconscious and the patterning and weave of a rug. The Persian Rug … and the psychoanalytic process are … forms of storytelling: examining their interactions can open up the function of narrative itself, oral and textual, as a prime activity of human consciousness.22

Santiago Borja’s installation Divan: Free-Floating Attention Piece, curated by Catalina Lozano (2010), took up this idea of storytelling embedded in Freud’s couch as a means of considering Freud’s relationship to race and his own construction of the notion of the ‘primitive’. From this vantage point, Borja had two vibrant tapestries and several cushions specially made to lie over Freud’s couch. These were tapestries with a difference: made in collabora‑ tion with the Wixarika community, also known as Huichol, living in central Mexico, Borja’s home country, Borja’s carpets replaced Freud’s belongings to reveal and record alternative travels of the imagination. These Huichol textiles were made with the assistance of peyote, a plant which when consumed induces ‘visionary effects, of brilliant colours, abstract forms, as well as mandalas, latticework s taging p sychoanalysis  47

santiago borja, divan: free-floating attention piece at the freud museum london, 2010

designs … flowers, animals, people and scenery [that] are then transferred into the patterns and narratives on the carpets’.23 These visions are woven into the tapestries, which then function as a form of storytelling, a type of visual script in an oral culture that does not have a written language. In ‘Productive Anachronism’, curator Lozano discusses how Borja’s textiles brought to bear on Freud’s couch the psychoana‑ lyst’s historically determined Eurocentric understanding of the ‘primitive’ nature of man and his Orientalist views on the ‘un‑ civilized’ ‘other’. Having Borja’s carpet inside the Freud Museum and on Freud’s couch brought this discussion into a contemporary context. Lozano considers the hegemonic territory known as Mexico and the place of the Huichol within this site of colonial‑ ism as they fight for self-determination.24 Thus, the curatorial and artistic intervention of setting the contemporary Wixarika textile upon Freud’s couch and next to his Mediterranean antiquities offered us another point of entry into the complex position of storytelling, the unconscious and the ‘other’. Artist Ellen Gallagher’s exhibition Ichthyosaurus (2005), curated by James Putnam, picked up on the sexual connotations associated 48  inside the freud museums

with the psychoanalytic couch, and also opened up another set of references. Bringing together works on paper, sculptural objects and two 16 mm films, Gallagher’s show engaged with the rela‑ tionship of the politics of psychoanalysis to race and gender. The two focal points of this intervention in relation to my analysis of Freud’s couch are Watery Ecstatic (2005) and Odalisque (2005). Invoking Freud’s often neglected early interest in sea creatures and marine zoology, Watery Ecstatic unexpectedly opened up a critique of racialization from within psychoanalysis. While study‑ ing for his medical degree between 1876 and 1881, Freud assisted the physiologist Ernst Wilhelm von Brücke by examining the ellen gallagher, watery ecstatic, 2005, ichthyosaurus, the freud museum london

spinal nerve ganglia of a primitive fish, the lamprey (Petromy‑ zon). Freud’s interest in this creature gave him insight into the evolution of the nervous system, which instigated the work that would eventually lead to his discovery of the scientific method by which the unconscious can be studied – psychoanalysis. Inspired by this connection between Freud and her own attraction to marine biology, Gallagher exhibited one of her artworks above Freud’s couch. These mixed-media drawings explore a mythical world under the sea that the artist refers to as Drexciya. Based on a ‘what if ’ scenario, Drexciya is a fantasy world produced by the offspring of pregnant African slave women who were thrown overboard during the Middle Passage. Placed inside the Freud Museum, this Drexciyan myth, driven by an Afro-Futurist aesthetic, prompted art historian Suzanna Chan to suggest that ‘Gallagher’s pursuit of the myth offers feminine identities which exclaim an audacious vitality, and one which offers no account within the Oedipal kinship relation that gives the psychoanalytic symbolic its intelligibility.’25 Working outside of psychoanalysis’s father–mother–child triangulation of subject formation, Gallagher’s work presented us with a feminine order in which patriarchal law is displaced. Moreover, by conversing with Freud’s early interest in the lamprey, Gallagher’s Watery Ecstatic drawings also instigated a narrative within the Museum that offered a revised version of our psychoanalytic myth of Oedipal origins to include a specifically and fundamentally racialized take on the story. In the artwork Odalisque, Gallagher shifts her focus to the con‑ sulting room. In this photo-collage, the artist reworked Matisse’s famous photograph of himself drawing one of his models, in a perceptive critique of psychoanalysis. Set within an enclosed and intimately luxurious space replete with a bouquet of flowers, hot tea and exotic drapery that has been pulled open, Matisse has been replaced with Freud while the artist poses as an odalisque on a daybed. By representing the African-American, bi-racial artist in repose, wearing harem trousers, with a fitted ornate bodice, ankle bracelet and bare feet, the artist is playing with an ‘Orientalist 50  inside the freud museums

fantasy’ appropriate to Freud’s time.26 The image is complicated by the subversive function of the gazes. Rather than providing Freud with a direct vision of the analysand/model/female artist, his gaze is averted; the analyst turns away from her and directs his focused gaze to the drawing he is making. She, on the other hand, looks directly and knowingly at Freud, bidding him to return her gaze. This reconfiguration reverses the normative power dynamics within psychoanalysis. We know that in the consulting room, it was Freud who had access to his patient, and it was his gaze that moved across her body as she lay in a prone position on the ellen gallagher, odalisque, 2005, ichthyosaurus, the freud museum london

couch. In Odalisque, the simple but effect reversal of who has the right to look levels an important critique to these gendered and racial relations of power. Inside the Freud Museum, both Watery Ecstatic and Odalisque invoked an important history of the convergence of psychoanalysis and race. Foucault has shown how psychoanalysis emerged during a time when national European ideologies pursued genetically based forms of racism, with the support of determinist eugenicist theories, and an interest in the purity of blood. In opposition to this, psycho‑ analysis embedded itself in a theory of sexuality based on the law of the father; thus its patriarchal stance enabled it to move away from racist forms of biopower. As Foucault notes, ‘of all the institutions that set out in the nineteenth century to medicalize sex, it [psycho‑ analysis] was the one that … rigorously opposed the political and institutional effects of the perversion-hereditary-degenerescence system.’27 Having said that, the racism of psychoanalysis emerged in its view of femininity as a ‘dark continent’ within a patriarchal discourse. Chan’s reading of Ichthyosaurus brings together a contem‑ porary genealogy of feminist theory and critical race studies that lays out the complexity of this knot, and the fact that its unbinding is still going on today. Once inside the Freud Museum, Gallagher’s use of the couch within Odalisque and the curation of Watery Ecstatic brought to bear on the site the complicated relationship that psychoanalysis has to race and gender. This complex constellation is thoroughly considered by literary scholar Ranjana Khanna, who ‘reads psychoanalysis symptom‑ atically’ in order to disclose it as a ‘masculinist and colonialist discipline that promoted an idea of Western subjectivity in op‑ position to a colonized, feminine, and primitive other’.28 Khanna’s project is not to reject psychoanalysis. Rather, it aims to show the importance of psychoanalysis as a means of understanding the postcolonial and neocolonial psyche because of its colonial his‑ tory. Gallagher’s and Borja’s interventions invoke this history and gesture to this troubling past, while also offering us a means of engaging with it, whether through fantasy, irony or contemporary 52  inside the freud museums

analysis. Certainly, these artists have proved H.D. was right in viewing Freud’s ‘old-fashioned horsehair sofa’ as a ‘homely his‑ torical instrument’ that held the ‘secrets’ of his patients but that also represents the often repressed histories of psychoanalysis. Degeuelle’s, Gallagher’s and Borja’s artworks have opened up for us aspects of these troubling histories. Inside the Freud Museum, the site-responsive impact of these interventions was to perform a critique of psychoanalytic theory by initiating a consideration of the gendered and racialized aspects of the discourse. Working with Freud’s couch, these artworks have enabled us to think dif‑ ferently about the medicalization of our bodies, our pleasures and pains, and how the history of psychoanalysis has dealt with, or has not dealt with, racial and sexual difference and the recognition of the other. The Mise-en-Scène of the Consulting Room

To this day, psychoanalytic practice takes place in the same distinc‑ tive setting that Freud invented over 125 years ago. To this extent the mise-en-scène that we find in 20 Maresfield Gardens is the exemplar for psychoanalysis today. Claudia Guderian’s exhibition The Magic of the Couch and Nick Cunard’s Head Space: Photographs of Psychotherapeutic Environments, both held at the Freud Museum London in 2004, confirmed for us the historical continuity of the consulting room through a series of photographs of psychoanalytic environments around the world. Each artist presented us with a selection of images from their own photographic archive, which together depict over 100 contemporary consulting rooms through‑ out Britain, Europe, New Zealand, and North and South America.29 There is no mistaking the way in which the mise-en-scène that Freud conceived of in 1886 forms the basis for psychoanalytic and psychotherapeutic settings worldwide. There is a striking resem‑ blance between all of these settings: specifically, the positioning of the patient’s couch and the therapist’s chair. Even given their differences, all of the consulting rooms refer back to their founder. As Guderian points out, interviewing the s taging p sychoanalysis  53

analysts whose consulting rooms she photographed, it was clear that ‘[m]odels – conscious or unconscious ones – were Sigmund Freud’s setting’.30 Perhaps this is the layout we know best because of its staging in the Freud Museum London, but it might be that our image of Freud’s consulting room is actually a result of view‑ ing the famous black-and-white photographs taken by Edmund Engelman of Berggasse 19, a setting that most of us will never have seen during Freud’s time in Vienna. While still in Vienna, in March 1938, just two months prior to the Freud family’s exile to London, August Aichhorn, one of Freud’s closest colleagues and friends, brought Edmund Engelman, a young Jewish photographer, to Berggasse 19.31 Engelman’s task was to document Berggasse. Aichhorn specifically mentioned to Engelman that the photographs were to be taken carefully so that one day they may assist in the re-creation of this psycho‑ analytic mise-en-scène in a museum dedicated to Freud. Essen‑ tially, apartment 6 Berggasse was to function as the basis for any future museum dedicated to Freud, and to this day the former is echoed in both the Freud Museum London and the Sigmund Freud Museum Vienna. Working quickly over four days, Engelman photographed Berg‑ gasse using two cameras (a Rolleiflex and a Leica), two lenses (150 mm and 28 mm wide-angle) and a light meter. A flash or floodlights were out of the question because the Nazis were closely monitoring Freud’s home. Engelman shot 106 photographs of Berggasse. His priority was to photograph the consulting room and study, but he also took shots of their surrounding environment, such as the stairwell leading to Freud’s consulting room, and the building’s facade. The photographer had hoped to record the interior spaces from Freud’s point of view: from the position of the analyst while with a patient or seated at his desk. In practice, however, this was difficult, and Engelman ended up taking photo‑ graphs from various vantage points, including those of the patient and visitor.32 Engelman’s intention was to document everything and so he made notes as he worked and took panoramic views 54  inside the freud museums

of the spaces to ensure he missed nothing. Due to a fortuitous meeting with Freud while carrying out his task, Engelman was invited to take portraits of the family, and also a few shots of Freud sitting at his desk. The importance of Engelman’s photographs cannot be over‑ stated. These images function as the primary markers for all future representations, real and imaginary, of Freud’s consulting room, study and surrounding environment. Whether restaged by psychoanalysts or artists working with this mise-en-scène, it is Engelman’s photographs that image the space for us. In having Guderian’s and Cunard’s photographs of contemporary consulting rooms in the Freud Museum London, the exhibitions’ site-responsive impact was a form of critical restaging of Berggasse that demonstrated both the universality of the mise-en-scène of the consulting room, and how the set-up in 20 Maresfield Gardens always echoes back to Berggasse via Engelman. For Guderian’s show, the artist’s sharp and beautifully captured colour photographs of consulting rooms were installed throughout the Freud Museum London. Each of Guderian’s photographs was framed and cropped to dramatically highlight the ubiquity of the international replication and mimicry of Freud’s positioning of the couch and analyst’s chair. The mise-en-scène in these pho‑ tographs echoed one another. It was certainly the case that the positions of couch and chair were repeated, in similar if not exact ways, in each consulting room. But there were many differences between them as well. The design of the furniture, for instance, particularly the couch, varied dramatically among the consulting rooms: they ranged from black, sleek, modern minimalist ones to single Madame Recamier-type beds with ornamental carpets placed on or around them. The differences in furnishings were also extreme: from plain or decorative pillows and blankets (one or more of them) to spotlights versus Tiffany lamps, to crowded libraries or an absence of books. The show demonstrated that each room reflected and embodied its analyst, as does Freud’s consulting room. Certainly none of the consulting rooms photographed is as s taging p sychoanalysis  55

theatrical as Freud’s space in Vienna, or the one in London. But, even given the many differences among the consulting rooms, there was still that single similarity between all of them world‑ wide: the couch and the chair. Guderian’s work was accompanied by one of Engelman’s blackand-white photographs, thereby making the reference to his images as antecedents quite plain. As art critic Jennifer Branwell has noted about Guderian’s images, the most striking factor was the strong presence of the absence of the two players, analyst and analysand. The couch and the analyst’s chair are captured in a wordless dialogue, often at opposite edges of the frame.33

Without analyst and analysand presented in Guderian’s photo‑ graphs, we are offered portraits of the mise-en-scène itself, as it awaits its players. But, unlike Branwell, I do not think that there is a silent dialogue between them. They did speak out; they invoked the setting initiated by their founder Sigmund Freud. The pho‑ tographs achieved this by summoning the psychoanalytic spaces staged in Maresfield Gardens, back to what had been at Berggasse and captured by Engelman, within the present. Nick Cunard’s project also had this iterative aspect to it: these photographs too echoed the past in the present. However, the site-responsive contribution made by this project was to open up the potential alliance between the practice of psychoanalysis and artistic process. During Cunard’s 18-month project, he pho‑ tographed and interviewed several psychoanalysts and therapists about their practice, their consulting room and their thoughts on psychoanalysis. Similar to Engelman’s meticulous approach to photographing Berggasse, Cunard employed a documentary-style method in his work, and also took photographs from the point of view of the analyst and the patient. The contemporary artist thoroughly photographed the consulting room. The artist sat in the patient’s chair or lay on the couch and took photographs from their individual perspective. If the therapist agreed, he shot them in the positions that they adopted during their session. 56  inside the freud museums

nick cunard, head space: photographs of psychotherapeutic environments, freud museum london, 2004

Turning to the psychoanalytic environment outside of the consulting room, Cunard’s photographs are similar to Engelman’s images of Berggasse: doorways, hallways and architectural facades. However, they are different in important ways. Cunard, for in‑ stance, photographed the pathway leading up to psychotherapist Jane Coleridge’s consulting room in the summer and then again in the autumn. Shown together at the Freud Museum, they depict the passing of time. Psychoanalysis is known for being a lengthy process, often taking years to undergo. Cunard’s photos character‑ ize this in an appropriate manner – by representing the changing of the seasons. These images of the consulting room’s surrounding environment, those semi-private spaces outside the consulting s taging p sychoanalysis  57

nick cunard, head space: photographs of psychotherapeutic environments, freud museum london, 2004

room, invoked the fundamental and yet often disregarded en‑ counters that constitute psychoanalysis. Surprisingly little has been written about the spaces outside of the consulting room, but, interestingly, their importance in constituting the ambience of a patient’s relationship to their analyst is often discussed in patients’ autobiographical accounts of their psychoanalysis.34 H.D. remembered how during the spring of 1933 she often crossed paths with Freud’s previous patient. The two of them met either on the staircase leading to apartment 6, or in the waiting room while he exited Freud’s consulting room and she was about to enter, or in the hallway by the coat rack while disposing of or collecting their respective coat and hat. They spoke only once, when he asked her to exchange hours with him for a single session that he was unable to attend. Otherwise they passed one another in silent acknowledgement.35 After H.D.’s first 58  inside the freud museums

series of sessions with Freud came to an end, she learned that this patient, Dr van der Leeuw, known as the Flying Dutchman, died in a plane accident. When H.D. returned to Berggasse in 1934, for her second and final set of sessions with Freud, she spoke to him about Dr van der Leeuw, a student and prodigy of Freud’s. He was a psychoanalyst who was in H.D.’s words to ‘carry on the torch – carry on your [Freud’s] ideas’. H.D. offered Freud her condolences: ‘I came back to Vienna to tell you how sorry I am’. Freud responded: ‘You have come to take his place’ – to carry on Freud’s ideas.36 H.D.’s brief anecdote highlights Freud’s fondness and respect for his patients, but it also highlights the invocation made by Cunard’s photographs that revealed an alternative set of social interactions that take place during psychoanalysis – those that have their genesis outside the consulting room. They too are part of the curative process. Cunard’s training as a social anthropologist resulted in his documentary-style approach to his photographs and to the instal‑ lation of his work at the Freud Museum: a style we have already come across in his predecessor Engelman’s work.37 Whether con‑ sciously or unconsciously, Engelman was a model for Cunard’s work. But there were important differences as well. Engelman produced his photographs for posterity, whereas Cunard hoped that his work gave visitors to his show an opportunity to enter into a space that they may or may not have ever personally experienced. The artist imagined that ‘the viewer’s experience of Head Space might be seen as evocative of the client’s experience in a therapeutic context since each involves a personal response to the therapists and their therapeutic environment’.38 Is it really possible, though, for photographs to convey the affect of a psychoanalytic encounter? For art critic Siobhan Wall, the answer to this question is not straightforward. For her, Cunard’s photographs can never fully reveal the often fraught and difficult relationship between therapist and client. Instead, we are offered images of therapists sans clients. [However,]… no one is really alone in the therapeutic session (although, of s taging p sychoanalysis  59

course, both client and psychotherapist may feel this to be the case). … Frustration, anger, fear and desire all play a role in exploring one’s relationship to oneself and others, but none of this can be revealed by these photographs.39

Perhaps Wall is too harsh in her interpretation of Cunard’s exhibition. Perhaps there was a way in which Cunard did invite us to glimpse the work of analysis: the frustration, anger, fear and desire that take place within the psychoanalytic process. Perhaps he did so by way of analogy. I am referring here to one aspect of his show that is rarely mentioned: Cunard’s decision to exhibit the photographic contact sheets from his project. With these on display, the artist made visible the process of his working method: the failures, successes and hesitations involved in his practice, as well as the passing of time, and the accumulation of images. This part of the photographic process is most often invisible to the viewer, as the artist controls the editing and choice of images on display. Certainly these contact sheets were not representations of the work of psychoanalysis. However, they did afford us a window into another kind of work nonetheless: the work of artistic practice. Similar and yet different. This is the site-responsive work that both Guderian’s and Cunard’s interventions precipitate. The shows invite us to think about the psychoanalytic mise-en-scène. Their imaging and exhibiting of environments inside and outside the consulting room reference several models: the importance of Freud’s initial staging of psychoanalysis, Freud’s consulting room in apartment 6 at Berggasse, its reconstruction in Maresfield Gar‑ dens, as well as Engelman’s photographs from 1938. Engelman’s early photographic documentation has certainly done its work for posterity. And one imagines that Aichorn and Freud would be proud.

nick cunard, head space: photographs of psychotherapeutic environments, laurie slade, freud museum london, 2004 s taging p sychoanalysis  61

A Treatment: Sissi in Analysis

Staying inside the consulting room and with the practices therein, I would like to focus on Freud’s recommendations for best practice within psychoanalytic treatment, and then move on to consider Bal and Williams Gamaker’s intervention Sissi in Analysis, which considers a productive breach in the parameters set by Freud. Throughout his writings, Freud provides us with his recommen‑ dations for establishing and maintaining the mise-en-scène and processes that take place in the consulting room. We now call this the psychoanalytic setting or frame. The earliest use of the term ‘psychoanalytic setting’ was by psychoanalyst D.W. Winnicott in 1954 when he described it as ‘the summation of all the details of management’ that are vital to the progress of psychoanalysis because ‘it turns out in the end or even at the beginning that the setting and the maintenance of the setting are as important as the way one deals with material’.40 Winnicott was expanding upon Freud’s own work that concerned psychoanalytic technique. Freud began drawing together his ideas on psychoanalytic technique in 1908 in an attempt to write a book on the subject, but in 1910 he abandoned it. Though he repeatedly referred thereafter to the idea of writing an opus on technique, he never did. Perhaps this was due to the fact that Freud’s views on psychoanalytic technique changed and developed over time. In fact, he often did not abide by his own advice, and altered aspects of the analytic setting to suit his patients and their needs.41 Having said that, Freud did publish a cluster of six essays between 1911 and 1915 in which he discussed some of the main technical aspects of his practice: the protocols for beginning a treatment; the analysand and analyst’s responsibilities; working through; dream interpretation; and transference. As a part of these recommenda‑ tions, Freud was clear that psychoanalysis was not appropriate for psychotic patients. He believed that the fact of psychosis meant that a patient was unable to engage with the transference – the patient’s unconscious redirection of feelings from important figures in one’s childhood onto the analyst – because he or she could not 62  inside the freud museums

maintain a sense of continuity between sessions that was the basis for working through the transference. Post-Freudian psychoanalytic thought and practice have chal‑ lenged Freud’s ideas on the productive results of having psychotic patients enter psychoanalysis. The film installation Sissi in Analysis, made by artists Mieke Bal and Michelle Williams Gamaker for the exhibition I curated entitled Saying It (2012), critically engaged with Freud’s ideas on the efficacy of psychoanalysis for psychotic patients, and provided some contemporary insight into the de‑ velopment of work being done within this area.42 By working with a case history, the site-responsive nature of Sissi in Analysis and its three companion pieces, Transference, DaughterMother and Sissi Outside, offered us an understanding of the ways in which psychotic patients can potentially benefit from psychoanalysis. The art intervention Sissi in Analysis was an experiment in audio-visual storytelling. A ten-channel work, it presented the individual case of Sissi, an allegedly schizophrenic woman in her thirties, institutionalized since she was 18. Based on a real case history from French psychoanalyst Françoise Davoine’s 1998 ‘theoretical fiction’ entitled Mère Folle, Sissi struggled to begin telling her story.43 Having been the victim of sexual abuse by her father, neglected and betrayed by her mother, and forced to have an abortion and hysterectomy by the medical establishment, in Sissi in Analysis the patient told her story in fragments. Famous psychoanalysts tend to have cases of an early patient they failed and who left their treatment. Davoine’s Sissi is a ver‑ sion of Freud’s failed treatment of Dora. The video installation’s fiction is that Sissi, discontented with the treatment, tried again, this time with an analyst who worked in Finland. Each looped video of short duration was a partly fictionalized session of her psychoanalysis. The dialogue was taken from Davoine’s book, and based on the analyst’s case notes, while the encounter is a fictional performance directed by Bal and Williams Gamaker. Finnish actress Marja Skaffari played Sissi, while Marjo Vuorela, a Finnish practising psychoanalyst, spoke Davoine’s words. s taging p sychoanalysis  63

mieke bal & michelle williams gamaker, sissi in analysis (2012), saying it, freud museum london, 2012

The ten sessions that constituted Sissi’s analysis were spread on, around and next to the furniture and objects within the various rooms of the Freud Museum: from Freud’s consulting room and study to the dining room and upper landing, to the Anna Freud Room, which in 2012 included her analytic couch and chair, as well as her loom. Often, more than one session of Sissi’s treatment was placed in a room; the two videos then demonstrated the simul‑ taneity of multiple memories, desires and trauma that constitute one’s subjectivity, and that emerge during psychoanalysis. The installation of the video sessions throughout the Museum did not follow a linear narrative. Rather, it responded to the way in which an analysis is non-linear: memories are remembered out of chronological order and intermingled with present-day events and emotions. The installation invited each viewer to create his or her own travels through it. In effect, the curatorial strategy was asking us to follow Freud’s advice on how a patient is to begin a treatment: ‘what the material is with which one starts … is on the whole a matter of indifference’.44 We simply, at some point, must begin. Psychoanalysis and literary theory have taught us 64  inside the freud museums

that a beginning always arises out of something else. It does not occur in linear time, but rather through adjacency. A beginning is not always evident; it is sometimes repressed; and ultimately a beginning implies return and repetition.45 In viewing Sissi’s sessions, we were slowly given access to the gradual process of uncovering the cause of her traumatized state. Speaking face to face with her analyst, rather than lying down as Freud recommended, in one session Sissi announced to her analyst: ‘I want to get better and choose the life that I want, not just any kind of life, the life of an artist … of great queens, grand dukes … the life of all forms of life.’ Sissi imagined herself to be the mieke bal & michelle williams gamaker, sissi in analysis (2012), saying it, freud museum london, 2012

s taging p sychoanalysis  65

mieke bal & michelle williams gamaker, sissi in analysis (2012), saying it, freud museum london, 2012

Empress of Austria-Hungary; she spoke like a queen, and dressed in flamboyant clothes expressing her many moods and voices.46 In another session Sissi stated with sadness and confusion: ‘One day I went to Paris and had an abortion. They said I was pregnant, they didn’t tell me I was expecting a baby. It was taken out of my body; who had the right to decide?’ At another time, she projected her affection for and fear of losing her analyst: ‘Your skin is vanishing. I’m afraid I will lose you; your mouth is already disappearing.’ In yet another session Sissi asked affectionately, ‘How on earth do you understand me so well? Must I admit that we get along?’ Conversely she also lashed out and resisted her analyst: ‘Don’t put your fat ass there. You’re disgusting with your big gob … you also have fake boobs.’ Abandoned by her mother, who did not acknowledge Sissi’s abuse, Sissi could not reconcile her ongoing love for her mother, and this division between loving and hating her began the ‘war’ within Sissi. The duality that troubled Sissi’s relationship with her mother, whom she loved and at the same time hated, is replicated in her love–hate relationship with her analyst. She asked that her mother speak with her analyst. In the video-work DaughterMother we heard Sissi’s mother tell her own traumatic story of abuse by her husband – Sissi’s father. 66  inside the freud museums

Sissi eventually had her moment of ‘saying it’. She spoke her traumatic memories. The session was appropriately placed next to Freud’s couch: I’m suffocating telling the truth. Her husband is a criminal. He wanted to fondle my chest. Everyone would like to fondle me. Everyone thinks they are on my breasts. If I knew why, I’d know why he is on my breasts… That makes me sound like an echo at a distance, an echo of things far away. How they came into me, all the illnesses came into my chest. My mother said: ‘If you want to leave, you are no longer my daughter’ … I can’t love another mother.

At this point we found ourselves in the midst of Sissi’s analysis; we were coming to know something of her; and yet, at this juncture, for Freud at least, a question remains: When are we to begin making our communications to the patient? When is the moment for disclosing to him the hidden meaning of the ideas that occur to him, and for initiating him into the postulates and technical procedures of analysis? The answer to this can only be: not until an effective transference has been established in the patient, a proper rapport with him. It remains the first aim of the treatment to attach him to it and to the person of the doctor. To ensure this, nothing need be done but to give him time.47

In a separate video-work by Bal and Williams Gamaker entitled Transference, the analyst responded to Sissi’s working through by meeting her with the words: ‘The resistance is always the analyst’s resistance.’ And ‘That’s true, I recognize that you have healed me.’ Sissi in Analysis, Transference and DaughterMother were siteresponsive in the way they reflected what happens in the consult‑ ing room, and thus psychoanalytic practice itself. The artworks presented us with a narrative structure that was a constellation of beginnings, detours, gaps, hesitations, endings and returns. It was a fragmented story with a scattered plot.48 The sessions gave us material that was remembered, forgotten, concealed or emerging as if out of nowhere. Repeatedly, and yet differently each time, s taging p sychoanalysis  67

mieke bal & michelle williams gamaker, transference (2012), saying it, freud museum london, 2012

these fragments were interpreted by the patient and the analyst. Sissi was encouraged by ‘saying it’: her analyst was by her as she spoke, literally sitting next to her during their analytic sessions, rather than in the classic analyst–analysand position. Freud’s recommendation that psychotic patients not be treated was critically analysed by the staging of Sissi in Analysis in the Freud Museum. Sissi’s treatment is a part of a larger movement of post-Freudian analysts who are working against Freud’s initial suggestion. Davoine, Sissi’s therapist in real life, as well as Vuorela, a practising psychotherapist in Finland and Sissi’s fictional thera‑ pist in the films, are both a part of this movement. Davoine has written about her psychoanalytic practice in theoretical terms. For her, in understanding ‘madness’, like psychosis, one must first accept that there is a connection between the personal and the socio-historical. In Davoine’s work, she has come to understand that trauma is passed on from generation to generation, which she names ‘transgenerational trauma’. If the first-generation survivor does not deal with his or her trauma, then it can be transferred onto the next generation as a type of ‘madness’. 68  inside the freud museums

mieke bal & michelle williams gamaker, sissi outside (2012), saying it, freud museum london, 2012

In Davoine’s view, psychoanalysis can be used to treat these forms of madness. In these particular situations, the analyst must deal with the patient’s transference by meeting her with and through the analyst’s own unconsciously living inherited trauma.49 For Davoine, these processes of transference and counter-transference are encounters with the ‘other’. The ‘other’ is constituted inter‑ subjectively by bringing together patient and analyst in dialogue. The ‘other’ is also engaged with intrasubjectively, wherein both the patient and the analyst are aware of their own traumatic experience being engaged during psychoanalytic treatment. In the case of the analyst, this process is commonly known as countertransference. In Davoine’s writings she considers this complex set of relationships between patient and analyst as an ethical encounter that works in and through transference and counter-transference. For Davoine, the narrative that emerges during such a process is always partial, fragmentary and incomplete because the workings of the unconscious are also partial and fragmentary. Thus the aim of psychoanalysis is not to narrate oneself totally and completely, but rather to recognize that this is impossible. Like Davoine’s case s taging p sychoanalysis  69

notes, Bal and Williams Gamaker’s narrativization of Sissi’s life in filmic fragments and the curation of the show as partial objects scattered throughout the Freud Museum reflected this aspect of the unconscious and psychotherapy. In Sissi in Analsyis parts were brought together and met, while others remained separate, thereby representing the shards of a subject and a process that cannot be neatly combined.50 In the video Sissi Outside, the patient was imagined wander‑ ing the grounds of a hospital. Alone and free, she was shown in moments of possibility: climbing a ladder, swinging from a tree. There was no closure in this intervention, no completion. By taking some time with Sissi inside and outside her analysis, this site-responsive intervention asked us to come into contact with fragments of a story that may offer us a space within which to listen to a patient that during Freud’s time would not have been offered psychoanalytic treatment and thus refused a space within which to speak. The complex structure of the ten-channel work Sissi in Analysis represented the problematic nature of working with an individual who has so many narratives that constitute her life that she has endured a psychotic breakdown, but also the fact that many psychoanalysts undertake this work and find it produc‑ tive and helpful for these patients. Sissi in Analysis as well as the video Transference and DaughterMother offered us an image of the work that a patient such as Sissi can now be offered. Work that is based on the talking cure, although fragmented and episodic, does constitute the vitality of a life, and a patient’s articulation of her life. What the intervention Saying It ultimately provided us with was a space in which to listen and learn, as well as to speak, to say what often remains unspeakable. A Provocation

Throughout this chapter I have been concerned with how the Freud Museum London abides by a hagiographic model of the personality museum that seeks to stage the aura of Freud’s con‑ sulting room and study; an aura that resonates deeply with our 70  inside the freud museums

own fantasy around these spaces. This staging and its affect are problematic because they can lead to idolatry. Psychoanalyst Adam Phillips argues that for Freud the distinction between belief and idolatry is not clear, as both concepts are founded on a form of illusion. If this is the case, then, Phillips contends, Freud’s under‑ standing of transference, a process that is key to psychoanalysis and is a type of belief held by the patient about their analyst, is also a ‘form of secular idolatry’.51 As a result, the grounds on which we understand the distinction between belief and idolatry are difficult to uphold. Phillips concludes his discussion by stating that ‘the one thing psychoanalysis cannot cure, when it works, is a belief in psychoanalysis. And that is a problem.’52 The problem being that a belief in psychoanalysis turns into a form of secular idolatry and in effect positions psychoanalysis as an ideology. Psychoanalysis, when it works, is thus a dispositif. When the Freud Museum London works, when we are affected by its aura and fantasy, it too is a dispositif. In considering the aura and fantasy of Freud’s consulting room and study in London, I have analysed a series of site-responsive exhibitions that have provided us with a deep understanding of the complex staging of psychoanalysis as a museological setting, a practice and an ideology. While the Freud Museum London stages and stokes our fantasy about Freud’s consulting room, the Museum’s historical accretions also disseminate both: we are constantly being pulled back to Berggasse, to the longevity and veracity of the work that Freud undertook in Vienna, and away from Maresfield Gardens. In addition, Guderian’s and Cunard’s photographic work has indicated how psychoanalysis as a practice, with its reliance on a particular mise-en-scène that we know as the consulting room, with its singularly delineated setting, techniques and responsibilities as outlined by Freud so many years ago, is also a dispositif: an ideological convergence and organization that dif‑ fuse our idolatry. Moreover, in considering the couch, Deguelle’s, Borja’s and Gallagher’s interventions have demonstrated how as an object the couch can be used to expose the often repressed s taging p sychoanalysis  7 1

and troubling historical relations that psychoanalysis has with gender and race. This too disseminates any fantasy we have of psychoanalysis and Freud’s consulting room. For its part, Bal and Williams Gamaker’s installation discloses the limits of Freudian psychoanalysis by introducing us to the work that analysts are doing with psychotic patients. But the story does not end here. I would like to conclude by referring back to this chapter’s second epigraph, the statement made by psychoanalyst Jean Laplanche. In writing about psycho‑ analysis within and outside of the consulting room, he states that [Psycho]analysis cannot fail to take into account the fact that it is itself also present, in a privileged way, in that ‘culture’, which has been in-formed and transformed by its very intervention. [There has been an] irreversible introduction of analysis into the culture, through all the modalities of analytic praxis, of which the practice of analytic treatment is the most eminent, without perhaps having the greatest impact. The analysand, having emerged from treatment to get involved in new gravitational forces, inevitably encounters, at the cultural sites of transference, the expanding presence of analysis.53

Laplanche’s point is that our culture is steeped in psychoanalysis. Even when we leave the consulting room, pass through its sur‑ rounding environment and enter the outside world, we are still interpellated by it. Whether we have been in analysis or not, psy‑ choanalysis, as a dispositif, is embedded in all of us.54 It is integral to our culture. We see this in the Freud Museum London, in its ability to both constitute a hagiographic museum dedicated to Sigmund Freud and dissipate this same staging through its own history, and in the site-responsive exhibitions held therein. This is the Freud Museum London’s strength, and that is its provocation to psychoanalysis, to the personality museum as a genre, and to our culture.

72  inside the freud museums

2 An Archaeological Impulse: Uncovering a ‘Museum Within a  Museum’ 1

[F]or a collector … ownership is the most intimate relationship that one can have to objects. Not that they come alive in him; it is he who lives in them. Walter Benjamin2 The psychoanalyst like the archaeologist in his excavations must uncover layer after layer of the patient’s psyche before coming to the deepest most valuable treasures. Sigmund Freud3 An Archaeological Impulse Made Manifest

There is an archaeological impulse at the core of psychoanalysis. I propose that this impulse is manifest in three ways: materially, metaphorically and phenomenologically. Materially, it is embod‑ ied in Freud’s avid collecting over 40 years of well over 2,000 antiquities, artefacts and curiosities. The amateur curating of these objects primarily took place at Berggasse 19, Vienna; now found at 20 Maresfield Gardens, these remnants of antiquity have always crowded Freud’s workspaces. Freud’s collection includes a multitude of small figurines, plaster casts, fragments of paintings, classical Aegean vases and funerary urns, iridescent glass jars and bottles, delicate ivories, scarabs and many other small objets d’art. The provenance of the majority of these artefacts takes us back to ancient Egypt, Greece and Rome, while others lead us to the histories of China and the Near East. Purchased during his

travels across Europe or from dealers in Vienna, Freud’s interest in antiquities as material embodiments of the past continued unabated throughout his adult life. The items were displayed in his consulting room and study in densely populated glass cabinets, bookshelves and tables, as well as on the floor and hung on walls, with a special few given pride of place on his desk facing him while he worked. When Freud’s patient H.D. found herself for the first time in the midst of this vast collection she noted that Freud was a ‘curator in a museum’ surrounded by his antiquities.4 Freud’s notable collection, his activities as a collector and amateur curator, manifest in a material way the archaeological impulse in psychoanalysis. The archaeological impulse is scientifically and hermeneutically embodied in Freud’s use of an archaeological metaphor throughout his career. This ‘mighty metaphor’, as art historian Donald Kuspit has called it, was fundamental to Freud’s understanding of the practice of psychoanalysis and the formation of the human subject.5 The similarities between psychoanalysis and archaeology always intrigued Freud. His patient, Sergei Pankejeff, known as the Wolf Man, noted how Freud once told him that ‘[t]he psychoanalyst like the archaeologist in his excavations must uncover layer after layer of the patient’s psyche before coming to the deepest most valuable treasures’. Freud began to employ the archaeological metaphor from as early as 1893 in his work on hysteria, and carried on utilizing it until as late as 1937, only two years before his death. As historian and philosopher of psychoanalysis John Forrester has noted, Freud, who was interested in archaeology as a child, remained a ‘perpetual student of the “prehistoric” throughout his life’.6 This lifelong interest in the ‘prehistoric’ was central to Freud’s metaphoric conception of psychoanalysis as an archaeological theory and practice. Phenomenologically, the archaeological impulse in psycho‑ analysis is embodied in the various ways in which Freud used objects of antiquity within his therapeutic, thinking and writing practices. The mise-en-scène of the consulting room meant that 74  inside the freud museums

Freud was seated behind his patient and could see his analysand, who could not return his gaze. However, both Freud and the patient would have been able to view the ancient figurines that gazed upon and watched over them both. Freud was aware of the impact that his antiquities could have on his patients and their use-value in his practice. In fact, Freud sometimes used the objects that surrounded him in his consulting room and study to drive an analysis forward, or to teach his patients something about themselves or their unconscious. An example of this is the incident I have already mentioned, where Freud used one of his antiquities during the Wolf Man’s psychoanalysis as a means of explaining the therapeutic process to him. At other times Freud used his antiquities as a way of spurring on his thinking and writing practices. I conceive of these practices as an ontology of use. This ontology is formed out of Freud’s phenomenological engagement with the objects in his collection and forms the third archaeological impulse within psychoanalysis. In following the archaeological impulse within psychoanalysis, I consider a series of exhibitions that deal with Freud’s antiquities and their relationship to the material, metaphoric and phenom‑ enological functions within this impulse. In terms of its material embodiment, I turn to the work of Andy Hope 1930 (aka Andreas Hofer), Stuart Brisley and Susan Hiller. Andy Hope 1930 at the Freud (2010) inquisitively inserts a set of contemporary superheroes within Freud’s collection and surprises us by taking us back to Freud’s childhood interest in archaeology and an its unexpected connection to his father and Judaism. Stuart Brisley’s The Collection of Ordure (2002) and Susan Hiller’s At the Freud Museum (1994) ask some pressing questions about the limits of collecting, curating and the function of the personality museum: with shit and rubbish as the collection on display, what is the purpose of a collection and museum dedicated to an individual, and in the Freud Museum what is the precise nature of psychoanalysis’s interest in archae­ ology as a practice? Hiller’s intervention pushes this interrogation one step further, as it blurs the boundaries between the material an archaeologic al impul se  75

and metaphoric impulses within psychoanalysis. Hiller’s objects point to the fact that Freud’s antiquities are at one and the same time archaeological treasures and fundamental to the metaphoric understanding of the human subject as an archaeological site that requires excavation through psychoanalysis. But what happens to the archaeological impulse within psychoanalysis when it is no longer aligned to an archaeological practice but turns into something that is radically different, a ‘not-archaeology’ based on the transformative potential of the unclassified, the spontaneous and the anomalous?7 Will Cobbing’s intervention Gradiva Project (2008) takes on what is arguably the most important archaeological case within psychoanalysis, Freud’s work on Gradiva. With humour and in‑ sight, Cobbing considers Gradiva in all her guises, and offers us an alternative perception of the archaeological metaphor within psychoanalysis: one that engages our peripheral vision and thus proposes that what we see in the margins is key to our analysis. Finally, in encountering a magnificent chess set in Oliver Clegg’s Night Move (2008), we come to a vivid understanding of the phe‑ nomenological impulse within psychoanalysis. With the game already begun, Clegg’s installation invites us to consider the ways in which Freud’s antiquities drove the analyst’s conversations with his patients, and inspired a complex internal dialogue on psychoanalysis. In this chapter I attempt to separate the material, metaphoric and phenomenological aspects of psychoanalysis’s archaeological impulse by analysing particular exhibitions in relation to certain modes. However, the boundaries between these modes are easily blurred. The anecdote that I told earlier of Freud’s use of an antiquity within the Wolf Man’s analysis is an example of the way in which an antiquity is both a part of his therapeutic process when the analyst points to it during a session and invested with metaphoric value, as Freud explains to his patient that in psycho‑ analysis the mind is excavated to find its most valuable treasures. Or, as Hiller’s art intervention proposes, Freud’s interest in his 76  inside the freud museums

antiquities as material objects that he collected and displayed slips quite easily into their metaphoric function, and then its critique: the objects are material treasures, they are fundamental to Freud’s conception of the human subject as an archaeological site that requires excavation through psychoanalysis, and they also represent the falling short of archaeology for psychoanalysis because psychoanalysis is understood ultimately as a transforma‑ tive process as opposed to the static methods employed within archaeology. Perhaps this blurring of boundaries is representative of both Freud’s dynamic approach to psychoanalysis and the way in which his antiquities function as much more than simply treasures from the past. As art historian Mary Bergstein puts it, Freud’s collection ‘constitutes a kind of self-staging, a Gesamtkunstwerk of deliberate self-representation’.8 Cultural critic and philosopher Walter Benjamin teaches us that a collector forms an intimate relationship with objects. In analysing the intimate self-staging of Freud’s antiquities throughout this chapter, we encounter the various ways in which the archaeological impulse works within psychoanalysis, and what is at stake within it. In the end, we are afforded valuable access to Freud’s activities as a collector and curator of antiquities: how these remnants from the past enabled him to conceive of and engender an archaeological theory of subject formation and psychoanalytic practice; and how certain objects played a significant role in this therapeutic work. Before I turn to each of these impulses, I begin with a knot that binds Freud’s antiquities and their intimate self-staging: the death of his father Jakob Freud, which instigated the young Sigmund Freud’s collecting and curating of antiquities. Freud considered the loss of one’s father to be the greatest loss in a man’s life. It was this loss that initiated his desire for collecting and stoked his youthful interest in archaeology, and that haunts the archaeological impulse within psychoanalysis. In following this impulse, we come to see how Freud lived in and through his collection in a complicated and fascinating fashion. an archaeologic al impul se  7 7

freud’s consulting room at berggasse 19, 1938

A Knot: Collecting, Curating and Death

Freud’s collection of antiquities began and grew while he lived and worked at Berggasse 19, Vienna. Its displacement from continental Europe to London accompanied the Freud family’s exile in 1938. Remarkably, after Freud paid the requisite taxes on his collection (which was compassionately undervalued by his friend Emmanuel Löwy, Professor of Archaeology at the University of Vienna), the Nazis allowed him to send his entire collection to London.9 A few days before the family made their journey, Freud asked Princess Marie Bonaparte to smuggle his two favourite antiquities out of Austria and to the safety of her Paris home. The two beloved figures were a Roman statuette of Athena and a Chinese jade and wooden screen of a scholar, both of which sat in the centre of Freud’s desk in Vienna and to this day remain in this privileged position in London.10 The remaining objects were carefully packed up and shipped to their new home. On 4 June 1938 the Freud family left Vienna and arrived at Princess Bonaparte’s residence in Paris for a short stay. While visiting her, Freud became reacquainted with his two favourite statues. He wrote in his diary that the family 78  inside the freud museums

freud’s study at the freud museum london

would continue their trip to London ‘proud and rich under the protection of Athene’.11 Having arrived safely in London, and having spent a few months in rented accommodation at 39 Elsworthy Road, the Freud family moved into Maresfield Gardens at the end of September 1938. The collection of antiquities joined them and was arranged and curated following a schema designed by Freud’s friend and colleague August Aichorn, the same individual who had commissioned Engelman to photograph Berggasse 19 for posterity. The layout was based on their placement in the Viennese rooms.12 On 8 October 1938 Freud, in a positive and happy mood, wrote to his colleague psychoanalyst Hanns Sachs: ‘All the Egyptians, the Chinese and the Greek women have arrived, have stood up to the journey with little damage, and look much more impressive here than in Berggasse.’13 In stark contrast to this, two months later Freud wrote a rather melancholic assessment of the collec‑ tion to his friend Margaret Stonborough-Wittgenstein, sister of philosopher Ludwig and pianist Paul: ‘Of course the collection is now dead, nothing will be added to it, and the owner is almost as an archaeologic al impul se  79

freud’s study at the freud museum london

dead…’14 Freud died nine months later on 23 September 1939. What we see today in the Freud Museum London is the same arrange‑ ment of the collection as left by Freud on the day of his death. In connecting his imminent death to the death of the collection Freud was very incisive. When we reflect on the knot involving Freud’s antiquities and death which he highlighted, we are brought back 40 years, to when Freud bought his first sculpture, a purchase that coincided with the death of his father. In December 1896, only two months after his father Jakob had died, Freud acquired what would come to be regarded as the initial item of his collection.15 Having purchased plaster casts of Florentine statues for his new office in apartment 4 at Berggasse 19, Freud wrote on 6 Decem‑ ber to his colleague and friend otolaryngologist Wilhelm Fliess that this experience was ‘a source of extraordinary invigoration [Erquickung; also translates as ‘comfort’ and ‘renewal’] for me.’16 We do not know what Freud meant by this because he does not expand on this experience and his feelings of it, but, we can wonder whether it was the actual choosing and purchasing of the statues that comforted him, or the displaying of them in his office, or the fact that he now had figures to keep him company in 80  inside the freud museums

his office. Perhaps it was one or all of these pursuits – collecting, curating, accompaniment – that offered Freud the support that he required during this time of great loss and mourning. The death of his father had a profound impact on the analyst and his work. Jakob Freud’s death precipitated tremendous self-doubt in his son, and necessitated Sigmund Freud’s self-analysis, a process that was articulated in The Interpretation of Dreams. As Freud noted almost a decade later in the 1908 Preface to the second edition of The Interpretation of Dreams, ‘a portion of my own self-analysis [was] my reaction to my father’s death – that is to say, to the most important event, the most poignant loss, of a man’s life.’17 Given that the psychoanalyst acquired his earliest statues so soon after his father’s death, it is peculiar that Freud did not analyse his inclination for collecting what he affectionately called his ‘old and grubby gods’ (in a letter to Fliess dated 1 August 1899), or examine the gods themselves.18 This knot involving the work of mourning and self-reflection brought on by the loss of his father and the comfort experienced by collecting and displaying artefacts from the past never manifested itself – either in his self-analysis or later in his work as a well-established practising psychoanalyst. Neglected by Freud, the entwinement is not lost on many scholars.19 Forrester encapsulates the battle between life and death symbolized by Freud’s collection when he writes that, Beginning with the father’s death, only kept from death as long as it was growing, Freud’s collection of antiquities elegantly demonstrates how a collection can symbolize the battle of life within death, of life being infiltrated by death, of a space cleared for the expression of this battle by the objects the collector has chosen as his personal representatives.20

Forrester’s interlacing of life and death brings together the beginning of Freud’s collection and the end of its growth, as well as the collection’s symptomatic relationship to Freud’s father’s death and the psychoanalyst’s own impending end. Building upon Freud’s thoughts about the death of his collection and H.D’s reference to its museological status with Freud as its curator, an archaeologic al impul se  81

Forrester describes a further peculiarity: ‘When [Freud] died, the collection stopped growing, and turned into the curious entity it is now: a museum within a museum, a collection of antiquities within a museum devoted to the founder of psychoanalysis.’21 Rather than its remaining dead, we will see how this ‘museum within a museum’, with its associations to the archaeological impulse within psychoanalysis, is activated in extraordinary ways by the showing of contemporary art inside the Freud Museum.22 A Material Impulse: From an Archaeology of Objects to a ‘Not-Archaeology’

The only reference we have to Freud rationalizing his collection is the indication that he drew up a numerical list of his antiqui‑ ties in 1913–14. Michael Molnar notes that some of the statuettes that have red numbers on them today may bear the traces of Freud’s record-keeping. These numbers correspond to those on the objects as seen in Max Pollak’s portrait of Freud at his desk, a picture that was made at the same time as the psychoanalyst is said to have begun the rather dry and formal activity of clas‑ sifying his collection. Unfortunately the list, if there ever was one, is lost.23 The etching by Pollack is one of the most powerful visual manifestations of Freud and his antiquities. Hugo Heller com‑ missioned the portrait. Heller was a dedicated follower of Freud’s work, publishing it and the psychoanalytic journal Imago for many years, as well as being a founding member of the Wednesday Psychological Society that met weekly in Freud’s waiting room at Berggasse 19. The dramatic etching depicts Freud at his desk surrounded, screened off, guarded and gazed upon by at least a dozen ancient Egyptian, Chinese, Greek and Roman gods, warriors, human figures and other creatures. Freud’s ‘old and grubby gods’ create a boundary between the psychoanalyst and any potential intruder or visitor. Freud animated his antiquities, giving them characteristics. He playfully reminded Fliess of one god’s condescending character in a letter dated 17 July 1899, in 82  inside the freud museums

portrait of sigmund freud at his desk by max pollak, 1914

which he wrote that ‘Old Gods must still exist because I got a few not long ago. Amongst them a stone Janus whose two faces regard me with great superiority.’24 Andy Hope 1930’s exhibition Andy Hope 1930 at the Freud (2010), curated by James Putnam, offered a subtle and at times witty tribute to Freud’s ‘toys’, as artist Louise Bourgeois has called them.25 By inserting and juxtaposing the artist’s own toys from his personal collection of contemporary science-fiction superheroes in between and next to Freud’s antiquities, the show invoked the role that these antique and contemporary ‘old and grubby gods’ can have in our everyday life, as well as the way in which religion, particularly Judaism and the figure of Moses, figured an archaeologic al impul se  83

installation view, andy hope 1930 at the freud, freud museum london, 2010

within Freud’s work. On the psychoanalyst’s desk, Superman joined Freud’s Roman figurines of Athena and Venus, the Egyptian statuettes of Osiris, Neith and Amon-Re, the Chinese Guardian and Scholar figurines, and the analyst’s little spiky metal porcupine. On a cabinet in Freud’s study, Putnam placed several small sculptures by Andy Hope 1930 next to Freud’s antiquities: two detached Spock-like ears and one long, claw-like finger lay on either side of an antique funerary mask, whereas miniature twin girls stood in between ancient female statuettes. A series of the artist’s blue beasts found refuge in one of Freud’s large glass vitrines that is filled with a variety of ancient figurines, animals, bowls and other curiosities. At the centre of Freud’s study, standing next to his desk, was a contemporary and creepy version of The Three Graces: three life-size mannequins, wearing hooded capes, ominous and unrecognizable, were present, yet remained anonymous as their faces were turned away from us. 84  inside the freud museums

The site-responsive curatorial mode at work in this exhibition was the act of insertion. Cultural critic and film-maker Mieke Bal informs us that in a collection the event of an additional acquisition and insertion is ‘an act of deprivation’, because the additional object has been isolated and removed from its initial context, thereby becoming ‘representational’. It is also an act of epistemological formation because each addition to a collection ensures that ‘mean‑ ing changes as the collection as a whole changes. As the narrative develops, each object already inserted is modified anew.’26 It is the dual nature of insertion that was at work within Putnam’s curatorial strategy for the Andy Hope 1930 show. The insertion of representational figures from the artist’s own collection into Freud’s museum of toys – gods and ancient objects – shifted his antiquities and ourselves into a contemporary cultural framework made up of references to popular and mass culture. In this new world created by Andy Hope 1930’s intervention, antiquity met science fiction and comic-strip heroes, television stars and figures – today’s gods. The insertions that occurred in the exhibition both highlighted the role of gods within our western capitalist culture and pointed to Freud’s complex understanding of the value of gods throughout various times and cultures.27 The value that Freud placed on gods was fundamental to the nexus he perceived between religion, archaeology and antiquities; a relationship that began in Freud’s childhood. Freud’s father educated him from the age of 7 until 11 with the Phillipson Bible. The volumes of this particular Bible were illustrated with vivid archaeological, ethnographic and artistic imagery. At the age of 35 Freud was able to revisit this same Bible when his father pre‑ sented him with a copy for his birthday. In fact, it was the same one Sigmund Freud received at his bar mitzvah, when at the age of 13 the young Freud became a Jewish adult. Newly rebound in leather, the gift was inscribed in Hebrew by Freud’s father, and is a testament to Freud’s Jewish heritage, his study of biblical narra‑ tives and imagery as a young boy in the 1860s, and his enduring interest in archaeology and religion. Through the Phillipson Bible, an archaeologic al impul se  85

more than a decade before Heinrich Schliemann uncovered the ancient city of Troy in the 1870s, the formation and fuelling of Freud’s archaeological imagination was well under way.28 As a boy, a young man and an adult, Freud was fascinated by depictions of gods in various representational forms, from illustra‑ tions, prints, reliefs and sculptures. The appeal was such that his colleague Hanns Sachs recalls in his memoirs how Freud placed himself, his patients and colleagues ‘under the silent stare of his idols and animal-shaped gods’.29 Psychoanalyst Adam Phillips takes up and considers the term ‘idol’ in relation to Freud’s antiquities and his bond to Judaism. For Phillips, the term ‘idol’ is useful but also ‘tendentious’ in referring to ‘what Freud called his “grubby old gods”’: in Freud’s ‘collection of more than two thousand pieces there were many representations of deities, but Freud did not worship them’; he simply ‘collected them with some relish and obviously prized them very highly’. Phillips then speculates on the psychoanalytic implications of Freud’s relationship to his antiquities and religion, and suggests that ‘there were powerful unconscious identifications at work both with the people who had worshipped them and the people who had found them’. In addition, the antiquities also represented Freud’s ‘family romance’ – ‘his wishful allegiance to alternative cultures’, which was more of a ‘world-historical romance’ that included Greek, Roman, Egyptian, Near Eastern and Asian members. Of course, Freud would not have had ‘comparable Jewish antiquities, because there could be no such thing’ since classical Jewish thought prohibits the representation of its god because it is considered an enticement to idolatry. As a secular Jew, Phillips imagines that these figurines and representations offered Freud extraordinary insight into culture and history. Phillips suggests that the antiquities functioned as a form of aide-mémoire for the analyst: ‘culture was history, and this history, which was of extraordinary duration, could be preserved and thought about. The present could be a cover story for the past.’ On the one hand, the temporality of this state of affairs, with the present covering over the past, provided Freud with the 86  inside the freud museums

means of understanding the formation of the psyche and the work of psychoanalysis as a form of archaeology. On the other hand, ‘more threateningly to the monotheism of a putatively chosen people – [Freud’s antiquities made clear] that culture was plural’. The gods from Egypt, Rome, Greece, the Near East and China all represent diverse cultures, diverse religions. For Phillips, this conjunction of diverse gods within Freud’s collection may have encouraged the analyst in his belief that ‘the only viable notion of True Belief was something local, provisional, and various’, thereby forgoing a belief in a singular monotheism, such as Judaism.30 The paradox Phillips notes between a belief in a singular mono‑ theism and religious diversity did not deter Freud from collecting artefacts of, or writing on, religion. Freud was concerned with belief throughout his life. His work on Moses is acknowledged most often as the bridge between his secular Judaism and his col‑ lection of antique gods.31 Phillips suggests that in Freud’s writing in 1914 on Michelangelo’s sculpture of Moses, Freud ‘seemed, quite unconsciously, to have made it into an idol’, thereby decrying Judaism’s iconoclasm.32 Then, returning to the figure of Moses 20 years later in his final extraordinary book Moses and Monotheism, Freud provided a defence of monotheism while at the same time experiencing profound ambivalence towards Judaism because of its historical ties to intolerance and imperialism. Freud’s interest in Moses, the great Jewish patriarch, was long-standing. As Phillips succinctly puts it, Freud, the man and psychoanalyst, identified with Moses ‘as an interpreter and as an abolisher of idols’. Like Moses, Freud produced a new hermeneutics, in the analyst’s case of the human subject in which all previous idols were abolished.33 That may be the case in theoretical terms, but materially, like Andy Hope 1930’s superheroes, Freud’s coveting of these gods within the plastic arts remained strong. The remarkable value that Freud placed on the ‘old and grubby gods’ that he collected, displayed and coveted is plainly visible when visiting the Freud Museum London. Freud’s ‘museum within a museum’ is certainly one of the most striking aspects an archaeologic al impul se  87

stuart brisley, the collection of ordure, freud museum london, 2002

of the site as a whole, and particularly of Freud’s consulting room and study. These latter two spaces hold a multitude of objects that demonstrate the long-term fascination that Freud had with antiquities. However, Freud the collector was not rigid in his taste: there is no discernible difference in the collection between beautifully preserved items or broken figures and fragments or unusual pieces. Nor is the display rigid in its curation: parts of it are rationally assembled by genre, for instance standing gods and goddesses are grouped together, while others are more randomly clustered together and sit alongside unrelated groups of objects. What is most obvious about the collection is that Freud was deeply involved in ancient history and its material remains. The care that Freud extended to the vast number of objects in his collection is still clearly redolent today. Stuart Brisley’s art intervention The Collection of Ordure (2002) and Susan Hiller’s installation At the Freud Museum (1994) engage with Freud’s antiquities, his collecting and curatorial habits, as well as the attention he paid to the anomalous, while also interrogating broadly the personality museum’s role as 88  inside the freud museums

an institution that collects and preserves memorabilia representing the life and work of an individual. Brisley’s The Collection of Ordure began in the mid-1990s, and since 2000 the artist has been expanding the project. The inter‑ vention at the Freud Museum London included several displays of objects of waste: shit, dirt, rubbish. The main impetus of the show was to conjoin Brisley’s collection of excrement, an assemblage of things that has no seeming value in our capitalist and consumer‑ ist culture, with Freud’s famous, and now priceless, collection of antiquities. Thus, for a time, a museum of ordure occupied Freud’s ‘museum within a museum’. The juxtaposition of these two vastly different collections had two main effects. It brought to mind Freud’s interest in excrement and the importance of it to his work, and challenged the function of a museum in housing and preserving objects, particularly the personality museum’s conservation and reliance on the aura of its collections in order to maintain its own relevance. Freud had a long-term interest in excrement. In fact, in a remarkably prescient incident in relation to Brisley’s Collection of Ordure, Freud had a dream of a Museum of Excrement. Freud’s dream included objects of disgust, which were transformed into items of pleasure, and vice versa, and an analysis of this dream was included in The Interpretation of Dreams. Freud’s description of this book in a letter to Fleiss on 28 May 1899 is apt in the context of Brisley’s intervention. Freud wrote: ‘No other work of mine has been so completely my own, my own dung heap, my seedling and a nova species mihi on top of it.’34 Freud unashamedly admitted that he had an explicit interest in his own ordure. His dung heap – collections of dreams, desires and memories that constitute his psyche – formed the basis of his self-analysis, which was written up in The Interpretation of Dreams. The excavation, collection and analysis of his own psychic excrement provided Freud with the seeds for his radical new method, his nova species mihi – that is, the archaeological method that he used within psychoanalysis. For John Forrester this makes Freud a ‘collector of the fading an archaeologic al impul se  89

yet precious detritus of western civilization’: ‘an archaeologist of rubbish avant la lettre’.35 If Freud’s method ensured that he was an archaeologist of personal and cultural refuse, then Brisley’s installation was a literal manifestation of just such a dung heap. In addition to invoking and materializing Freud’s fascination with ordure as key to human subjectivity and psychoanalytic practice, Brisley’s installation also probed what the function of the Museum – and the personality museum – is in preserving the ordure of its inhabitants. Soon after the installation in the Freud Museum, Brisley published an accompanying fictional art book entitled Beyond Reason: Ordure. The book is a damning indictment of the art market and the role that the collector and curator play in transforming art into capital. Through various fictional char‑ acters – the Artist, the Collector, the Curator – Brisley asks us to consider the relationship between objects, aesthetics, capital and where authorial power and ownership lie within this structure. The book concludes that capital usurps any other function a work of art may have, no matter what form the artwork takes, even if, as is the case in The Collection of Ordure, it is society’s waste. Even without the accompanying book’s articulation of intent, Brisley’s installation of ordure has always provided a robust attack on the art market. By mounting the intervention in the Freud Museum, the installation interrogated the value of Freud’s collection and the function of the Museum. Forrester once noted that Freud’s collection is ‘priceless’, but not in terms of its financial worth (the terms over which Brisley’s fictional characters argue about art); rather, its worth is based upon its dynamic and enabling relationship to Freud’s psychoanalytic work.36 If the value of Freud’s collection is its use-value for the practice of psychoanalysis, then one could similarly say that the value of Brisley’s collection is not financial, but related to its usevalue because it asks us to think about the value of the work of art outside of the market, outside its exchange-value. Inside the Freud Museum The Collection of Ordure’s use-value became siteresponsive. The intervention asked a set of questions about the 9 0  inside the freud museums

site. How is value attributed to the Museum’s objects? What role does the personality museum have in preserving the ‘detritus’ of its inhabitants? At what point should a personality museum cease to collect and conserve the remnants of the life of its previous inhabitant? How many mundane objects from this individual’s life are enough? How much access should the visitor have to the inhabitant’s personal space? What is the mythology that surrounds the space? For instance, in the Freud Museum London the couch is there, in its place, and one is imaginatively encouraged to lie down on it and start talking. The psychoanalyst’s spectacles remain on his desk, as though he has just walked out of the room and will return any minute now. A cigar in an ashtray is still on the landing, as if he left it like that a moment ago, or even decades ago. The impetus is the same. The museum preserves all of its inhabitant’s detritus – big and small – in order to provide its visi‑ tors with an aura surrounding the objects and a mystification of the inhabitant’s personal life and work. We are granted privilege and access to something that is private. These various practices, and the narratives that they produce, constitute the personality museum’s sense of itself. That is why the staging of the arte‑ facts often remains intact throughout the museum’s life; would a museum ever have the courage to change any of them? Brisley’s intervention asked many serious questions of these practices and their impact, even if it did not answer them: what ordure remains at the end of a life, how much of it do we need to collect and keep, and for what purpose? Ultimately, the site-responsive nature of Brisley’s The Collection of Ordure was productive because the installation encroached upon the value of Freud’s collection of antiquities and the ideas it engendered, as well as meddling with the Freud Museum’s own narratives. The intervention also reminded us that the practice of psychoanalysis is based on the excavation of our cultural and personal excrement, thereby recognizing that the dung heap of our psyche is the basis of our subjectivity, and its interpretation is the work of psychoanalysis. Value is not measured by capital, an archaeologic al impul se  91

the intervention said, but through well-being, wherein the useless and valueless become vital and valuable. Eight years earlier, Susan Hiller’s intervention At the Freud Museum offered a set of related questions. The site-responsive work that Hiller’s installation accomplished was in interrogating the Freud Museum and Freud’s collection by asking both personal and epistemological questions. When did Freud begin collecting antiquities? What type of a collector was he? How did he display his collection? What is the relationship between these objects that manifest the past and Freud’s interest in archaeology as a practice that excavates personal history? What can archaeology offer psychoanalysis and what are the limits of this relationship? And it is here, with this final question, that the slippage takes place from an archaeology of objects to the metaphoric impulse within psychoanalysis. What begins as an archaeology ends in a not-archaeology, a challenge to what archaeology can offer artistic practice and psychoanalysis. Hiller’s intervention prompted these inquiries through the artistic methodology she employed, its reli‑ ance on archaeology, and in its rendering of artistic interpretation susan hiller, at the freud museum, freud museum london, 1994

92  inside the freud museums

as an open-ended, translative process that is analogous to the work of psychoanalysis beyond archaeology. At the Freud Museum consisted of 22 archaeological boxes also made up of seemingly worthless and meaningless objects and frag‑ ments – discards, rubbish, fakes and ruins. The boxes contained objects such as pebbles from a cave at the bottom of the Mani peninsula in Greece where Aeneas is said to have entered the Underworld, a photocopy of a Classic Mayan calendar, a replica of a magic lantern, a copy of an illustration of the cave paintings from Uluru Australia, and a translation of the introduction to the book Jüdische Geschichte und Literatur in vergleichenden Zeitafeln ( Jewish History and Literature in Comparative Tables), which was published in Frankfurt in 1935 and made the grave and tragic mistake of claiming the Führer as a guide for Jewish life. With resonances of human origins, whether mythological, geological, historical or from popular culture, the items also reflected moments of political turmoil and historical crises. Hiller accrued these objects seren‑ dipitously during her travels throughout Europe, North and South America, and Australasia. Although found through happenstance, they are not just any object or any reproduction without meaning or value. Hiller has stated that they were chosen because they carried with them an ‘aura of memory’ that ‘hinted at meaning something’.37 The prescient and distinctive nature of the objects was meant to appeal to our need to excavate, interpret and under‑ stand the past within the present. For a time, these objects sat in the artist’s studio without further purpose. Then, in 1991, Hiller began to sort, clean and display specific items using archaeological methods and placing them within the boxes used by this discipline. Processed and arranged in a typical archaeological fashion, each artefact box included three elements: a word (title), a thing or object and a representation (image, text or chart). These practices of notation and display mimicked both the traditional logic of a museum’s collection and the ways in which that collection is classified, conserved, displayed and valued by the institution. At the same time, the an archaeologic al impul se  93

individual boxes functioned rather differently from the practices undertaken by a museum because the various objects in each box were curated through a series of ‘personal associations’ rather than any overarching narrative structure.38 The first 22 of these boxes were installed in the Freud Museum. Hiller has suggested that the ‘aura’ the objects asserted was partially coincident with the sites in which they were found and their histories, and partially activated by the context of the Freud Museum. Each box formed a ‘mini-installation’ within the larger installation, but a particular interpretation of each box or an object was not encouraged. Rather, the various objects within the installation worked with and against one another, diffusing instead of fostering interpretation. This resulted in an epistemological ripple: the ‘objects embody meanings’ and worked together to both contextualize and open up the potential meanings and narratives associated within each mini-installation, and between various boxes in the larger work.39 Initially, having At the Freud Museum inside 20 Maresfield Gar‑ dens invoked Freud’s own practices as a collector and curator. As I have noted, Freud first mentioned purchasing copies of Florentine statues in his letter to Fliess as a comfort after his father’s death. The next time Freud referred to an acquisition of antiquities – rather than replicas – was in a postcard to his wife Martha in 1897, sent while he was travelling in Bolsena. It is quite likely that Freud was speaking of an Etruscan statuette. Then, on 20 August 1898, while taking a trip in Innsbruck, Freud wrote to Fliess saying that his latest purchase was a Roman statuette of ‘an old child’.40 From this point onwards, Freud’s collection grew rapidly as he procured objects during his travels across Europe, acquiring them by befriending various dealers in Vienna,41 Berlin, Paris and Rome, and receiving them as gifts from his family, friends and colleagues. Often seeking advice and authentication from friends and experts in the field, Freud made many well-considered decisions.42 He also bought a few fakes, a few reproductions, and some broken and damaged pieces, simply because he wanted to have the objects near him. Freud often sold objects from his collection when he tired of 94  inside the freud museums

them or required funds to obtain other pieces, and he delighted in gifting his antiquities to those close to him. Hiller’s archaeological method of arranging and displaying an object or thing alongside a representation such as an image, text or chart and labelling it with a title raised questions about Freud’s own curatorial strategies. We know that Freud moved the objects around his study and consulting room, making new arrangements of them. In effect, as H.D. noted, he ‘curate[d]’ them.43 Art historian and curator Jon Wood suggests that ‘a number of curatorial tenden‑ cies can be discerned’ in the arrangement of objects on Freud’s desk. With them placed in rows facing him, the combination of scales in the statuettes and the use of pedestals turn some into ‘miniature monuments’, resulting in ‘a contradictory spatial and temporal experience of nearness and distance, small-scale and monumental’. In addition, there is an ‘active aesthetic’ at work in Freud’s display due to the varying heights, materials and finishes of the objects. The ‘range of times, places and cultures’ within the collection of antiquities on Freud’s desk results in a ‘mini, desk-bound museum without walls’.44 Freud’s mini, desk-bound museum situated within his larger collection – one that Forrester has called ‘a museum within a museum’ – was echoed by Hiller’s mini-installations within a larger intervention. The investment Hiller had in archaeology as a method and interpretative mode in At the Freud Museum was crucial in activat‑ ing a significant aspect of its site-responsivity. The intervention precipitated a reflection on Freud’s own profound interests in archaeology as a practice and as a metaphor for psychoanalysis. The importance of Hiller’s show was to demonstrate the close connection and the blurred boundaries between Freud’s antiquities as a material archaeological collection and his use of archaeology as a metaphor for psychoanalysis. We have already seen how the first was activated by Hiller’s installation. As for the second, it is useful to begin with Freud’s interest in archaeology. A product of his time, Freud was attracted to archaeology in part due to its popularity in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. an archaeologic al impul se  95

Both archaeology and psychoanalysis emerged as fields of knowl‑ edge and practice during this time, and each did so with equal amounts of fanfare and infamy.45 For Freud, both the popularity of archaeology as a mode of encountering the past and the use of the archaeological metaphor were meant to legitimize the scientific ambitions he had for psychoanalysis as a practice and as a way of understanding the formation of the human subject. The use of archaeology was to bring popularity and ‘respect‑ ability’ to psychoanalysis.46 Freud was knowledgeable about the contemporary world of archaeology – from Giuseppe Fiorelli’s excavation of Pompeii to Heinrich Schliemann’s Troy, to Arthur Evans’s exploration and excavation of Knossos, along with their accompanying controversies, to George Herbert Carnarvon and Howard Carter’s discovery of Tutankhamen’s tomb, to Leonard Woolley’s excavations of Sumerian Ur. He hoped that by using archaeology as a metaphor within his work, the sense of archaeol‑ ogy’s innovation, popularity and scientific judgement would impact positively upon psychoanalytic theory and practice.47 Freud was so proud of his knowledge of archaeology and its embodiment in his antiquities that on 7 February 1931 he wrote a letter to his friend the novelist, playwright, journalist and biographer Stefan Zweig in which he made it clear that he felt slighted by Zweig’s recent essay on the analyst in which there was no mention of his collection: ‘I have made many sacrifices for my collection of Greek, Roman, and Egyptian antiquities, and actually have read more archaeology than psychology.’48 Perhaps it was an exaggeration to say that he had read more archaeology than psychology, but Freud certainly had a serious and enduring interest in archaeology as a practice and as a metaphor for psycho‑ analysis and the formation of the human subject.49 As Forrester puts it, Freud had a ‘desire to be an archaeologist of the mind’.50 But by 1937, near the end of Freud’s life, the usefulness of the archaeological metaphor had reached its limit. For Freud it was now the psychoanalyst – not the archaeologist – who was able to achieve impressive goals in his work, objectives that were 9 6  inside the freud museums

impossible to achieve by the archaeologist.51 These achievements were the result of the psychoanalyst having, as Freud explained, ‘more material at his command to assist him, since what he is dealing with is not something destroyed but something that is still alive’.52 This living material was vital to Freud’s understanding of psychoanalysis. For Freud, the work of psychoanalysis was to slowly and carefully uncover and ‘translate’ the still living topological traces of fragmented memory or ‘memory images’ within the subject’s memory ‘landscape’.53 The ‘translation’ of this memory landscape is crucial to psychoanalysis. As Freud explained and emphasized, memory traces have undergone ‘from time to time a rearrangement in accordance with fresh circumstances – to a retranscription’. This means that they are in a constant process of reconfiguration. If a later retranscription does not exist, the earlier trace remains and becomes an ‘anachronism’ – what Freud called being in the ‘presence of “survivals”’. This is clearly a very dynamic understanding of the mind.54 Crucially, this also meant that the purpose of psychoanalysis was opposed to that of archaeology. Whereas archaeology endeavoured to hold still the excavated fragments so as to configure a total knowledge of the past, psychoanalysis recognized this impossibility. This is why art historian Whitney Davis has called psychoanalysis a ‘not-archaeology’.55 Psychoanalysis is a process of translating, deciphering and piecing together the ever-changing fragments and images from our past. In psychoanalysis we undertake this archaeological labour knowing that the process will never offer us a totality of any kind; nor would we aspire to it. Here, again, Hiller’s intervention echoes Freud’s ultimate dis‑ placement of archaeology. It invokes the need to translate what we find in the curious boxes that Hiller has made, while also being confronted by an ambivalence that makes this process impossible. There was no key to interpreting the mini-installations because each was as unique as the visitor who viewed it; nor was there a conclusive reading of the installation as a whole. One of the best examples of this was the way in which Hiller dealt with the titles an archaeologic al impul se  97

susan hiller, nama-ma  /  mother, detail of at the freud museum, freud museum london, 1994

for each of the boxes. Every mini-installation included a label with a word and its translation. There were designations in German, Hebrew, classical Greek, Latin, German and French. The first box’s title was ‘Nama-ma / mother’. The first word was in an aboriginal language that the artist cannot speak or read, as is probably the case with most of its viewers. Even if the primary titular word for a box was in English, there was a form of translation that followed. This use of translation as a method pointed to the multiple mean‑ ings of words, and opened up a chain of ideas related to cultural and linguistic difference, untranslatability and ambivalence as key concepts within the work and within psychoanalysis.56 98  inside the freud museums

Perhaps in the end Hiller’s At the Freud Museum, like psycho‑ analysis, was a ‘not-archaeology’. Although it used archaeology as a method, the intervention was never meant to have a singular or total reading attributed to its parts or the work as a whole. Like Freud’s understanding of psychoanalytic practice, as a deeply historical and yet contemporary form of anti-narrative, meaning in Hiller’s At the Freud Museum was also multiple, polyvalent and open. The objects, images and titles of the boxes were a means of opening up interpretation, which then released further analyses and narratives between the boxes. As in psychoanalysis, the aim was not to discover a single narrative or meaning. Interpretation was dependent on the viewer and, in this instance, on the site. The triangulation of artwork, site and individual visitor ensured that there was a changing interpretative field within which Hiller’s installation functioned. The diverse narratives formed out of each box were shaped and informed by the artist and the viewer, as well as their relationship to psychoanalysis and the Freud Museum. It is worthwhile to point out that site-responsive artworks foster a form of translation as interpretation that is distinctly not-archeological. With each new rearrangement in fresh circumstances (site), each context provides a retranscription of meaning, often while holding a previous interpretation in place. Hiller’s At the Freud Museum as an artwork has had several rearrangments and retranscriptions. Once it left the Freud Museum, it became an artist’s book After the Freud Museum (1995), and later 28 boxes were added to become From the Freud Museum (1991–97), now owned by Tate Modern. And yet, like the anachronism that Freud speaks of, each of its subsequent incarnations resonates with its beginning inside the Freud Museum. Hiller has noted that this openness in the work has meant that at times she ‘remains the outsider’ of At the Freud Museum; at times so did the viewer; while at other times we found ourselves inside its complexity.57 The curators – Hiller, Brisley and Freud – found, collected, organized, conserved and chose what was included in their col‑ lection; a collection that was once private and became public. an archaeologic al impul se  99

Brisley’s Collection offered us the by-products of human life, thereby turning ordure into something vital. Hiller’s installation was an index of historical and cultural beginnings and crises as embodied in objects that are no longer of any seeming use or value. Andy Hope 1930’s exhibition introduced the way in which we honour our present-day demi-gods – superheroes – as a form of religion. As for Freud, it is helpful to turn once again to Adam Phillips, specifically, when he informs us that through the analyst’s collec‑ tion and work ‘[t]he Enlightenment Freud wants to tell us what we have in common; [but] the post-Freudian Freud, his collaborative antagonist, is the connoisseur of anomalies.’58 In Andy Hope 1930 at the Freud the common and yet still curious collection of super‑ heroes from the artist’s childhood brought to mind the popular and mass culture of one’s own childhood and often forgotten past. While Brisley’s collection of ordure was shown to be both banal and common within our unconscious life, and although a seeming anomaly within the art market, it too was appropriated. For Hiller, nothing but the structure of each box was consistent; all they contained were serendipitous objects that later, through an archaeological method, came to have meaning. In light of these interventions, and Phillips’s provocation, perhaps Freud’s collection may be understood as, on the one hand, an archive of our com‑ monalities discovered through Western culture’s celebration (and often through its colonization) of the ancient world’s achievements that, buried and revealed, enabled Freud to understand the human subject and the practice of psychoanalysis.59 On the other hand, the collection is also a compilation of ‘anomalies’ that, like Hiller’s work, did not provide us with a linear teleology of cultural and historical progression.60 Neither did Brisley’s. Neither did Andy Hope 1930’s. Neither does Freud’s. As art historian Jack J. Spector notes, The guiding principle by which Freud put his collection together was personal taste rather than any systematic interest in the objects. This becomes clear not only from the almost random heaps of objects, but from the surprising gaps and 10 0  inside the freud museums

jumps from period to period and culture to culture; indeed, one’s first impression is that these objects have in common only their apparent great age and the remoteness of their origins. … While Freud knew the value and background of most of his pieces, he was not driven by a narrow interest in one area, nor by the expert’s compulsion to gather all of the types in his special field.61

Freud’s unclassified, spontaneous, non-serial mode of collecting as a practice and process was personally motivated, his taste was eclectic and his enjoyment was private. Inside the Freud Museum, Andy Hope 1930, Brisley and Hiller shared this motiva‑ tion; their own mini-museums were seen to be the results of the collector’s desire. Each of these three collections functioned as a museum of curiosities, rather than a ‘proper’ collection. Each materially manifested the collector’s individual understanding of culture and collecting.62 Perhaps Baudrillard was correct when he informed us that ‘it is invariably oneself that one collects’.63 Like the psychoanalytic process itself, Freud’s collecting habit was not about conferring authenticity upon the past, but understanding our changing self in the present. A Metaphoric Impulse: An Archaeology of the Mind, the Case of Gradiva

The worksite of archaeologists is made up of material culture.64 For Freud, the materiality of the psyche was his ‘worksite’, and archaeology was the metaphor through which he understood its formation and its excavation within psychoanalysis.65 H.D. articu‑ lates this beautifully, when she states that the psyche’s constitution is formed from the materiality of thoughts, fragmented memories, ideas and dreams: Thoughts were things, to be collected, collated, analysed, shelved or resolved. Fragmentary ideas, apparently unrelated, were often found to be part of a special layer or stratum of thought and memory, therefore to belong together; these were sometimes skilfully pieced together like the exquisite Greek tear-jars and iridescent glass bowls and vases that gleamed in an archaeologic al impul se  101

the dusk from the shelves of the cabinet that faced me where I stretched, propped up on the couch in the room in Berggasse 19, Wien IX. The dead were living in so far as they lived in memory or were recalled in dream.66

Brisley’s The Collection of Ordure and Hiller’s At the Freud Museum have shown how these are embodied in Freud’s collection, and come to life in our excavation of them through analytic work. The analyst and analysand labour together to dig up, decipher and acknowledge the living dead in the psyche. William Cob‑ bing’s Gradiva Project, curated by art historian and theorist Jon Bird and held at the Freud Museum London in 2008, presented us with a series of perceptive, resistant and often humorous works of art that interrogated and extended Freud’s understanding of archae­ology as a metaphor for psychoanalysis.67 In a series of sculpture, installation and video works, Cobbing excavated that which is, as Freud noted, ‘buried beneath the rubble of time’.68 Within this show, the most appropriate artworks for my argu‑ ment are Excavation and Gradiva. Excavation (2007) was installed in Freud’s consulting room and study. In the video a figure was chipping away with hammer and chisel, as an archaeologist might do, a mound of concrete that surrounded his head. In the silence of this hallowed space, the tap, tap, tap of the chisel, followed by sounds of concrete pieces dislodging and dropping to the ground, resonated well. The weight and burden of the concrete enclosure diminished as escape drew nearer. And yet, denied the desired endpoint, the subject’s freedom from the concrete surround was not realized because the video was looped: we were sent back to the beginning, where the incomplete process repeated itself. Aghast at the repetition, but also relieved by the artwork’s humour in its reiteration of an absurd situation, this video demonstrated the interminableness of what was taking place. Situated in Freud’s consulting room, this site-responsive artwork invoked the archaeological experience of analysis. The cement encasing became a literal manifestation of the artist’s unconscious. The dreams, memories and desires buried 102  inside the freud museums

william cobbing, excavation (2007), gradiva project, freud museum london, 2008

deep in the mind form a bundle of cement that needs to be worked through. On display was the process by which ‘the psychoanalyst like the archaeologist in his excavations must uncover layer after layer of the patient’s psyche before coming to the deepest most valuable treasures.’ With humour the video acknowledged what can be gained from being in analysis and working through this process of excavation. Having said that, the fatalistic aspect of the video referenced the more pessimistic side of Freud’s concerns late in life about analysis. In his 1937 essay ‘Analysis Terminable and Interminable’ Freud makes clear that it is possible for analysis to be interminable. Although an actual psychoanalysis lasted for a relatively short time during Freud’s life, today a psychoanalysis may never end, no cure may take place, and the process may continue for a lifetime, and it is this possibility that Feud presci‑ ently acknowledged. Perhaps Cobbing’s film also points to such an archaeologic al impul se  103

a critique of psychoanalysis. In the essay, Freud considers the interminability of psychoanalysis to be related to the fact that even though we may consider a psychoanalysis to be finished when the patient stops seeing his or her analyst (and the narrative of Excavation is over), the process is never complete (the narrative is looped and continues playing); we take and use what we have learnt, and are interminably in a form of analysis.69 Having Excavation within the Freud Museum, and particularly within Freud’s consulting room, the artwork invited us to think about the work of psychoanalysis as an archaeology of the mind. In manifesting this process, Excavation invoked the history of Freud’s use of the archaeological impulse within psychoanalysis as a metaphor for its therapeutic practice. As early as 1893 in Studies on Hysteria, written together with the physician and neurophysiologist Josef Breuer, Freud proposed that by the combining of free associa‑ tion, psychoanalytic practice and the cathartic method they had arrived at a procedure which I later developed into a regular method and employed deliberately. This procedure was one of clearing away the pathogenic psychical material layer by layer, and we liked to compare it with the technique of excavating a buried city.70

In 1896, in ‘The Aetiology of Hysteria’, Freud described in detail the worksite of the archaeologist, the tools required and the process of excavation that can lead to the rebuilding of a site as analogous to that of the psychoanalyst. Like repressed memo‑ ries, knowledge of the past in an archaeological dig surfaced in a ‘reversed chronological order’.71 A few years later, on 21 December 1899, in a letter to Fliess, Freud expressed how the process of self-analysis was comparable to one of the major archaeological excavations of the nineteenth century: ‘I hardly believe it yet. It is as if Schliemann had again dug up Troy, which had hitherto been deemed a fable.’72 This particular instance of psychoanalytic ‘digging up’ resulted in Freud’s writing and publication of The Interpretation of Dreams. 104  inside the freud museums

Six years later, in Freud’s introduction to his 1905 case history of patient Dora, whom he saw at the end of 1899, at the same time as he was writing The Interpretation of Dreams, he extended the metaphor of archaeology, giving us more information about the constitution of the psychic material excavated and the importance of analytic interpretation even if it led somewhere unexpected. Freud wrote: I had no choice but to follow the example of those discoverers whose good fortune it is to bring to the light of day after their long burial the priceless though mutilated relics of antiquity. I have restored what is missing, taking the best models known to me from other analyses; but, like a conscientious archaeologist, I have not omitted to mention in each case where the authentic parts end and my constructions begin.73

The narrative ‘constructions’ required to make sense of the fragments in an archaeological dig are approved of by Freud, as long as they are duly and ethically noted. In 1907 Freud published Delusions and Dreams in Jensen’s ‘Gradiva’, a close reading of the 1903 novella. This was his fullest analysis of the connections between archaeology, psychoanalysis and the construction of subjectivity. While Freud continued to use the archaeological metaphor throughout his career, by 1929/30 he began highlighting the differences rather than the similarities between psychoanalysis and archaeology. In Civilization and Its Discontents Freud states that ‘[t]here is clearly no point in spinning our phantasy [of the archaeological metaphor] further, for it leads to things that are unimaginable and even absurd.’74 By 1937 the metaphor had reached its limits so that for Freud it was now the psychoanalyst – not the archaeologist – who was able to achieve impressive goals in his work, goals that were unavailable to the archaeologist. As discussed in relation to Hiller’s intervention, Freud’s problem with archaeology was that it did not deal with living matter, whereas psychoanalysis did; and that archaeology’s aim of a total interpretation of the past was opposed to psychoanalysis’s interest in an ever-changing understanding an archaeologic al impul se  105

of the past within the present. In the materialized nowhere of Excavation’s cement enclosure, with its indistinguishable features all bound together, memories and desires were excavated and provocatively chipped off, considered and shed. Like an analytic session, wherein fragments of these residues form the living matter of interpretation, Excavation revealed the never-ending process of breaking up and working through personal fragments. A second focus of Cobbing’s show was Gradiva: arguably, the most famous literary, archaeological and visual constellation in psychoanalysis. ‘Gradiva’ refers to a group of representations: the early-twentieth-century novel by Wilhelm Jensen that Freud read, the comprehensive analysis Freud made of it, and the multiple reproductions that the psychoanalyst purchased of the Roman bas-relief of a young woman, known as Gradiva, walking. Freud hung one of these reproductions at the foot of his analytic couch in Berggasse. Cobbing, following Freud, began with the Roman bas-relief of Gradiva and Wilhelm Jensen’s Gothic novel, and then added to them Freud’s close reading of the story. In 1903 Jensen published a novella entitled Gradiva: A Pompeian Fantasy. 75 The story focuses on the misrecognitions, delusions, dreams and misplaced love that a young German archaeologist, Norbert Hanold, has for a classical Roman bas-relief of Gradiva that represents a young woman gently pulling up her flowing gown, thereby exposing her delicate feet ‘stepping along brilliantly’. Travelling to Rome and then Pompeii, Norbert becomes extremely ill. He is brought back to health by talking to a young woman, whom he comes to recognize as his long-lost childhood sweetheart Zoë Bertgang (zoē meaning ‘life’ in Greek, while Bertgang and Gradiva both translate into ‘someone who steps along brilliantly or splendidly’) and to whom he becomes wed. The Gradiva story offered Freud much valuable material for interpretation. In 1906 he used the archaeological method in order to analyse the fictional characters as though they were real patients, and in 1907 he published his work under the title Delusions and Dreams in Jensen’s ‘Gradiva’.76 In this case history of a fictional 10 6  inside the freud museums

character, Freud discusses the formation of subjectivity and repres‑ sion, and introduces the idea of transference-love (the ‘love’ that a patient projects onto the analyst during a psychoanalysis, in this case Norbert’s love for Zoë).77 My interest in Gradiva is not so much with the story, although it is inevitably primary, but with an excavation of its afterlife in sculptural form. More specifically, I am intrigued by the intensities that resonate through its replica‑ tion and the part that peripheral vision plays in its installation in Norbert Hanold’s home in Germany, Freud’s homes in Vienna and London, and in the various versions of it that Cobbing, a century later, produced throughout Europe in his Gradiva Project, one of which was installed permanently at the Freud Museum. On 24 September 1907, on a solitary visit to Rome, Freud wrote in a postcard to his wife: ‘Just imagine my joy when, after being alone so long, I saw today in the Vatican a dear familiar face! The recognition was one-sided, however, for it was the “Gradiva,” high up on a wall!’78 As it was placed up high, Freud probably saw only a part of it, peripherally. Upon his arrival back home in Vienna, the psychoanalyst had several copies of it made, which, as he often did with his antiquities, he offered as gifts to his colleagues. This particular gift was a sign of close friendship between the men. One of these casts of the bas-relief is now permanently on display in Maresfield Gardens. It hangs on the small side wall we encounter as we enter into Freud’s consulting room and study. The relief is placed so as to engage only our peripheral vision when entering the room. To view it head-on, we must turn around, and take a step back; we need to physically displace our body to view it properly. In Berggasse 19 the Gradiva relief was also hung in an awkward position in Freud’s consulting room. It was placed at the foot of the analytic couch, on the wall adjacent to it. The analyst would have been able to see it directly while sitting at his desk, but only peripherally while seated behind and at the head of his patient’s couch during a psychoanalytic session. The analysand, while lying on the couch, could have glanced at the sculpted young woman walking towards them, but only peripherally. To do so would also an archaeologic al impul se  107

gradiva in freud’s consulting room at berggasse 19, 1938

mean that the analysand would have to assume an awkward pose: looking up above her feet and to the left. Such odd positioning would only allow for a partial sight of the raised and blurred edges outlining Gradiva’s body. Like its display in the Vatican, the Gradiva in Freud’s Vienna and London consulting rooms could only be viewed from an awkward angle, through one’s peripheral vision, and even then the encounter was only to be ‘one-sided’: Gradiva does not look back; as much as Freud may have wished, there is no transference-love to be found. For his Gradiva Project, Cobbing made copies of Gradiva, in the form of manhole covers, and installed them in Rome, Pompeii, and finally in London at the Freud Museum and Camden Arts Centre.79 While working in Rome, Cobbing was made aware of Mussolini’s propaganda machine that ensured Rome was covered with signs of his dictatorial power, including installing Era Fascism (E.F.) manhole covers throughout the city. With this history in mind, Cobbing temporarily substituted one of his artworks for one 108  inside the freud museums

william cobbing, gradiva (2008), gradiva project, freud museum london, 2008

of Mussolini’s SPQR (Senate Poplus Que Romanus [The Senate and People of Rome]) manhole covers. Cobbing also chose to replace a manhole cover on the via Gramsci, a street named after the Marxist theoretician and politician Antonio Gramsci, who was imprisoned for many years by Mussolini’s Fascist regime. Given this connection, one cannot help but be reminded of Freud’s need to escape the Nazis in Vienna. In Pompeii, another manhole cover was replaced; this time it spoke to the ruins that stand in the city as a marker of its history and its prominence as an archaeological site. Back in London, on the lower ground of Camden Arts Centre’s main entrance, copies of André Masson’s painting of Gradiva and his Acéphale drawing (both from 1936) refer to the Surrealists’ commitment and deployment of psychoanalysis in their practice. Finally, to one side of Maresfield Gardens’ front entrance another Gradiva manhole cover can be found. But it too is peripheral: it is placed close to the front entrance but off to one side. Offering us a humorous literal illustration of the archaeological metaphor, an archaeologic al impul se  109

a ‘portal’ between an underground drainage system (the un‑ conscious) and the ground upon which we walk (the conscious), Cobbing’s Gradiva playfully reminds us of the centrality of the archaeological metaphor within psychoanalysis. This reading of the Gradiva Project is, of course, too direct, too literal. It misses the encounter with the peripheral, which is what Gradiva, in all of her guises, seems to elicit in us. There is something tantalizing about the way in which we encounter Gradiva indirectly. For instance, Norbert is first peripherally drawn to Gradiva, and then slowly comes to see her and himself clearly and directly: the sculpture, the young woman’s gait, Pompeii, his childhood and his friend, and finally the young woman, Zoë Bertgang. There is also the peripheral display of Gradiva in the Vienna and London consulting rooms, and there is Cobbing’s manhole cover outside of Maresfield Gardens. In the same way that Gradiva’s sprightly and brilliant gait is the peripheral symptom through which key emotional, psychological and physical memo‑ ries and desires are brought to the fore in Freud’s analysis of the Jensen story, the bas-relief in all of its manifestations hangs or sits to one side of our vision: as patient or visitor to the Museum, to Freud’s consulting room and to Cobbing’s exhibition. Engaging our peripheral vision, Gradiva in all of her formulations is constantly distracting us, while also engaging us, and encouraging us to continue speaking during our psychoanalysis. Like its awkward position, psychoanalytic treatment similarly induces the emergence of peripheral thoughts and fragments. We are meant to proceed with free association at all times, to enable the peripheral that both distracts us from ourselves and tells us a great deal about ourselves to rise up and escape without censorship. We are meant to do so continuously until we are able to face head-on that which is buried. As one of the main material representatives of the archaeological impulse within psychoanalysis, as an object within Freud’s collection, and as a manifestation of the archaeological metaphor, Gradiva, in all of her guises, hovers one-sided, and impresses herself upon us, brilliantly. 110  inside the freud museums

A Phenomenological Impulse: An Ontology of Objects

Smoking and collecting: these two lifelong habits inspired, consoled and enabled Freud in his work and his everyday life.80 Smoking was a pleasure he took in his study, consulting room and in the family’s private quarters. The antiquities, on the other hand, remained almost solely within the professional spaces of his psychoanalytic practice, whether at home or while the family was on holiday and Freud continued with his work – with one exception. Ernest Jones, neurologist, psychoanalyst and Freud’s official biographer, informs us that at times Freud would bring new objects such as a statuette to the family dinner table. Freud would place the new addition in front of him while he dined, and then return it to the desk in his study or to another part of his collection in the consulting room.81 While surrounded by so many antiquities, Freud felt he had to endure ‘the most uncomfortable positions’ in order to move his ob‑ jects from one place to another. Given this situation, it is sur­prising that Freud rarely broke any of them. Freud offered a medical reason for his agility. Claiming that, although he was ‘not par‑ ticularly dextrous’, the ‘anatomical integrity of his nerve–muscle apparatus’ meant that there were ‘clearly no grounds’ for ‘clumsy movements’.82 In the three instances of breakage – two statuettes and one marble ink holder – that took place before 1901, when he published The Psychopathology of Everyday Life, Freud informs us that the bungling was due to an underlying ‘unconscious purpose’ connected to the present. When Freud delved into this ‘purpose’, it led him to a ‘deep prehistory’ of himself by way of archaeological examination. Freud related the uncontrolled movements and the ‘bungled actions’ to specific unresolved aspects of his daily life. Unfortunately, it took the breaking of these three objects for him to garner an insight into how to use them therapeutically: the acci‑ dents revealed to him the relationship between present-day actions and unresolved unconscious conflicts. Freud used the incidents of the broken objects as a means of understanding and learning something about the force of the unconscious within everyday life. an archaeologic al impul se  111

freud’s study at berggasse 19, 1938

These opening remarks are by way of an introduction to Freud’s personal habits with regard to his antiquities. By taking his antiq‑ uities on vacation with him to inspire his thinking and writing, spending time with new acquisitions, and using their untimely breakage as incidents from which he could learn more about his archaeological method, Freud put his antiquities to personal ontological use. By this, I mean that Freud’s antiquities are objects through which he, and those of us interested in psychoanalysis, can ‘think’ in order to comprehend ‘subject–object relations’.83 In order to develop this idea, I turn to an incident with one of Freud’s patients, H.D., and the way in which her recollection of this encounter, combined with one of Oliver Clegg’s sculptural installations in his exhibition Night Move (2008) curated by James Putnam, enables me to further analyse Freud’s use of objects within his therapeutic practice and the solitary practices of writing and thinking. 112  inside the freud museums

Not solely consigned to his own pleasure and self-analysis, Freud, at times, also used the antiquities to treat his patients. In one of H.D.’s references to Freud’s therapeutic uses of objects during her psychoanalysis, she wrote: I did not always know if the Professor’s excursions with me into the other room were by way of distraction, actual social occasions, or part of his plan. Did he want to find out how I would react to certain ideas embodied in these little statues, or how deeply I felt the dynamic idea still implicit in them despite the fact that ages or aeons of time had flown over many of them? Or did he mean simply to imply that he wanted to share his treasures with me, those tangible shapes before us that yet suggested the intangible and vastly more fascinating treasures of his own mind? Whatever his idea, I wanted then, as at other times, to meet him half-way; I wanted to return, in as unobtrusive a way as possible, the courtesy that was so subtly offered me. If it was a game, a sort of roundabout way of finding out something that perhaps my unconscious guard or censor was anxious to keep from him, well, I would do my best to play this game, this guessing game – or whatever it was. … It was a smallish object, judging by the place left empty, my end of the semicircle, made by the symmetrical arrangement of the Gods (or the Goods) on this table. ‘This is my favourite,’ he said. He held the object toward me. I took it in my hand. It was a little bronze statue, helmeted, clothed to the foot in carved robe with the upper incised chiton or peplum. One hand was extended as if holding a staff or rod. ‘She is perfect,’ he said, ‘only she has lost her spear.’ I did not say anything. He knew I loved Greece.84

bronze figure of athena

H.D.’s insightful summary of this incident in which Freud used one of his antiquities during her treatment, along with Clegg’s Everywhere I go I find a poet has been there before me (Freud Chess Set) (2008), the main installation in Clegg’s show, open up Freud’s ontological use of antiquities in important ways. For Clegg, psychoanalysis might well be a game of chess.85 Set in a darkened room, and lit to create deep shadows and intrigue, the installa‑ tion was captivating. A replica of Freud’s desk and his unique anthropomorphic chair were accompanied by glass reproductions of 16 of Freud’s antiquities positioned on a chessboard as though in mid-game. The black pieces were ‘made to look, feel and weigh exactly like the originals, the white side as transparent echoes of the full-bodied casts’. Clegg chose the appropriate antiquity for each chess piece by considering its place and importance within Freud’s collection.86 With a single chair placed next to the table and chessboard, the game was set up for only one person to play, and this was to be Freud: this solo match was a ‘personification of the internal dialogue of Freud as he sits at his desk’.87 Freud was knowledgeable about chess. It was a popular pastime in Viennese coffee houses during Freud’s lifetime. The psycho‑ analyst played it regularly until the age of about 50, after which he preferred to put his concentration to use solely in his psycho‑ analytic work. Freud mentions chess in his writings twice. The earliest reference is in Studies on Hysteria where he makes an analogy between the zigzagging of the knight in chess and his understanding of the human mind. The second reference is in his 1913 essay ‘On Beginning the Treatment’, in which Freud opens up the text by describing how analysis is like ‘the noble game of chess’: only the openings and end-games admit an exhaustive systematic presentation, and that the infinite variety of moves which develop after the opening defy any such description. The rules which can be laid down for the practice of psycho-analytic treatment are subject to similar limitations.

Freud goes on to say that because of ‘the extraordinary diversity of the psychical constellations concerned, the plasticity of all 114  inside the freud museums

mental processes and the wealth of determining factors … any mechanization of the technique’ is difficult.88 Using chess as a metaphor, Freud informs us that a fixed understanding of psycho‑ analytic technique is problematic because in an actual treatment rules may be broken as each analysis is based on the specificities of an individual. Freud broke the psychoanalytic frame as soon as he took H.D. into ‘the other room’. Psychoanalysis functions in the same way as chess: both defy any exhaustive system of moves.89 By transforming Freud’s antiquities into chess pieces, Clegg’s installation brought out the singularity of the intellectual play that Freud understood to be the process of psychoanalysis: no two analyses are the same – like no two chess games. The tactility of Clegg’s artwork invoked the activities of handling and play within a chess game, and these in turn evoked Freud’s handling and play of antiquities during psychoanalytic treatment. H.D. clearly under‑ stood that in picking up the Athena and showing it to her, Freud was asking her to join in a game: it ‘was a game, a sort of roundabout way of finding out something that perhaps my unconscious guard or censor was anxious to keep from him, well, I would do my best to play this game, this guessing game – or whatever it was’. The objective of the game was to prompt the loosening up, excavation and interpretation of guarded or censored things within her un‑ conscious by using archaeological objects that manifested the past. The archaeological impulse in Freud’s use of his antiquities was apparent to H.D. Freud seemed to want to know how she ‘felt’ about the ‘dynamic idea still implicit’ in them ‘despite the ages or aeons of time [that] had flown over many of them’. The dynamic which H.D. was signalling is important because it demonstrated that the antiquities referred her to the remotest of past times, while also indicating that the past was to be found in the present, and that an archaeological excavation in the consulting room would bring that past to light. However, H.D. ‘did not always know if the Professor’s excursions with me into the other room were by way of distraction’. Were they meant to distract her from herself? Or displace her interest in the an archaeologic al impul se  115

‘intangible and vastly more fascinating treasures of his [Freud’s] mind’?90 Although H.D. was ambivalent about the function of Freud’s turn to his antiquities, she did feel their questioning gaze: the antiquities ‘stare and stare and seem to say, what has happened to you?’91 This question, like Freud’s choice of Athene to show H.D., provoked transference. At first, the perfect Athene, except without a spear, pleased H.D. The patient was brought into Freud’s world: she ‘wanted, then, as at other times, to meet him half-way’. She too loved Greece. They shared this, and the transference was positive. However, she did not reply to Freud’s comment. She remained silent. She resisted Freud’s provocation. She was momentarily con‑ fused. She asked herself whether Freud’s pointing out that Athene lacked a spear was meant to suggest that she too was castrated, or was Freud intimating that he was the one who was castrated? This moment of hesitation, resistance and silence on H.D.’s part was followed by a complex hostile negative transference.92 We know that in the end, after her analysis with Freud, H.D. was cured of her writer’s block, and was able to resume writing, productively so.93 Enabling H.D. to write was a positive end to her analysis with Freud. The statues’ ability to encourage thinking and writing was also a part of their use for Freud. Clegg considered the solo match he set up as a ‘personification of the internal dialogue of Freud as he sits at his desk’. Freud’s an‑ tiquities did indeed help him communicate, think and write. Their embodiment of the past, and their association with archaeology, made them a constant reminder of the archaeological impulses within psychoanalytic theory and practice. For instance, on 1 August 1899, while finishing the ‘dream book’ in the mountains near Berchtesgaden, Freud wrote to Fliess that the selection of statuettes that he had decided to bring with him during his summer holiday ‘take part in the work [of completing The Interpretation of Dreams] as paperweights for my manuscript’.94 They were useful company during the final stages of his most intense archaeological excavation and examination of his own mind. Never far away from him, whether at work in his 116  inside the freud museums

freud’s desk at the freud museum london

consulting room and study at Berggasse or while in his temporary workspace during his annual summer vacation, Freud was always in the company of his antiquities. As art historian Ellen Handler Spitz tells us, Intimately present in his [Freud’s] visual field on a daily basis and physically proximate, close enough to touch, these objects – statuettes, busts, vases, reliefs, tablets, receptacles – ever growing in number, formed, in the company of books and pictures, a thickly textured stage-set against which his patients’ narratives and his interpretations of them were played out. Seated in his consulting room, listening hour by hour, penning the theories that were to transform our self-understanding, Freud shared physical space and visual field with these carved, limned, and modelled objects; he worked, as it were, under their gaze.95

Although Freud rarely mentioned them as aids to his thinking, reading and writing practices, from the fragmentary information that we have we can piece together the following picture. We know from the Freud family’s housekeeper Paula Fichtl that Freud often greeted and touched his sculptures as he entered his professional an archaeologic al impul se  117

workspaces. He stroked the marble baboon, and acknowledged every morning the Chinese sage that sat on his desk.96 While seated on his chair at his desk, thinking, reading, writing, either in private or with friends and colleagues, the statues that surrounded him became meditative objects that enabled him to carry on with the task at hand.97 Hanns Sachs, Freud’s close friend, fellow psychoana‑ lyst and author of Freud, Master and Man, informs us that Freud had the habit of taking one or another piece of his collection from its place, and of examining it by sight and touch while he was talking. He never did this however when he was listening; then he sat still, his eyes looking inwards, only now and then he played with his ring. Neither the expression of his face nor a shift in his position gave the slightest sign of whether he was pleased or displeased by what he heard. His later comments left no doubt how attentively he had listened.98

By touching his antiquities while speaking, or while engaging in his solitary work, Freud’s mind was able to wander, to engage in a process of free association and to work through the issues on which he was deliberating at the time.99 The visual idea in Freud’s mind became embodied in words through this act of touching. For Spitz, following psychoanalyst Didier Anzieu, who wrote about Freud’s remarkable ability to translate from vision to writing, Freud’s sculptures became ‘vision’ aids for him while he was at work in his study.100 We know from H.D. that the ‘little statues and images helped stabilize the evanescent idea, or keep it from escaping altogether’.101 For Michael Molnar, ‘[t]hat row of antiquities in the foreground [on his desk] represents the passes from inspiration to inscription’.102 Ivan Ward, head of education at the Freud Museum London, has mentioned that the analyst was unable and unwilling to sit books on his desk because this space was dedicated to his preferred compatriots, the antiquities. Jon Wood has suggested that, placed in rows facing him, the statuettes formed both an ‘audience’ and a ‘wall’: ‘an attention-seeking and an attention-deflecting arrangement’, whereby the statues were both ‘competing amongst themselves’ and ‘protecting the sitter’.103 118  inside the freud museums

A Note on Forgetting

Freud introduced H.D. to his figurines of Osiris, the god of the afterlife, the underworld and the dead as his ‘answerers’, his inter‑ locutors while he worked.104 With his antiquities as interlocutors, and without his books, suggests Ivan Ward, ‘Freud escaped from the shadow of the (intellectual) fathers to whom he was indebted. He had, in effect, to deny them – to assimilate what he read and to make it part of himself before he could write it. To think it anew.’105 Perhaps the Osiris figurines – Freud’s answerers, which represent the god of the afterlife – also bring us back to the death of Freud’s father. Perhaps Freud used his objects to ‘think anew’ while seated at this desk, to think anew while engaging with his patients, to think anew in the company of his colleagues and friends, to think and work through the death of his father, and perhaps even to mourn with them – anew. By considering how a set of exhibitions held inside the Freud Museum responded to the objects displayed on Freud’s desk, throughout his study and consulting room, in this chapter I have demonstrated how, through an analysis of the material, metaphoric and phenomenological uses to which Freud put his objects, an archaeological impulse within psychoanalysis can be clearly es‑ tablished. The boundaries between the material, metaphoric and phenomenological modes within this impulse are blurry, and this attests to its complexity and the way in which each mode is formed and played out in psychoanalytic practice and theory. As a part of unravelling this complexity, I have shown the depth of each mode by considering the ways in which they are manifest in Freud’s collecting and curating of antiquities, in his understanding of the psychopathology of his everyday life, in his complex relationship to Judaism, in his writings on the formation and function of the human subject, and in their importance to his therapeutic practice, his writing practice and his thinking. Andy Hope 1930’s show connected Freud’s antiquities to the analyst’s childhood and his complex relationship to Judaism. Brisley and Hiller’s interventions asked some tough questions about the value of art, the purpose an archaeologic al impul se  119

of the personality museum and what psychoanalysis might look like once it has gone beyond the parameters of its archaeological metaphor and moved towards a not-archaeology. In light of this shift away from the usefulness of the archaeological metaphor, Cobbing’s exhibition worked with the interminability of psycho‑ analysis and the figure of Gradiva in order to show how the margins of an excavation are key to what is central in psychoanalysis: the unconscious peripheral fragments that emerge without our real‑ izing how important they are to our self-understanding. Finally, the antiquities that populated Freud’s consulting room and study were put to use as significant players within several of his practices. By way of Clegg’s installation and H.D.’s memoir, we were able to see how Freud put his antiquities to phenomenological use within his therapeutic practice by eliciting both positive and negative transfer‑ ence, as well as inspiring him in his writing and thinking practices. In the end, I would like to propose that Freud’s collecting habits, his views on archaeology as a psychoanalytic metaphor, and his use of antiquities within the consulting room all work towards the same psychoanalytic end: to ensure that memories are excavated and remembered so that we can understand them, and be relieved of them, in effect, so that we may ‘forget’ them. Like the process of psychoanalysis, the objects in Freud’s collection function as reminders of the past that in their existence enable us to forget it.106 Begun soon after the death of his father, carried on throughout his life, Freud’s entire practice of collecting was perhaps a form of self-analysis. Not the analysis of his dreams, memories and desires which took place as a result of his father’s death, but a different form of self-analysis. Perhaps as his answers beyond the grave, the objects and their collecting were the means by which Freud could remember, mourn and work through a task that can never be completed: a mourning of the ‘most important event, the most poignant loss, of a man’s life’, the death of his father.

120  inside the freud museums

3 On Dreaming and Travelling Through the  Unconscious

The interpretation of dreams is the royal road to a knowledge of the unconscious activities of the mind. Sigmund Freud1 Following Freud then, it may be said that the dream and art form a natural alliance, and that pictures dominate the grammar of the unconscious. Siri Hustvedt2 The Interpretation of Dreams and Travelling

Freud’s passion for collecting antiquities was matched by his desire for and dreams of travelling. Both offered him the real and imagined opportunity of visiting the ancient worlds of Mediter‑ ranean culture and the means of escaping from the pressures of daily life. Freud dreamed in his sleep and waking hours of visiting Rome and Athens. Eventually, Freud fulfilled his desire to travel to both of these ancient cities. His first visit to Rome was in 1901, and his only trip to Athens was in 1904. While travelling to Athens Freud noted that When first one catches sight of the sea, crosses the ocean and experiences as realities cities and lands which for so long had been distant, unattainable things of desire one feels oneself like a hero who has performed deeds of improbable greatness.3

Upon his arrival at the Acropolis, and after seeing the ruins of ancient Rome a few years earlier, Freud noted how surprised

he was by the reality of both. Writing in Tivoli on 8 September 1901, Freud recorded that ‘Everything is real, hill, olive grove, cypresses, deep blue sky, figs, peaches and dark brown people’. Interestingly, Freud’s dreams of travelling and then the reality of the sojourns functioned as breakthroughs in his work. For instance, Freud’s interpretation of his dreams and longing to travel played an important role in his self-analysis, which was documented in his book The Interpretation of Dreams. Here, the desire and dreams associated with these trips became for Freud ‘the royal road to a knowledge of the unconscious activities of the mind’. This reference to travel was not a casual metaphor. In fact, Freud relied on, interpreted and produced new knowledge out of the literal and metaphoric relationships between dreams and travelling: literally, as I have pointed out, Freud dreamed about his longing to travel; and, metaphorically, travelling was used as a means of understanding the formation and interpreta‑ tion of dreams. In a letter to his colleague Wilhelm Fliess, Freud wrote meta‑ phorically about the perambulatory structure of The Interpretation of Dreams. He stated: The whole thing is planned on the model of an imaginary walk. At the beginning, the dark forest of authors (who do not see the trees) are hopelessly lost on the wrong tracks. Then a concealed pass through which I lead the reader – my specimen dream with its peculiarities, details, indiscretions, bad jokes – and then suddenly the high ground and the view and the question: which way do you want to go now?4

Clearly, for Freud, the metaphor of travel was integral to the formation of his argument in the book. He began the book by recounting how the paths taken by his fellow authors who have interpreted dreams incorrectly were hopelessly lost on the wrong tracks. Freud then turned to his own dreams and put his ideas to work by taking his reader through ‘a concealed pass’ of interpreta‑ tion and analysis which led him to ask his reader, and his patients, whether they would take up the new road, the new interpretation 122  inside the freud museums

and follow him towards a cure. The interpretation of dreams in psychoanalytic theory and in practice (in his self-analysis and in the work he undertook with his patients) enabled Freud to under‑ stand something about the structure, function and meaning of the unconscious. This interpretative process yielded significant insights into the formation of the human subject and his or her memories, fantasies and fears. In this chapter I focus on three exhibitions that, once inside the Freud Museum and framed by its psychoanalytic context, raise essential features about dreams and their interpretation that are not always highlighted in the literature on Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams.5 The first is Sława Harasymowicz’s intervention that considered one of Freud’s most famous case histories, that of the Wolf Man, whose entire analysis revolved around a dream. In my consider‑ ation of various artistic and curatorial strategies employed in this exhibition, I propose that Freud’s understanding of dream-work (the formation and function of dreams within the unconscious, for instance through condensation or substitution) becomes material‑ ized. By opening up the dream-work, Harasymowicz’s artworks and exhibition actualized how the dream is always twofold. One part of it is visible and remembered; this is the ‘manifest dream’ (what it is that we actually dream). The other part is unknown in the first instance; Freud calls this a dream’s ‘latent content’ (what the dream refers to and means). When a dream is interpreted, its latent content and meaning are discovered. In manifesting the two parts of the dream, Harasymowicz’s show made apparent the way in which the dual nature of dreams is a form of shadowing, a haunting: what we dream is shadowed and haunted by what it means. The second exhibition I address is by artist John Goto, who pictured the dreams and fantasies of travel by the jazz singer Jelly Roll Morton. Through anachronistic and pro­chronistic temporal strategies that highlight a vital aspect of a dream’s temporality, Goto’s show proposed that time is not as it seems. tr avelling through the unconscious  123

The third show is the work of artist and writer Sharon Kivland, who photographed Freud’s dreams of travelling by following in his footsteps during his real and imagined journeys to Rome. Kivland also embarked on and photographed a set of viable, yet fictional, digressions. Both Goto and Kivland’s artworks and practices invoked the relationship between dreams and travel‑ ling as the artists go elsewhere: Goto imagined following a jazz singer to Moscow, Vienna, Berlin and New Orleans; while Kivland discovered Freud’s Rome. Travelling in order to follow eclectic dreams, from those of the Wolf Man to Jelly Roll Morton, to those belonging to Freud, these three artistic interventions enable us to understand what author Siri Hustvedt has pointed out, namely that ‘the dream and art form a natural alliance, and that pictures dominate the grammar of the unconscious’. Moreover, the site-responsive implication of these exhibitions inside the Freud Museum provides an important insight: as images that belong to the past, present and future are brought together, often simultaneously, we come to see that the time of art and dreams is out of joint. The Wolf Man

Harasymowicz’s show Wolf Man (2012), curated by Sarah Jury, was concerned with Freud’s most significant case history involving a dream: the story of the Wolf Man. Among other things, the analysis of Sergei Pankejeff provided Freud with a comprehensive understanding of the formation and function of dreams, and the way in which dreams can become lodged in the unconscious and prohibit the everyday functioning of an individual. Freud’s case history entitled ‘From the History of an Infantile Neurosis’ was written in 1914/15 at the end of the first phase of the analysis, which had lasted for four years. It was not published until 1918. Although in it Freud claims that he had cured his patient, Pankejeff returned to see Freud in 1919, this time for a short treatment, and unfortunately continued to suffer with depression and phobias throughout his life.6 124  inside the freud museums

In the 1918 publication, Freud records the work that he and Pankejeff had undertaken in the first and more lengthy part of the analysis. In order to narrate the treatment, Freud turns the nonchronological ideas and historical events that his patient uncovered and discussed during his psychoanalysis into a linear story of the Wolf Man’s life. The core of the psychoanalysis rests on an event that took place in Pankejeff’s childhood. Freud informs us that at the age of 18 months, the young Pankejeff woke up and saw his parents having intercourse a tergo, from behind. Frightened, and unable to comprehend what he had witnessed, the child falls back asleep, and has a dream of six or seven white wolves perched on the branches of a walnut tree outside his bedroom window. For Freud, this was an example of how common experiences are incorporated into our dreams but not in the image-form in which they occur. In this instance, the traumatic experience of the young Pankejeff seeing his parents having sex was ‘substituted’ by an alternative image, that of the wolves in a walnut tree. Unable to process or comprehend what he saw, the child repressed the image and experience. The trauma was transformed into a dream of wolves, and, importantly, in this instance, the dream was repressed as well. The covering over of the initial traumatic experience by a second experience (in this case a dream) that is then repressed is what Freud calls the formation of ‘screen memories’. Screen memories are troublesome and can produce a vast symptomology. For Pankejeff, the screen memory began to reverberate in the young boy, and a series of anxieties ensued, neurotic symptoms emerged, and a change of behaviour took place. As Pankejeff entered adulthood, he experienced overwhelming bouts of depres‑ sion, anxieties and phobias, which led him to psychoanalysis. At an early stage in the psychoanalysis with Freud, Pankejeff remembered for the first time the dream of the wolves; he reexperienced it, and recounted it to his Viennese analyst. It became the focus of the psychoanalysis. The analysand also drew and painted several versions of the dream for his analyst; these visual depictions supplemented and mediated Pankejeff’s experience tr avelling through the unconscious  125

of the dream and his verbal recounting of it.7 The Wolf Man’s dream and its interpretation, specifically its anachronistic forma‑ tion, helped Freud understand the relationship between a screen memory or knot and the negative impact it can have on someone’s life and well-being. Freud believed that it was the work of psycho‑ analysis to undo, through remembering and interpretation, this type of complicated knotting of subjective experience. In his book The Interpretation of Dreams, published almost 15 years before he worked with the Wolf Man, Freud had already discussed the process through which dreams are formed. Calling it ‘dream-work’, the analyst demonstrated how raw materials from our daily lives and our unconscious wishes (both positive and negative desires), what he called dream-thoughts or the latent content of a dream, are transformed, translated and distorted through a function of psychic censorship into a manifest dream – what we actually dream. In this way, the dream can be a form of wish-fulfilment. In the book, Freud analyses how dreams and the dream-work are constituted by a main set of operations. Condensa‑ tion, for instance, happens when more than one piece of latent content is merged into a single manifest content. Displacement takes place when latent content is transferred onto entirely differ‑ ent manifest content. Latent content can be transformed though reversal, substitution and absurdity into another image or into something resembling a daydream. An instance of dream-work is the way in which Pankejeff’s experience of viewing his parents having sex is displaced and substituted by the unrelated image of wolves in a walnut tree. Freud’s point in unpacking how the dream-work functions was to show that dreams themselves revise their own content. What is striking about these various modes of dream construction is that there are always antecedents – our daily lives or unconscious memories, for example – that are transformed into the dreams that come to life during our sleep. Following Freud, then, dreams are always dual: they are formed through the latent content as an antecedent to the manifest content which constitutes the dream’s actual imagery. 126  inside the freud museums

Freud also realized that dreams are a good example of the blurred division between what is ‘normal’ and ‘abnormal’ in human subjects, and suggested that the difference between them is slight: in dreams we all live ‘pathologically’ under the influence of unconscious desire. But sometimes our dreams live with us through our memories and in our daily lives to such an extent that they disrupt who we are and disturb our ability to live. This disturbance may make it impossible for us to live our lives productively and may lead us to psychoanalytic treatment. This was the case for Freud’s patient Pankejeff. Ultimately for Freud, dream interpretation was a significant part of the work that the psychoanalyst would undertake with his or her patient. In The Interpretation of Dreams Freud provides us with an impressive process of detailed and fragmentary analy‑ ses of salient words and images, both central and marginal to the dream. At the same time, he deftly considers how specific contexts, be they cultural, familial or psychological, also impact on the meanings of dreams. These processes of unravelling dreams, of understanding the transformations that they have undergone, and coming to terms with what they mean, were key for Freud, as they were a significant part of psychoanalysis that would enable the patient to return to living with personal understanding and well-being. Harasymowicz’s show took up some of the operational and hermeneutic ideas around dreams that Freud provided us with in the Wolf Man case history. It did so through its artistic processes as well as its curatorial strategies – processes and strategies that come to work site-responsively and take on these dream interpretations once housed within the Freud Museum. There were two parts to Harasymowicz’s intervention: the graphic novel The Wolf Man written by Richard Appignanesi and illustrated by the artist, which functioned as an antecedent to the exhibition, and the intervention itself, which included a series of silkscreen prints, constructions and drawings from the graphic novel alongside items related to Pankekeff from the Museum’s collection. tr avelling through the unconscious  127

cover of richard appignanesi and sława harasymowicz’s graphic novel the wolf man

The graphic novel The Wolf Man has been highly praised; par‑ ticularly singled out are Harasymowicz’s drawings and her artistic style. Rick Poynor’s review of it in Eye magazine speaks to this when he notes the ‘fierce’ ‘commitment to the subject matter’ as exemplified through the artistic methods employed. The critic also remarks on the sculptural and collage-like elements of the two-dimensional drawing methods, including the artist’s ‘carv‑ ing out’ of figures and the ‘varied command of page structure’, demonstrated through the ‘cutting up’ of ‘drawings and moving the parts in position’ to ‘achieve dramatic overlaps and transi‑ tions’, which at times result in ‘the demarcations between panels [to be] so understated that the spread becomes a single layered yet integrated composition’. In addition, Poynor comments upon Harasymowicz’s use of an ‘emphatic line and vigorous shading’ that speaks to the figures being ‘lost in thought’, and the ‘energetic looseness’ and ‘dream-like lack of finish of details’.8 He observes 128  inside the freud museums

sława harasymowicz, the wolf man, selfmadehero, 2012

how striking Harasymowicz’s drawings are because of the way in which they delineate figures, space and forms. In viewing and reading The Wolf Man graphic novel inside the Freud Museum, these artistic techniques and methods both come to represent excellent forms of creative practice and resonate with Freud’s ideas of the dream-work. If we focus on the double-page spread in which Pankejeff remembers his dream and what he had witnessed, for instance, alliances between artistic method and dream-work can be explored. The narrative written by Appignanesi alternates between the patient’s childhood memories and his recounting and interpreta‑ tion of them in the consulting room. The interleaving of these two experiences meant that the temporality that the artist needed to represent fluctuated between the past and present, as well as tr avelling through the unconscious  129

between what was seen (the parental sexual act), what replaced it (the dream of the wolves) and what was repressed (both the scene and the dream). The artist visually constituted this complex narrative temporality and the psychic enactments through a series of fragmented and collaged images. Harasymowicz depicted the adult Pankejeff undergoing psychoanalysis, with one eye open, remembering the past. His other eye was concealed by a set of collaged, partially abstracted images of wolves in a tree that refer to both the patient’s drawings as an adult and his childhood dream. Beneath him, the artist represented the patient’s toddler self, who is aghast by what he has seen and crying out helplessly in his crib. A lamp placed to one side of both the adult Wolf Man and his toddler self shed light on the scene: the lamp functioned as a metaphor for psychoanalysis. On the opposite page, a fragment of the same lamp now shone on the boy’s parents embracing, while a drawing of the boy standing up in his crib with his buttocks and genitals exposed was a displaced image for the sight of his parents having sex a tergo and the ensuing fantasies and fear the patient had of buttocks. The artist used collage to juxtapose, overlay and condense past and present temporalities and experiences, echoing while not slavishly mimicking Freud’s understanding of the way in which condensation and displacement work in dreams to bring together that which is not of the same time. Moving on to the Wolf Man exhibition itself, this too echoed Freud’s dream-work in its curatorial strategies. The show included images and artworks from Harasymowicz’s production of the graphic novel. These were displayed on and around Sigmund and Martha’s bedroom walls and within the glass vitrine, as well as placed on one of the Freud family’s side tables and within its drawers, inviting us to rummage through them. Accompanying these drawings were objects from the Museum’s collection: one of the Wolf Man’s drawings that he had given to Sigmund Freud as a gift during his analysis; Freud’s appointment book with his notations of Pankejeff’s sessions; the statuette of Neith that the patient gave to his analyst as a gift upon ending the first phase of 130  inside the freud museums

sława harasymowicz, the wolf man, installation shot, freud museum london, 2012

his treatment; and Pankejeff’s death mask. The curator, Sarah Jury, in discussion with Harasymowicz, invoked the complex temporal‑ ity of experience and memory within the Wolf Man case history as a guiding principle in exhibiting the artist’s work. For example, the use of shadows, both literally and metaphorically, was important in this show. Several of the cut-outs that Harasymowicz used in the graphic novel were placed in the cabinet in such a way that they cast impressive shadows. In the Freud Museum these images and their shadows became metaphors for the manifest content of dreams, what we dream and remember, and the shadows that they cast became the dream’s latent content, its hidden meaning, which we shed light on and come to understand through analysis. Whole and partial objects, images and drawings exhibited were presented as fragments through which we as viewers could construct narratives and meanings based on what we see, or perhaps what we know about the Wolf Man case history. By selecting, examining and combining the objects and images in tr avelling through the unconscious  131

sława harasymowicz, the wolf man, installation shot, freud museum london, 2012

the show, we performed something resembling the work of dream interpretation. The multiple drawings of the same figure that were in the exhibition, for instance, referred us to the ‘repetitive reworking’ of dreams and their association that takes place within psychoanalysis.9 Additionally, the process of rummaging through these drawings resonated with the workings of repression and screen memories, strategies through which, Freud noted, we hide, cover and displace (traumatic) events through dreams. By juxtaposing a set of images and constructing a narrative when viewing Harasymowicz’s show, we are making linear what is not and thus enacting the drive to chronology and linearity that Freud saw in his patients when they recounted dreams in analysis: in remembering and recounting our dreams in the consulting room, the fragments of manifest dreams that we can remember are placed within a linear narrative for the purposes of com‑ municating them to our analyst for interpretation. But this is not how we experience them in our dreams. In our dreams they are 132  inside the freud museums

as fragmented and non-linear as the images and objects found in Harasymowicz’s exhibition. In the Freud Museum the artworks and curatorial strategies em‑ ployed in Harasymowicz’s exhibition functioned site-responsively in their endeavour to visualize Freud’s understanding of how dreams are formed, and what methods are required in uncovering their meanings. Like the Wolf Man case history, where it was only through analysis that the patient was able to remember and understand the traumatic event from his childhood that haunted and debilitated his emotional and psychic well-being, Harasymo‑ wicz’s exhibition made manifest in its artworks and their curation the way in which we are haunted by our unknown desires and fantasies. Our individual experiences and their shadowy revisions in dreams remain hidden and torment us, until we are enabled to remember what we have forgotten, and dissipate the haunting. Dreaming to Travel; Travelling to Dream

The American jazz musician Jelly Roll Morton proclaimed himself the founder of jazz. Part truth, part exaggeration, part fantasy, this statement is indicative of Morton’s characteristic recounting of his life story. In 1938, three years before his death, Morton spent several months relaying the events of his life to Alan Lomax, folk music curator at the Library of Congress. These tapes, along with a ‘huge and rambling scrapbook’ filled with vivid and often contradictory stories left by Morton’s contemporaries, as well as photographs, letters, musical scores and official documents, are the main sources we have relating to Morton’s life and work. Artist John Goto’s exhibition Dreams of Jelly Roll (2011) took these sources and produced a series of photographs that reconstructed some of the real and imagined trips that Morton made throughout his life. In order to do this, Goto journeyed through someone else’s life, their dreams and desires. Although Goto did not actually travel to Morton’s birthplace in New Orleans, or to Moscow, Berlin and London, he did imagine those voyages through his artistic practice. Morton was born in New Orleans. It is quite likely that tr avelling through the unconscious  133

john goto, buck house, from dreams of jelly roll series (2010–12), freud museum london, 2011

he never travelled abroad; he simply exaggerated or fictionalized these trips to places he so desired to experience. By focusing on the gap between dreams as wish-fulfilment and their relationship to historical fact, between the unconscious and conscious worlds, Goto’s work used anachronistic and prochronistic elements to make present a past that was not but could have been, as well as one that could never have been. In these ways, the artist suggests that his work follows Alfred Hitchcock’s phrase: ‘The dream … will be inscribed in reality.’ Perhaps one of the most clearly defined cases of wish-fulfilment in Goto’s Jelly Roll series is Buck House. The work was based on a wish (or is it a lie? or is it a fantasy?) taken from Morton’s encounter with the BBC broadcaster Alistair Cooke in 1938, when Morton duly informed Cooke that he had been to London 25 years earlier in 1913. It is almost certain that Morton never travelled outside of North America. Imagining what this visit and others might have entailed, Goto employed the virtual world technology of Second 134  inside the freud museums

john goto, morton in moscow from dreams of jelly roll series (2010–12), freud museum london, 2011

Life to create a dreamscape that brought together a group of people that Morton could have met if he had made the trip. In this photograph Jelly Roll is seated at the piano. Walter Sickert, painter of music-hall scenes and prostitutes, is standing to his left. Marie Lloyd, a music-hall singer, is to his right. Next to her is the music-hall comedian Mark Sheridan in top hat and long green coat, and Edward Prince of Wales, an occasional jazz fan who invited Sidney Bechet to perform for King George V (standing at the centre of the photograph) at Buckingham Palace in 1919. London nightlife of that time would not have been complete without male impersonator Vesta Tilley, dressed in a tuxedo and holding a cigar, and American minstrel Eugene Stratton, working in London. The two women sitting are ‘unknown’ figures dressed or undressed representing history’s often forgotten members of society. The characters, thinking and construction of Buck House make it a good example of Goto’s working premiss in this series of photographs: tr avelling through the unconscious  135

john goto, berlin olympics, from dreams of jelly roll series (2010‑12), freud museum london, 2011

My aim in this series is to take a creative approach to the possible meanings behind Morton’s daydreams and tall stories. Using clues found in his pronouncements, I mix people from his musical and social circles with significant figures from the world stage to which he aspired. … I weave imaginative narratives from factual documentary material.10

Using a similar mode of construction, but with very different effect, Goto made Morton in Moscow and Berlin Olympics. The first photograph was based on an invitation Morton received to travel to Moscow in either 1930 or 1935. The trip did not take place, thus becoming another one of his dreams or wishes disguised as a tall tale. Goto’s photograph imagines a dream scenario in which the wish is fulfilled. Standing in front of Lenin’s Mausoleum in Red Square are a group of people who form the political and cultural attachés of the Soviet regime. The collective includes Joseph Stalin carrying his daughter Svetlana, Lazar Kaganovich, who purged the Soviet railways but was also a jazz fan and wrote with 136  inside the freud museums

Leonid Utesov a jazz pamphlet entitled ‘How to Organize Railway Ensembles of Song & Dances & Jazz Orchestras’. Utesov, wearing a red tie and standing to the far left of the crowd, was the most popular jazz musician of the pre-war period in Russia. Behind Stalin is Maxim Gorky, artist and author of an influential negative article on jazz titled ‘The Music of the Gross’. Next to him is Boris Shumyatsky, the feared boss of the Soviet film industry and a lover of jazz, defending it in the pages of Pravda. Morton himself is at the centre of the photograph, with upturned palms inviting the viewer into a scene that could have been but never was. Berlin Olympics follows a similar mode, but this time we travel through Nazi Germany. Here, too, jazz was at the heart of this totalitarian regime. Goto informs us that Morton ended an open letter to radio presenter Robert L. Ripley with ‘Lord protect us from more Hitlers and Mussolinis.’ Goto imagined who Morton – who never travelled to Nazi Germany but was clearly aware of the rise of fascism in Europe – might have met. At the centre of the photograph are the musicians Jelly Roll Morton, Benny Goodman and Django Reinhardt. To the right is Jesse Owens, the athlete who won four gold medals at the 1936 Olympics in Berlin to crush Hitler’s idea of Aryan supremacy. To the left of the podium is Benito Mussolini holding his son Romano, who would become an important Italian jazz pianist. Next to him is Kurt Gerron, an opera singer who was deported and killed at Auschwitz. He is standing beside Perry Broad, a guard at Auschwitz, a war criminal and an accomplished jazz accordion player. To the far left of the photograph, Goto placed two Nazi youths, followed by two fans of German jazz known as ‘Swings’, a subculture that was suppressed by the Nazis, and Siegfried Wagner, the director of the Bayreuth Festival, who vilified jazz’s ‘nigger rhythms’. The Moscow and Berlin photographs are highly charged images. Inside the Freud Museum, these photographs spoke to us about some grave and difficult histories. Through them we were taken on a journey of racism, death and survival. What we learn is that jazz did not produce clear-cut political alliances or contempt. It was tr avelling through the unconscious  137

loved and hated by fascists and Stalinists alike. In this site, there was a dream-like quality to these haunted photographs. Different histories of exile and oppression, different stories of life’s fortunes and misfortunes, different histories of European nations were brought together in this series. The photographs reminded us of the way in which dreams build up knowledge through travelling. In embarking upon these travels based upon the life, fantasies and dreams of Jelly Roll Morton were points of departure, and this exhibition brought together the history of jazz and that of political extremism: two histories that would otherwise remain separate. Goto’s photographs reminded us of one of the basic tenets of dreams: that the unconscious juxtaposition of that which is seemingly disconnected is what dreams are made of, and that they carry in them vital knowledge about our past in the present. I began the chapter with Freud’s longing for and dreams of travelling to Rome and Athens, those ancient cities of western, Mediterranean civilization that he cherished. In the end, Freud was able to travel to both, and fulfil his desires. In Freud Dreams of Rome (2007–8), Sharon Kivland followed in Freud’s footsteps by sharon kivland, freud dreams of rome, freud museum london, 2007–8

138  inside the freud museums

sharon kivland, via dei polacchi, from freud dreams of rome, freud museum london, 2007–8

sharon kivland, piazza della primavera, from freud dreams of rome, freud museum london, 2007–8

tracking his four dreams of Rome.11 Taking each trip in turn, the artist pursued Freud as he wrote about his dreams and interpreted them in his self-analysis. In the artist’s book that accompanied her exhibition, Kivland provided us with a form of travel log of these excursions which informed us of Freud’s longing to visit Rome, and his failed attempts at getting there. We are made privy to how near he came to Rome, passing Lake Trasimene, and seeing the Tiber, only 50 miles from the city, but how, in the end on this particular trip, he could not make the final necessary journey to view the place of his desire. In addition, Kivland also deviated from Freud’s desire by following a set of routes she imagined he might have taken. She took paths that led her to other dreams Freud had of travelling to other destinations. She examined the letters Freud wrote to his wife Martha and his colleague Wilhelm tr avelling through the unconscious  139

Fliess where he described his dreams to them. In following in Freud’s footsteps, through his dreams and in his remarks about his actual travels, Kivland voyaged with Freud, and took us along with them, through her photographs of Ravenna, Karlsbad, Paris, Berlin, Prague, Athens and Rome as well as other destinations. In the Freud Museum show, Kivland displayed 11 photographs of Rome. These images were remarkably still, representing some of the most famous parts of Rome. Casting strong shadows, the photographs were uninhabited. The black-and-white images await a traveller. They wait for Freud, and they wait for us. Through these images of Rome, we are asked to step back in time, into Freud’s dreams, into our dreams, in order to travel into and through the unconscious. When Time is Out of Joint

Freud concluded The Interpretation of Dreams with this final paragraph: And the value of dreams for giving us knowledge of the future? There is of course no question of that. It would be truer to say instead that they give us knowledge of the past. For dreams are derived from the past in every sense. Nevertheless the ancient belief that dreams foretell the future is not wholly devoid of truth. By picturing our wishes as fulfilled, dreams are after all leading us into the future. But his future, which the dreamer pictures as the present, has been moulded by his indestructible wish into a perfect likeness of the past.12

Freud’s interpretations of his and his patients’ dreams functioned within this complicated temporality. Whether voyaging to past times or to futures yet unknown, the three exhibitions discussed in this chapter, once placed within the Freud Museum, have shown themselves to be invoking these anachronistic and prochronistic aspects of dreams. By considering the site-responsive character of each intervention, we have come to understand the temporality in‑ volved in the associations Freud drew between dreams, travel and the unconscious. Harasymowicz’s show has done this materially 140  inside the freud museums

through the curatorial strategies and the artworks themselves that represent the duality of dreams – their haunted nature – as they travel and get stuck within our unconscious and require psychoanalysis. Goto and Kivland approached daydreams as a means of thinking about the temporal dynamic of dreams. Goto accomplished this through the multiple temporalities employed in his photographs that pushed the time of dreams into the realm of politics in which time is captured out of sequence. Kivland made manifest the potential within Freud’s travels by using his diaries, writings and analysis of his dreams to document his real and dreamt-of excursions, while also following her own daydreams and imagined routes that the analyst might have taken but did not mention. Together, these artworks and practices, once inside the Freud Museum, have provided us with an important understanding of how dreams work and what psychoanalysis offers us when things go wrong. These site-responsive interventions have insisted on reminding us that in dreams we are always here and elsewhere at the same time. When we dream, time is out of joint. We dream in the present of that which has preceded us in our everyday life or is hidden in our unconscious. A dream from the past follows us, throughout the day, without our realizing that it remains in the present. The temporal dislocation articulated by Harasymowicz’s, Goto’s and Kivland’s work provided us with an understanding of what it means to be within oneself, and yet to do so anachronisti‑ cally – out of time, out of the present, in the space of elsewhere. In analysing and working through dreams, alongside these exhibi‑ tions in 20 Maresfield Gardens, we have also been encouraged to see dreams as shadows that haunt us. Sometimes these shadows enable us to think about our future differently, and sometimes they stop us in our tracks, leading us to psychoanalysis. Whether the dream clings to us or lets us go, these exhibitions have shown that dreams speak to us of what we have experienced and forgotten, what we wish for, and, more mundanely, of how past fragments from our everyday lives live on in the present. tr avelling through the unconscious  141

4 Approaching Trauma: Working Towards a  Politics and Ethics of  Art Making

This is one of my father’s sisters… One of those that died in concentration camps … Mitzi Freud. Anna Freud1 Not until later does … the definitive neurosis become manifest as a belated effect of the trauma. Sigmund Freud2 The abundance of real suffering permits no forgetting… But that suffering … also demands the continued existence of the very art it forbids. Theodor Adorno3 Home Movies

Screened on a continuous loop in the London and Vienna Freud Museums is an extraordinary series of short films.4 Formally known by their colloquial description as the Freud family’s Home Movies, the 15 short films are introduced and narrated by an elderly Anna Freud. Speaking in 1980, at the age of 84 and two years before her death, Anna Freud’s halting, raspy, heavily accented voice guides us through the various events that were recorded on film. Chronicling experiences that occurred between 1930 and 1939, the films begin by granting us access to the Freud family in their home at Berggasse 19 and then on holiday in the Austrian countryside and Viennese suburbs. Later, we view some for­bidding footage of the Nazi occupation of Vienna, the roaring crowds cheering their entry into the city, and the swastika banner that

was placed on the facade of Berggasse 19. This is followed by a film recording of the family’s flight to England in 1938, including their short stay in Paris, their arrival at 39 Elsworthy Road in Primrose Hill London and, finally, the family’s and their friends’ celebration of Sigmund Freud’s 82nd birthday at their permanent English residence, 20 Maresfield Gardens. Quite early on in the movies, there is a short film taken in the summer of 1936. While the family was on holiday in suburban Vienna they organized a party to celebrate Sigmund and Martha Freud’s golden wedding anniversary. Many guests arrive – family, friends and colleagues are pointed out to us by Anna Freud’s voiceover. We see a fleeting segment showing Sigmund Freud seated on a lawn chair. He is next to an elderly, bourgeois woman. As he strokes her back, she returns his intimate gesture by resting her hand on his knee. We hear Anna Freud’s voice saying: ‘This is one of my father’s sisters… One of those that died in concentration camps... Mitzi Freud.’ The camera moves on. Four of Sigmund Freud’s five sisters died in concentration camps in 1942. Adophine (Dolfi) died in the Theresienstadt ghetto concentration camp in Czechoslovakia at age 80. Regine (Rosa) 82, Maria (Mitzi) 81 and Pauline (Pauli) 79 were killed by gas in the Treblinka II camp in occupied Poland around 23 September 1942. Freud’s two remaining siblings were lucky enough to evade this fate. Alexander Freud escaped to Switzerland with his wife in 1938 and went to Canada, where he passed away in 1943. Freud’s fifth sister, Anna, emigrated to the United States in 1892, after she had married Ely Bernays. She died of natural causes in 1955. As we know, Freud died in London in 1939. He had no knowl‑ edge of the Holocaust and the losses that would be experienced by his immediate family and the repercussions these events would have on the extended Freud family. This was not the case for the others who lived on in Maresfield Gardens. In January or February 1946, the Red Cross informed Anna Freud by official letter that her aunts had been killed in Nazi camps. Sigmund Freud’s wife Martha and his daughter Anna had to deal with the trauma of approaching tr aum a  143

this news. Martha died five years later; there is little information about how she handled this loss. In Anna’s case, we know that the news came during a time of convalescence from a serious illness, and instigated a period of mourning for these losses and the death of her father. It also began a phase of self-analysis.5 As I have indicated, in the Home Movies we hear Anna Freud mention her aunt Mitzi, the Holocaust, and that others in her family were lost to it. We see Mitzi in the film. Her presence paradoxically marks an absence: the loss of her life and all of those who did not survive. By seeing Mitzi and hearing Anna’s acknowledgement of her death, we are reminded of the murder of her four aunts, and are confronted in a rather fleeting moment with the enormity of familial loss and suffering. Perhaps because the reference is so fleeting, and the personal as well as collective trauma it refers to is so difficult and painful, I found myself replacing the traumatic facts with thoughts about Sigmund and Anna Freud’s work on trauma, and how Anna’s ideas on it may have been influenced by these deaths. We know that Anna Freud carried on her father’s theories concerning the therapeutics and metapsychology of trauma. For both of them, trauma is an event in one’s life that intervenes and ruptures the functioning of the ego to such an extent that the subject is unable to cope with the event. The traumatic event is repressed, but the repercussions of it emerge later in the subject’s life as a form of neurosis. As I signalled in the second epigraph to this chapter, Sigmund Freud states that ‘not until later does … the definitive neurosis become manifest as a belated effect of the trauma’. For Freud, the effect of trauma is belated; it happens after the event not during it. Anna Freud held on to this formulation of trauma throughout her career. For both Sigmund and Anna Freud, the purpose of psychoanalysis for those who have suffered trauma is to enable the bringing to memory of the event – that which is repressed – and relieve the belated symptoms. And yet the actual traumatic moment can never be fully remembered or represented, and the repercussions of a traumatic event are 14 4  inside the freud museums

continuously felt after the fact, belatedly. For Freud, this process is also connected to communal or historical trauma. In his book Moses and Monotheism Freud compares the history of the Jews with trauma. Again he puts forward the idea that there is a form of forgetting and delay, within communal trauma, wherein the traumatic event is repressed and forgotten only to return later, in another time and place, in disruptive ways. Post-Freudian theories of trauma have developed these ideas in important ways. Scholar of English and comparative litera‑ ture Cathy Caruth has demonstrated that there is a paradox at the centre of Freud’s thinking: if a traumatic event is forgotten and then emerges in another time and place, then how can we approach the traumatic experience itself? If trauma within the unconscious is precisely a form of blankness that returns in a different moment, then where does the claim of psychoanalysis to provide us with the personal and historical truth of trauma lie? Does it lie inside or outside of the psyche: that is, in memory or in history? Caruth suggests that this concern with where trauma lies may ‘miss the central Freudian insight into trauma, that the impact of the traumatic event lies precisely in its belatedness, in its refusal to be simply located, in its insistent appearance outside of the boundaries of any single place or time’. For Caruth, what we can gain from psychoanalysis is an understanding of the split between external and internal trauma. For her, ‘the fundamental dislocation implied by all traumatic experience is both its testi‑ mony to the event and to the impossibility of its direct access’.6 Cultural historians and Holocaust scholars Saul Friedlander and Dominick La Capra have deployed the Freudian concept of ‘working through’ as a means of addressing the ways in which those who experience trauma can engage with it. For them, firstgeneration subjects of trauma include survivors, perpetrators, bystanders of the Holocaust, as well as historians. Friedlander and La Capra have taken on board Freud’s notion of working through, which refers to the ways in which the patient is able to transform repressed material into conscious memories. Working through approaching tr aum a  145

is a process of remembering and interpretation, which occurs repeatedly within psychoanalysis until the new or alternative interpretation takes hold. The outcome of this technique enables the patient to live with the knowledge of his or her memories, the interpretation of these repressions, and him- or herself.7 But the working through of trauma is never complete: it is an absence that can never be fully represented or healed; it can only ever be approached and the traces of it live on interminably, repressed and not fully understood. For children of first-generation survivors of trauma, their per‑ sonal encounter with trauma, specifically trauma that is inherited from those who lived through the experience itself, has been called second-generation trauma. Cultural critic Marianne Hirsch has theorized this form of intergenerational trauma as postmemory. For Hirsch, postmemory reflects an uneasy oscillation between continuity and rupture. [… It is] a structure of inter- and trans-generational transmission of traumatic knowledge and experience. It is a consequence of traumatic recall but … at a generational remove.8

In other words, postmemory is the inheritance of traumatic experi‑ ence that has not been lived through by a subject, but received ‘belatedly through the narratives, actions, and symptoms of the previous generation’. Dealing with this inheritance through artistic practice is the work of postmemory.9 As author and cultural critic Eva Hoffman makes clear, the familial, emotional, psychological and historical transformation/transposition of knowledge – vocal, physi‑ cal, linguistic, documentary – that constitutes second-generation experience is both foundational and fragmentary. This inherited knowledge, usually through an absence of actual discussion about the traumatic events themselves by those that experienced them, is the basis of second-generation subjectivity. It is acquired through fragments that do not and cannot cohere into or constitute an entire, narrative whole.10 As a result of this fragmentation, any approach made towards postmemory as a personal and collective history is complex, and ambivalence is often present. 146  inside the freud museums

Ambivalence is central to much postmemory artistic practice and is an important term within psychoanalysis. Often the resolu‑ tion of conflict or painful memories and events occurs when we recognize and accept an emotional ambivalence towards them. Psychoanalysis and postmemory artwork questions what the temporal, psychological and emotional relationships are between the here and the there. The temporal affiliation and disaffiliation between the past, present and future are brought into sharp relief. Ultimately, both psychoanalytic and postmemory practices ask what can be done with what we inherit. These forms of ambiva‑ lence are common in much second-generation postmemory art practices because these artworks testify to a devastating personal and collective history. Ambivalence is thus a strong feature of these art practices. It is also an important part of the Freud Museums in London and Vienna because they represent personal and collective crises and trauma, as well as the potential for psychoanalysis to work through these events. What is astonishing in these artworks and artistic practices, in these museums and in the process of psychoanalysis, is that hope exists. It is the imperative of artistic practices that work with trauma to consider the ethics of their approach – and here I am referring to their artistic, political and ethical approach to the representation of trauma. The fundamental ethical issues at stake in such prac‑ tices are found in the work of Theodor Adorno. In 1949 he wrote ‘after Auschwitz it is barbaric to continue writing poetry’.11 With this well-known and oft-quoted but still crucial and complicated statement, Adorno set a tone for artistic representations after the Holocaust.12 However, in 1962, after the widely repeated and perhaps misunderstood use of this statement, Adorno readdressed it.13 What he makes clear is the way in which the Holocaust brought to the foreground a very real paradox. On the one hand, it is our ethical imperative to remember, to represent; and yet, on the other hand, there are some forms of representation that lead to forgetting. Adorno’s problem is with the idea and actuality of a certain type of Holocaust representation, one in which ‘victims are turned into approaching tr aum a  147

works of art’. For him, this results in the aesthetic transfiguration of the victims – away from the horror and into an autonomous, transcendental, pleasurable aesthetic experience: an image. To counter this problem of transfiguration, he proposes that we must question the notion of representation itself. We must continue to represent the horror, lest we forget. But the representation must be mediated so as not to aestheticize the trauma of others, lest we find pleasure in these representations. In concluding his discussion, Adorno reiterates the paradox: ‘the abundance of real suffering permits no forgetting … But that suffering … also demands the continued existence of the very art it forbids.’ Art has a political and ethical duty to continue its work, while at the same time it is forbidden. That is the political and ethical contradiction that representations of trauma and its aftermath need to negotiate. While sitting, watching and listening to the Home Movies inside 20 Maresfield Gardens (and the same can be said for watching the films in Berggasse 19), Anna Freud’s voice guides us as we become witnesses to the individual losses of the Freud family. Moving from this particular loss to the social and historical events that contain it, in this case to the Holocaust, and then back to the particular, to the site of the Freud family’s last homes – Vienna from where the family was exiled and London where the family moved to and yet experienced the after-effects of exile and the traumatic loss of family members – trauma and absence still haunt and resonate within their walls. These two sites also stand for the psychoanalytic discourses that assist us in dealing with trauma. Together, through personal, communal, and social experience of trauma and its working through, the Freud Museums come to embody this singular constellation.14 This context is brought to bear on artworks that speak to, and approach, trauma. These particular psychoanalytic resonances within the Freud Museum London have offered artists an ex‑ tremely productive and responsive space within which to exhibit work that has dealt with their individual and personal relationship to socio-historical trauma. In having postmemory artistic practices 148  inside the freud museums

within the Freud Museum London the political and ethical implica‑ tions of representing trauma within a psychoanalytic context are activated. This is a complex terrain to negotiate, and Ralph Free‑ man, Vivienne Koorland and Vera Frenkel’s postmemory art inter­ ventions have done it deftly.15 What is so impressive about these exhibitions is the way in which, once inside the Freud Museum, they have opened up the ethical properties of psychoanalysis itself. In addition, each artist has used the work of art – and by work I mean both the process of its making and the artwork itself – as a means of approaching trauma and establishing a politics and ethics of art making. Thus the personal, inherited and collective experience of trauma has been translated and transcribed within their artistic practices in ways that enable a political and ethical approach to trauma and psychoanalysis.16 In Freeman’s Foundations and Fragments (1998 and 2002) the artist examined his ambivalence towards a set of documents he unex‑ pectedly found in his Jewish parents’ home that revealed their exile from Nazi Europe. These documents formed the matter through which he engaged in a process of melancholia and mourning his family’s personal trauma. By way of Koorland’s show Reisemalheurs (Travel Woes) (2007), which included several paintings related to the Holocaust, the astounding amount of physical labour that the artist undertook in the lengthy process of bringing her canvases to completion is revealed. Once the artwork was inside the Freud Museum, this evidence of labour spoke to a belatedness that is key to psychoanalytic thinking on trauma, and provided a context within which the ethical aspects of her practice based on the temporality of art making was invoked. Frenkel’s Body Missing (2003), based on the Third Reich’s Kunstraub, art theft policies, employed the sound of voices as a strategy for revealing the ways in which the sound of trauma from the past echoes in the present. In each of these artistic practices it is the retranscription of the experience of trauma – personal, inherited, collective – within artistic practice itself that enables a political and ethical approach to trauma and psychoanalysis. approaching tr aum a  149

Melancholia and Mourning

Between 1997 and 2003 artist Ralph Freeman built up a post‑ memory artistic project entitled Foundations and Fragments. This project was made up of collages, reliefs, constructions and oil paintings. The focus of the artworks was the Freeman family’s traumatic exile from Nazi Germany to England in the 1930s and the repercussions of this event. Foundations and Fragments was based on documents that Freeman unexpectedly found in his parents’ personal effects after the death of his widower father in 1985. Once discovered, these documents became triggers for the artist’s postmemory experience and practice. The transit docu‑ ments, identity papers, bureaucratic decrees, photographs, letters and books that belonged to his parents, and that he inherited upon their death, became the material and symbolic manifestations of his postmemory recall of life with his parents: family members who were formed by trauma but never spoke of it. As I have noted, Eva Hoffman has suggested that often knowledge of a previous generation’s trauma is acquired through fragments that do not and cannot cohere into or constitute an entire, narrative whole.17 In these terms, the title of Freeman’s project – Foundations and Fragments – was both accurate and acute. Beginning with his personal experience of these documents and his parents’ lives, Freeman’s project first elucidated the role of the individual, and then moved on to consider the collective community within the Diaspora of European Jewry before and after the Holocaust. Shown in the Freud Museum, these differ‑ ent engagements with traumatic history meant that Freeman’s artwork resonated with and responded to the Freud family’s exile and displacement and the trauma endured by those who survived. At the same time, the site situated the project within a very productive psychoanalytic interpretative frame. Two series from this work, with the same title, were exhibited at the Freud Museum London, and each had different hermeneutic results.18 In 1998 the Museum showed some early collages and mixed media work on canvas, which considered inherited personal trauma, 150  inside the freud museums

and by being in Maresfield Gardens invoked the psychoanalytic state of melancholia. In 2002 a group of reliefs, constructions and collages reflected upon communal trauma, and the site-responsive psychoanalytic invocation was the process of mourning. Seen within the Freud Museum, Foundations and Fragments presented personal and communal trauma and took on the psychoanalytic processes of melancholia and mourning. Because the site-responsive interpretation of Freeman’s work is so heavily based on the ideas of mourning and melancholia, it is important to consider these terms in relation to trauma. In his work on survivors of trauma, La Capra uses Freud’s ideas of mourning and melancholia to understand different ways in which survivors work through these experiences. Freud distinguished between mourning and melancholia in relation to the process of grieving the death of a beloved. Mourning is an important process of grieving, and one in which the subject is able to understand both whom he (or she) has lost, and importantly what has been lost. A melancholic, on the other hand, is someone who is stuck in the process of grieving because he (or she) knows ‘whom he has lost, but not what he has lost’ (Freud’s stress). That is, the melancholic realizes that a person has died, but the meaning of the absence is not understood.19 This makes melancholia a form of neurosis for Freud because the person is fixed in misunderstanding. At the same time, melancholia is often a precursor to the work of mourning, and thus important to the process of grieving. La Capra takes up Freud’s theory of mourning and melancholia as a means of considering the different states in which first-generation survivors of trauma deal with their experiences.20 La Capra’s theories are of interest to me in light of Freeman’s practice. But, rather than thinking of these Freudian concepts within the history of first-generation traumatic experience, I devel‑ op them in relation to my analysis of Freeman’s second-generation art practices. Looking closely at both of Freeman’s exhibitions (1998 and 2002) in the context of the Freud Museum London and psychoanalysis, we can see how the conditions of melancholia approaching tr aum a  151

and mourning were already embodied and activated by Free‑ man’s artistic practice. As I suggest, in Freeman’s work there was a shift from melancholia to mourning as part of a postmemory practice. Given that we are now on the terrain of postmemory, an important question is raised: can inherited trauma, rather than first-generation trauma, ever be worked through? To ask this question slightly differently, is postmemory ever dissolved, or do traces of it, like the initial trauma experienced by first-generation survivors, stay with the second-generation subject? Friedlander’s and La Capra’s reliance on Freud’s concept of working through suggests that first-generation trauma can to a certain extent be worked through. Freeman’s practice was also a form of working through. In considering his practice within the Freud Museum London and thus framed by psychoanalysis, we can see how it moved from a work of melancholia to one of mourning, and the shift demonstrated a move from what Freud called neurosis to grieving. This process also enabled Freeman to meditate on some key issues in postmemory representation: the relationships between aesthetics and politics, the individual and the collective, death and hope. The artworks that were eventually exhibited in the Freud Museum in 1998 were begun after Freeman was unexpectedly confronted by his parents’ transit documents and he realized that what they meant was beyond his understanding. Freeman’s first response was to relate to their aesthetic qualities: ‘I related to these source materials, despite or because of their content being beyond my grasp, I was drawn to their formal qualities.’21 The artist’s inability to ‘grasp’ the meaning of the documents meant that Freeman did not make artwork relating to them until almost a decade after discovering them. The artist’s first attempt to use this material was to produce an assemblage for each of his parents, resulting in works of melancholia. These included photocopies of his parents’ personal effects, visas, birth certificates and passports. Each work functioned as a form of homage to his mother or father. ‘But’, as cultural historian David Cohen noted, 152  inside the freud museums

the result did not satisfy him [Freeman], so instead he set about using the materials more discriminatingly. He also responded to other things from his parents’ archives other than official documents: press cuttings and sheet music that related to his mother’s truncated operatic career; letters relating to his grandfather’s trade in horses; a missive from family who had emigrated to Detroit at the end of the last [nineteenth] century.22

Freeman’s collage works Reisepaß (1997) and Identity (1999) were the results of this more open practice. Here the artist used colour photocopies of his parents’ Ausweiskarte (identity cards), their Reisepaß (transit documents from Germany) and their original passports that were reissued by the Nazis, and thereafter included a bold, red ‘J’ on them. That ‘J’ is clearly visible in the collage Reisepaß (1997). In this work, Freeman also utilized his parents’ British immigration documents that state their status as ‘Refugees from Oppression’. At one and the same time, then, these documents, and the artworks that come out of them, identified his family as Jewish, as victims of Nazism and survivors of the Holocaust. The works also represented the Freeman family’s escape and migration to freedom: an escape that many others, like Sigmund Freud and some of his family, shared, and yet an escape that came with its own traumatic reverberations encoded in personal and cultural memory. The Freud Museum London, in which these works were exhibited, is a testament to this duality: freedom from Vienna, as a result of the trauma of exile and the loss of family members. In the Freud Museum, Freeman’s early collages, and the documents that ground them, functioned and resonated as testimonials of ruptured lives, as manifestations of past trauma and resonances of postmemory experiences, as well as gesturing towards the possibility of a different future. Even with the gesture towards the future, works such as Reisepaß (1997) and Identity (1999) are melancholic. They remain close to the figure of death, unable to move outside its orbit. As I have noted, for Freud the melancholic knows ‘whom he has lost, but not what he has lost’.23 This inability to understand what is the loss was echoed in Freeman’s statement approaching tr aum a  153

ralph freeman, reisepaß (1997), foundations and fragments, freud museum london, 1998

that his initial encounter with his parents’ documents, ‘despite or because of their content being beyond my grasp’, meant that he stayed close to the documents and their formal qualities. But, in staying close to the formal qualities of the documents, a visible uncertainty between aesthetics and politics remained within these works. The uncertainty manifested the artist’s turn to the formal characteristics of the personal documents as a means of eliding, in the first instance, what had been lost which remained beyond 15 4  inside the freud museums

the artist’s grasp. This uncertainty is central to practices that approach trauma. Cultural historian James E. Young puts it well when he notes that there is ‘a narrow call for an aesthetics that devotes itself primarily to the dilemmas of representation, an anti-redemptory history of the Holocaust that resists closure, sustains uncertainty, and allows us to live without full understanding.’24 At a funda‑ mental level, then, all of the documents that attest to trauma also signify a necessary and yet interminable transit and transition for the artist. By transit and transition I am referring to the way in which Freeman and other postmemory artists have dealt with trauma by transforming the documents they use materially and metaphorically. They have done so by rethinking and redraw‑ ing the documents, by working them up and then paring them down, thereby re-presenting them. This practice ensures that the artwork is at one remove from the original document, and with it from the origin of the inherited trauma with which the artists are irrevocably linked. Perhaps as a result of the vital nature of the small number of documents that have survived, repetition has been a very common mode of engaging with them. Freeman’s Identity and To an Island Far Away (1997) are good examples of such repetition. This practice of repetition has been one of the ways in which the artist has dealt with difficult memories. It is also passed on to the viewer who becomes affected by the work and what it means. We must deal with them; they will never be dealt with. This ambivalence and the paradox it represents are key to much debate on the necessity and impossibility of representation or presentation of the Holocaust, and to second-generation expe‑ rience within postmemory art practices. For Marianne Hirsch, second-generation ambivalence functions between ‘curiosity and desire’, on the one hand, and ‘wanting to own their parents’ knowledge’, on the other hand.25 In my view, Freeman’s use of collage, particularly his use of documents in this early work, spoke to these contrasting emotions, to the ethical and political dilemma that Adorno initially pointed out in questioning what it means approaching tr aum a  155

to make art after Auschwitz. Freeman’s early work was attuned to this. When the artist said that he was drawn to the ‘formal qualities’ of his parents’ personal documents, he was referring to their aesthetic possibility. At the same time, he was unable to ‘grasp’ what they actually meant, for that was too horrific. Cohen recognized this ambivalence in Freeman’s early work from his 1998 exhibition, when he wrote: ‘[t]he trappings of Nazi state [with its ‘bureaucratic elegance’] must have exacted considerable ambiva‑ lence [on the artist] as he studied the slickness of their insignia, the gothic letters, streamlined eagles, swastikas’.26 Freeman’s use of collage as a method by which the reuse of historical images is key highlighted the ambivalence between, on the one hand, a desire for redemption, transcendence and forgetting – putting the past behind you, if you will – and, on the other hand, the necessity of an ongoing and interminable process of remembering, repeating and working through that is demanded by the past in the present. For the second exhibition held at the Freud Museum, in 2002, Freeman moved away from the politics and aesthetics of per‑ sonal identity and postmemory, and this time elaborated on the historical event on a more general, communal and allegorical scale. In considering the site-responsive nature of this exhibition, the psychoanalytic context invoked by the work saw a shifting of terms: the practice moved away from melancholia to the work of mourning. Since Freud, mourning has been theorized as an understanding of both who and, importantly, what has been lost. By moving from the personal to the communal, Freeman’s work unravelled what the loss meant for him, his family and the com‑ munity of which they are a part. Most of the direct references to his family were gone in this later installation. The artist exhibited oil- and canvas-based reliefs, constructions and collages that used mainly three forms: book covers, letters and envelopes. As Free‑ man stated, this work ‘is an attempt to imply the essence of the initial documents – with their history, associations and symbolism – without necessarily using them’.27 The artworks bore titles such as Tribe (2002), Empty Books II (2002), Memorial II (1999) and Voices 156  inside the freud museums

ralph freeman, empty books ii (2002), foundations and fragments, freud museum london, 2002

(2002). The use of books in this series of artworks referenced com‑ munal, or public, knowledge as opposed to the more personal and private aspects of correspondence highlighted in the artist’s use of letters and envelopes. Having these specific artworks exhibited in the Freud Museum made apparent the duality of the site as both public and private. Once inside the Freud Museum these artworks evoked the immense task of mourning. Site-responsively invoking Freud’s work by being situated in 20 Maresfield Gardens, this series sug‑ gested a working through of the psychic and ethical imperative of transitioning the event – represented by the document – into a memory of the past through its historical, symbolic and allegorical approaching tr aum a  157

associations. With a darkened palette reminiscent of burnt offer‑ ings, these works were recognizable as solemn commemorations of the trauma that befell Freeman’s family, and other Europeans before, during and after the Holocaust. In Empty Books II (2002) and Missing Books I (2002) the artist made use of the remnants of books: just their covers remain, the pages and contents have been emptied – whether torn or burnt, one was left to wonder; their Hebrew titles were either etched out and erased on their covers, or were still inscribed on their spines. These reliefs based on Hebrew books, inserted within the Freud Museum alongside Freud’s own book collection, activated and responded to the epistemological legacies attached to the Museum. Freeman’s book project referenced the communal knowledge, specifically Judaic epistemology, from the Talmud to Freud and beyond. At the same time, in considering Freeman’s act of empty‑ ing the books of their contents and the titles of these constructions, the artworks spoke to the decimation of that same epistemology. As we know, many books by Freud and other writers, whom the Nazis considered subversive or representing ideologies opposed to Nazism, were burnt under the Third Reich. More personally, Freud sold much of his book collection to pay for his exit from Vienna and escape Nazi persecution. Having Freeman’s Empty Books II and Missing Books I within the Freud Museum invokes this particular history related to Freud and his work. In terms of community and the persecution of European Jewry, the missing and empty books in Freeman’s book-works also al‑ legorically represented the extinguishing of an intellectual Jewish community, its genealogy and the very real Jewish bodies that went missing and were murdered by the Nazi regime. For instance, the ‘witnessing’ of the extermination of communities haunted artworks such as Voices, Memorial II and Tribe. These reliefs were made from multiple letters and envelopes. Gedenkblatt (2002), which means ‘commemorative documents’, was one such work, as were the overstuffed, darkened envelopes, ‘full of nothing’ in Voices, Memorial II and Tribe. We were unable to read or see what 158  inside the freud museums

ralph freeman, memorial ii (1999), foundations and fragments, freud museum london, 2002

was in these bulging envelopes – the letters. As Edward Timms has stated of Freeman’s work, ‘the leitmotif of the envelope [is] an evocative form which simultaneously expresses plenitude and emptiness, irrepressible longing and irretrievable loss.’28 And yet, what exactly were we witnessing? Freeman’s working through? The trauma of postmemory? The politics and aesthetics surrounding the question of representation after the Holocaust? A commemoration of a decimated community? A loss of epistemol‑ ogy? The personal, private and yet always already public and civic issues raised by such loss and its representation? Yes, each and all approaching tr aum a  159

of these. With Freeman’s earlier series, as exhibited in 1998 in 20 Maresfield Gardens, the artworks invoked a form of melancholia, what Freud recognized as an internalized being-in-death with the other. In remaining close to the personal experience of inheriting trauma from one’s parents, these artworks represented the way in which melancholia also remains too close to the individual who has been lost. In the later works, shown in 2002, the artist provided a set of artworks that memorialized the external loss of one’s history, genealogy and community. In doing so, they invoked the psychoanalytic work of mourning because they recognized whom and what had been lost – the loss was both personal and communal. Between 1998 and 2002 a shift had taken place in Freeman’s work. It had moved from an internalized negotiation of the personal and private aspects of postmemory to an external‑ ized consideration of the communal and multiple public and civic functions of postmemory. This shift in artistic practice elicited two different interpretative frameworks once inside the Freud Museum London. The site-responsive aspects of Freeman’s two exhibitions moved from a personal working through to a communal one. The initial images of his parents invoked a certain melancholia once in 20 Maresfield Gardens, whereas the multitude of empty books, envelopes and letters used within the later work involved a recognition and understanding of communal trauma that invoked the idea of mourning. All in all, in this series of works we were offered the foundation and fragments of a personal and communal working through, and the impossibility – the necessary impos‑ sibility – of coming to a full understanding of it.29 Belatedness and the Art of Work

Displayed on the upper landing of the Freud Museum London are a series of images: a pen-and-ink sketch of Freud by Salvador Dali from 1938; a 70th birthday charcoal portrait of Freud by Ferdinand Schmutzer from 1926; a sculpted bust of the analyst by Oscar Nemon (1931); and two versions of arguably the most famous image of psychoanalysis, a tree inhabited by five white wolves painted by 160  inside the freud museums

Freud’s patient Sergei Pankejeff.30 This small collection of works may function as a snapshot of psychoanalysis and the Museum. It represents the key figure to whom the Museum is dedicated, Sigmund Freud the analyst. It also highlights Freud’s work with patients; in this instance it is Pankejeff who is present, as is their communication within the consulting room vis-à-vis the painted picture of the Wolf Man dream, and their separate subjectivities in their individual ‘portraits’. The proximity and display of these works in what was once a psychoanalytic space of practice, as well as the Freud family’s home, and is now a museum also highlight their purpose as museological and historical artefacts. Precisely here, alongside this significant display, Tamar Garb, art historian and curator of the 2007 show Vivienne Koorland: Reise­malheurs (Travel Woes) in consultation with the artist, placed Koorland’s small and intimate work Gulag Tree (2000). This con‑ junction was a curatorial moment worth pausing over because it opened up the site-responsive character of the show. It introduced the conceptual psychoanalytic framework through which a pro‑ ductive reading of the intervention could take place: through the lens of the Wolf Man case history and Freud’s theoretical extrapolation from this work. By pointing to the Wolf Man, the notion of psychoanalytic ‘afterwardsness’, which is key to Freud’s understanding of this patient, was put into play. By following the idea of afterwardsness within psychoanalysis and Koorland’s art practice, the political and ethical dimensions of Koorland’s art practice are opened up and brought to bear on this site. Koorland’s Gulag Tree was a small collage and pastel drawing made of paper, card and linen on wood. Within this image of a solitary tree full of buds or fruit a series of ideas and memories were constellated. Perhaps the image of a tree and its simple formal qualities evoked memories of childhood or the biblical story of the Garden of Eden. Because of its title, Gulag Tree, the history of Soviet political prisons, wherein the sight of a tree can keep one alive, was also brought to the fore. It is likely that the image fragment of the tree was appropriated, and this is approaching tr aum a  161

an important feature in the artist’s work. Garb calls this aspect of Koorland’s practice ‘interlinear’, wherein previous words or images are recontextualized in the artwork, the result of which is a doubling of significance: the former and current meanings resonate simultaneously.31 If we were to think of this practice in terms of psychoanalysis, we would benefit from bringing to mind Freud’s understanding of memory wherein each ‘non-linear’ ‘rearrangement’ and ‘retranscription’ of a memory trace provides alternative meanings for the subject.32 In the consulting room, through a belated and reconstituted remembering, the subject is able to interpret and work through the initial repressed experi‑ ence. In the context of the Freud Museum, the migration of an image or a word in Koorland’s work functioned in a similar way: the initial image was rearranged and retranscribed to form the artwork which had its own meanings, but the antecedent was always present pushing its way forward. In Koorland’s work, the traces of the past image were prescient for our understanding of the work in the present. As we know from the previous chapter, the Wolf Man case history provided Freud with an understanding of the mechanisms through which the past was activated. Crucial for Freud was the way in which the trauma of Pankejeff seeing his parents having sex was repressed and then screened off by the dream of wolves. However, the memory traces of the trauma persisted and produced a symptomatology that led the patient to have analysis with Freud. In the writing up of the Wolf Man case history, Freud used the German term Nachträglichkeit to describe this process. Nachträglichkeit translates into English as ‘deferred action’ and via the French term après-coup as ‘belatedness’ or ‘afterwardsness’.33 Through his work with Pankejeff, Freud concluded that Nachträglichkeit is an important function of the psyche. It is based on the ways in which memory traces of a past experience, whether real or phan‑ tasmatic, are remembered and re-experienced, and continuously reconstructed and revised later on. Through psychoanalysis, itself a form of belated and reconstituted remembering, the subject is 162  inside the freud museums

able to interpret and work through the layers of revisions to the initial repressed experience. Cathy Caruth develops the notion of Nachträglichkeit in relation to the trauma experienced by Holocaust survivors. Taking French psychoanalyst Jean Laplanche’s formula‑ tion of Freud’s Nachträglichkeit as belatedness or afterwardsness, Caruth theorizes how the impact of trauma reverberates after the fact. As Caruth states, ‘trauma is not locatable in the simple violent or original event in an individual’s past, but rather in the way that its very unassimilated nature – the way it was precisely not known in the first instance – returns to haunt the survivor later on.’34 Koorland’s Polish Jewish grandparents died in concentration camps; her mother was orphaned and sent from Poland, via France and through the organization OSE (Œuvres Secours Enfants) to South Africa. In an interview published in 2007, Koorland discusses her family history and the impact that it had on her practice. She states: My mother has neither a birth certificate nor a mother tongue. So I think initially I wanted to salvage something and perhaps aspects of my working method express this. But the work is not only about me or about my mother’s story. The paintings reference other paintings and the language of painting and question the capacity of painting to convey a narrative. So the fact that these are paintings of drawings or words is very important.35

For Koorland, there is something about her mother’s trauma, displacement and loss as a result of the Holocaust that she has ‘wanted to salvage’ in her work. The intervention at the Freud Museum spoke to this salvaging as many of the works referred to the Holocaust as well as to the troubled history of South Africa. While referring to these events through the narrative content and language of painting, it was also the labour involved in the artworks that connoted the importance of the psychoanalytic concept and practice of belatedness. Hanging on an ample wall in the Freud family’s dining room was Koorland’s painting War Drawing Eva: Seder II (1991). The work approaching tr aum a  163

vivienne koorland, war drawing eva: seder ii (1992), reisemalheurs, freud museum london, 2011

is based on two drawings made by Eva Meitner and Eva Winternitz, two girls who died in Theresienstadt, a Jewish ghetto, transit and concentration camp during World War II. The drawings depict a real or imagined Passover Seder that took place before the war, in real or imagined homes. It was striking to see this painting hanging in Maresfield Gardens, the Freud family’s home away from Nazi Europe. In this context the work activated a series of specific concerns; for instance, the meaning of Passover in relation to Jewish identity; Sigmund Freud’s Jewishness (and his ambivalence about his identity); the Freud family’s home life; Anna Freud’s work with children during the Blitz; the writing within psychoanalysis around memory and trauma; and the question of history. As the basis for War Drawing Eva: Seder II, Koorland used re‑ productions of the originals: photocopies that the artist found in a Russian book of ghetto drawings she came across while visiting Prague in 1990. The originals were already mediated several times 164  inside the freud museums

over: in terms of history, medium and geography. In this particular painting, Koorland drew together parts of these two drawings, the names of the two girls, and the dates of their births and deaths. In other versions of the painting, the artist inscribed the word ‘Auschwitz’ in Cyrillic, linguistically referencing the reproduc‑ tions’ Soviet source, thereby marking another point of mediation. Koorland’s Seder paintings are repeated, each time differently, and the mediated drawings and their multiple representations are put into motion, again and again. The original images by Eva Meitner and Eva Winternitz become traces in these multiple temporal, geographic and subjective travels. Each step in Koorland’s process of making is a move away from the original. These practices once considered inside the Freud Museum take on a particular psycho‑ analytic interpretative framing, and as such our reading of this Seder painting and Koorland’s work more generally come to attest vivienne koorland, the kapo tallies his human losses for the day (2006), reisemalheurs, freud museum london, 2011

approaching tr aum a  165

to their mediation as a form of belatedness, of afterwardsness: because the image is mediated over and over again, reworking and echoing something in and of the past that is further distanced through the temporality of her practice, the artistic practice comes to embody a belatedness and afterwardsness. Koorland’s interest in mediation as a necessary part of her artis‑ tic practice comes from her reading of Adorno.36 Within Koorland’s work, the necessity of mediation is made manifest by her taking of images or words from elsewhere. They have a previous life, a pastness that is brought to bear on the work of art. As I have noted, Adorno’s understanding of mediation is essential to the way in which he believed artists should approach the Holocaust in their practice. We have seen this with Freeman’s work, and now once more with Koorland’s practice. A very explicit example of this in Koorland’s exhibition was the painting The Kapo Tallies His Human Losses for the Day (2006). In this work the artist used a single frame from Alain Resnais’ 1955 film Night and Fog, a documentary on the Shoah. The frame reproduced by Koorland on a single piece of burlap was the one in which the head of a camp counted ‘his’ dead. Koorland used the English subtitle of the French voice-over as the painting’s title. By focusing on the tallies in this still, we are left to wonder how and why, under what conditions, a life is worth but a stroke, a single mark.37 The necessary fissure between aesthetics and politics that Adorno insists upon and the need to interrogate representation itself when dealing with the Holocaust is manifest in Koorland’s choice of images – the marginal and invisible. The images in her work are also subjected to various stages of mediation and afterwardsness, drawing them irrevocably from the notion of an original while still remaining connected to a traumatic event. Returning to Koorland’s interpretation of her work in terms of the language of painting, it is evident that the artist prefers not to have her work interpreted solely through the lens of trauma. Although clearly concerned with trauma, there was something else that also emerged by having Koorland’s work within the context 166  inside the freud museums

of the Freud Museum. What were we to make of what Koorland called her work’s ‘referencing of other paintings and the language of painting’, and the capacity for her paintings to ‘convey a narra‑ tive’? We know that Garb thinks that the imagery in Koorland’s work is interlinear. It is always taken from elsewhere, is out of context, refers to something else; inside the Freud Museum this echo of something before itself invoked the psychoanalytic notion of afterwardsness. We have seen this in War Drawing Eva: Seder II (1991) and The Kapo Tallies His Human Losses for the Day (2006). And yet there is something more about Koorland’s practice that provoked this psychoanalytic concept. It is the work she puts into a painting’s production, the sheer labour of what the artist calls her ‘working method’, that was so striking and significant in the context of 20 Maresfield Gardens. It was more than simply the work of necessity: it was a form of political and ethical action. Knowing that Koorland spends hour after hour, and year upon year making a single painting, in this site we may ask: is this not a form of referencing and narrative, a form of Nachträglichkeit, of remembering, re-experiencing, reconstructing and revising? In 1990, Koorland received a large quantity of burlap sacks from a factory in Brooklyn, New York. The sacks once contained spices and cinnamon that were exported from various countries to the United States. After a thorough and intensive process of washing and cleaning, which took much time and physical effort, the recycled burlap sacks became the foundation for many of her paintings. This began the demanding and laborious process that constitutes Koorland’s practice.38 Koorland’s practice is a slow and intense process of work: underpainting, overpainting, tear‑ ing, scraping, reusing, recycling, stitching, cutting, drawing and redrawing; and then the entire process is repeated once again, this time differently. One of the works produced from these sacks was Riding Alone for 10,000 Miles (1995–2007). During the Freud Museum show, Riding Alone for 10,000 Miles was hung in the Museum’s hallway. The painting functioned as a sort of passageway into the show, approaching tr aum a  167

Koorland’s practice and the Museum. It was one of the map paintings. In this instance, the work was made up of layers of painted maps from the First World War combined with landscapes of South Africa. These maps were painted, then overpainted; vivienne koorland, riding alone for 10,000 miles (1995–2007), reisemalheurs, freud museum london, 2011

the canvas was then cut into pieces, stitched back together and painted over once more. The result is a diaphanous and densely layered painting with geographical boundaries, names of cities, pictograms referring to residential areas, or military references. Seeping up from underneath this work are these various layers of images that constitute a geographical and historical landscape from the past meeting more recent paintings of other maps. In portrait rather than landscape format, the various maps were both legible and illegible, evoking the unconscious and the work of memory that arranges and rearranges our experiences in light of fresh circumstances.39 The motifs within the painting are also important. Taken from other military maps, which were recycled in this work, the final map is useless, as this place does not exist. It is a kind of mind map, a memory map and a historical map all in one. Koorland considers this work ‘a map of its own making’.40 Edges of the previous painting are exposed in this work to ensure that the memory of the work is present. Having taken over a decade to make, this work resonates with afterwardsness as a product of a belated temporality and tremendous labour. The cuts, stitching and restitching varies within a single painting and between them. The stitching of the patchwork of burlap segments in Riding Alone for 10,000 Miles seem to threaten to pull apart that which it holds together. The stitching is not stable. Art writer Adrian Rifkin likened the stitching within Koorland’s practice to a wound: a wound that was healing at the same time as it remained an infinite wound.41 In considering Koorland’s working method, its practice and labour as site-responsive, it invoked the way in which it embodies a form of afterwardsness. The process always came after an initial inscription, cut or stitch that was never original and always mediated (for instance by an image from elsewhere). This practice produced a work that held within itself the visible and invisible layers of its own making. Like the unconscious and memory, Koorland’s practice and artworks have traces of what has been before. In considering her working method, the artist has thoughtfully noted: approaching tr aum a  169

However long the painting takes, it ends up not looking new. I used to add weight to my stretchers because I was so hard on the canvas with knives (or whatever) that I felt that I needed a very substantial support. Light didn’t feel right. It occurred to me a long time ago that the less rooted I felt in a place, the more I needed the paintings to be heavy, both content-wise and as objects.42

Koorland’s practice is a slow and intense process of work that involves layers of painting, different ways of tearing, cutting and scraping the canvas, and then pulling it back together through stitching, drawing and redrawing, only to repeat the entire process once again. In the Freud Museum this method suggested a process of literal and metaphorical working through: words and images migrated from one work, one historical moment and geographical location, to another. These traces were buried under many layers of paint in one work, and foregrounded in another. The site-responsive nature of Koorland’s exhibition was how we were made aware of the ways in which Nachträglichkeit as a form of belatedness and afterwardsness, and their necessary repetitions, are central to Koorland’s artistic practices and to the work of psychoanalysis. An image, a word, a memory, an idea in both psychoanalysis and in Koorland’s artistic practice, emerged slowly and with difficulty, countering that which was immanent. It then re-emerged and was recontextualized; repetition was key, as was interpretation and reinterpretation. Through the work and labour that made this happen, we were reminded of past times, and other places, past memories and other fantasies, previous identities, and other histories in the present. There are traces in this palimpsestic practice that ensured that the past remained present, and that it impacts upon the present. The temporalities of past and present coexist in this art practice as they do in the psychoanalytic concept of Nachträglichkeit. As Freud taught us, and as Koorland’s work embodied by being inside the Freud Museum: each time we remember, memory traces are reconstructed and changed; our interpretation of them becomes a reinterpretation and meaning is reconfigured; and so is our understanding of ourselves. 170  inside the freud museums

Accented Voices

Certainly, the voice is central to psychoanalysis. It is through the modality of the voice, through speaking our free associations, that our repressed desires, psychic traumas and the common unhappi‑ ness of our everyday lives acquire a voice. But it is through our own and the psychoanalyst’s listening that we are heard. Both elements are integral to clinical work.43 Having Vera Frenkel’s installation Body Missing inside the Freud Museum London pro‑ vided a way of conceiving of speaking and listening to the voice as an ethical encounter. Frenkel’s use of the voice in considering the Nazis’ art theft policy encouraged us to take note of the ethical bond that exists between the individual and the social by connecting the sound of the voice with matters of personal and traumatic histories. Body Missing is a multichannel, multimedia installation (1994), which later included a website44 designed for ISEA ’95, and made in relation to an earlier work, …from the Transit Bar for Documenta IX (1992).45 All three of these works dealt in various ways and forms with the Third Reich’s Kunstraub, art theft policies. Body Missing was first produced as a site-specific artwork for the 1994 exhibition Andere Körper (Different Bodies) curated by feminist art historian Sigrid Schade. The exhibition was held at the Offenes Kulturhaus in Linz, a building that was once a Wehrmacht (German Army) prison, and is now the city’s centre for contemporary art. This building, in Hitler’s schoolboy hometown, is near the Altausse salt mines, one of the Nazis’ largest storage facilities for artworks plundered under the Sonderauftrag Linz (Special Assignment Linz). Established on 1 June 1939, Hitler’s most secret pillaging project included artworks forcibly taken from collections of occupied countries, those ‘bought’ under duress for very little money, and those appropriated and stolen from the possessions of persecuted and later murdered minorities. Over 6,000 works were stored in the Altaussee mines. All of these, and others stored across Austria and Germany, were to have formed the collection for Hitler’s dream of building a Führermuseum in Linz, larger than any in Europe, of approaching tr aum a  17 1

which he was to be the chief curator. When the Allies opened up the mines in 1945, many of the works were missing. Some of the ones that were found were repatriated, but many are still ‘lost’, and the search for them continues today. Coming to learn about this history while planning her installation for the Linz exhibition, Frenkel constructed Body Missing. Body Missing consists of six stations. Each station includes a different but related six-minute video: Reconciliation with the Dead; Recalling the Benign World of the Things; Trail of Fragment; The Apparatus of Marking Absence; Athena’s Polished Shield; and The Process of Redemptive Naming Begins. In Linz the windows on the facade of the Offenes Kulturhaus building included a series of large translucent photographs of images taken from the videotapes and collaged together. Later, these black-and-white transparen‑ cies were inserted into wooden lightboxes, echoing the notion of travel, displacement and exile, while others, in colour, became photographic wall works; both types of mural are included as a part of each station.46 The videos are made up of densely layered and edited still and moving images with two temporalities. On the one hand there are the archival images that represent a historical moment: black-and-white images of anonymous hands saluting the Führer; photographs from 1945 or before of the stored artworks in the salt mines; photographs of Hitler and Mussolini visiting a museum in Rome; lists of objects, their provenance and their movements throughout Europe during the Kunstraub; the drawings and model for the Führermuseum (both of which Hitler took with him when he went into hiding at the end of the war); and the evacuation of work by the Allies at the end of the war. On the other hand there is the imagery that brings this historical moment into the present. This includes colour footage shot by Frenkel of, for instance, present-day Linz, its monuments and architectural facades, as well as the Vienna Academy of Art (which twice refused Adolf Hitler’s application to study art). In addition, the more contemporary film includes as key protagonists a group of women and men. Are they 172  inside the freud museums

artists? Art historians? Forgers? It is difficult to say. We only know their first names. We have no idea who has hired them, but what we do know is that they have been set the task of ‘embodying the missing works of art’. With list upon list drawn up by the Nazis of the artworks they had stolen, the task at hand is almost impossible. So, they begin alphabetically and have only a few bits of information about each work: an artist’s name – Caravaggio, Courbet, Rembrandt – the work’s title, and its dimensions. It is almost impossible to ‘reconstruct’ the lost work. Using what they can find – pictures, references in diaries and letters, and ‘inven‑ tion’ – each artist is allocated a painting, and a time frame in which to complete the job. This artistic intervention embodying what is missing – in this instance, actual works of art – is central to Body Missing. To this day, repatriation of these stolen artworks continues, with the original and forged works coming to light in auction houses and collections around the world. A soundtrack accompanies the images, although often they are not synchronized, creating a disharmony that accentuates the difficult nature of what is being represented. The sound‑ track includes ambient noises from inside and outside the Offenes Kultur­haus. The sounds of shoes clicking against the marble tiled floor as the artists move through architectural spaces of transition: across interior courtyards, down hallways, up stairwells, and into storage facilities, the transitional nature of the spaces echo their covert task. Note the noise of traffic, cars and trains, church bells ringing, rain falling, and the faraway sound of children playing. But the voices are most striking. Voices reading from lists: many different types of lists all encoded by the Nazis working on the Sonderauftrag Linz – lists of artworks, collections, truck numbers, insurance policies, storage spaces and depots. One of Frenkel’s fictional characters draws up a ‘list of lists’ in order to draw atten‑ tion to the elaborate systems that Hitler’s Kunstraub project created and employed. Other voices are in conversation reading archival transcripts from the interrogation of those involved in the art theft policies. A contemporary reporter informs us of an ongoing legal approaching tr aum a  173

vera frenkel, body missing (detail) station 1: reconciliation with the dead (1994), freud museum london, 2003

trial related to the Kunstraub and the repatriation of the artworks to their proprietors, while the dialogue between the artists about how best to ‘restore’ the missing artworks, through research and invention, continues. Punctuating these are versions of the song ‘Maikäfer Flieg’ (Ladybird, Ladybird, Fly), sung in German and in English, either as a solo or in a round: a song about death, destruction, family and loss. Throughout the video stations we hear the voices of women and men reading and singing this song in German, and when in English sung either by a native speaker or one with a German accent. Often there are English subtitles. The faces of those who speak are never shown. All of these voices and sounds are strategically punctuated by silence. There are many fine interpretations of Frenkel’s Body Missing.47 The installation is read through the historical, political, bureau‑ cratic and social prisms of the Nazis’ art theft policies during the war, after it, and the ongoing project of repatriation and restitution that is still under way. The installation has encouraged a critical analysis of the politics and practices of art collecting itself, in public and private museums and galleries, as well as the function of the art market. It has provoked discussions on the trauma of migration, displacement and exile, particularly in 174  inside the freud museums

vera frenkel, body missing (detail) station 2: recalling the benign world of things (1994), freud museum london, 2003

light of psychoanalytic work on trauma. This reality inevitably draws us to the Holocaust. Although there is a consensus that the missing artworks are not metaphors for those who went missing and perished in the Holocaust, there is an understanding that a contiguous relationship between them exists. Body Missing raises the sight and site of the traumatic body, while keeping it and its histories, its horrific past and its concomitant connection to the present, in place. Griselda Pollock summarizes the breadth and depth of these analyses well when she writes: Body Missing is a video meditation on memory and amnesia, loss and mania, restoration and recreation, bureaucracy and crime, and Hitlerian looting and his cultic adulation as a symptom of the delusional search for bliss by means of the acquisition of things and a faith in a false messiah.48

To have an installation such as Body Missing inside the Freud Museum was to make visible a very personal connection between the Kunstraub and the Freud family. In 2003 Frenkel and the then director Erica Davies installed Body Missing. The curatorial strategy was uncomplicated and appropriate. It followed the flow of the house. The entrance hall held Station 1, the consulting room housed Station 2, the dining room included Station 3, the two parts of the approaching tr aum a  175

landing held Station 4, while Station 5 became a part of the Anna Freud room, and Station 6 was placed in what was Martha and Sigmund Freud’s bedroom. The curatorial strategy ensured that the house was bathed by this history in the present. Here I mean that while Body Missing functions as a historical document, it is not finite: the issues at stake in it continue to resonate today. When placed inside the Freud Museum it ensured that the particularity of the Freud family’s history within this larger historical context remained animated today. Without explicitly describing this, Body Missing invoked the Freud family having to ‘sell off’ belongings to pay for their safe transit to London. It also pointed to the tragic perishing of Adolphine (Dolfi) in the Theresienstadt ghetto concentration camp, and Regine (Rosa) 82, Maria (Mitzi) 81 and Pauline (Pauli) 79 in the Treblinka II camp as individual losses, and the social trauma of the Holocaust. By way of these personal and historical traumas, the installation connected us to the work Freud and his successors have done on trauma within the field of psychoanalysis. In walking through Maresfield Gardens and Body Missing, the various voices activated these personal and historical traumatic realities. Hearing the German and English voices from Body Missing throughout the Freud Museum – where the talking cure took place between Freud and his analysands and between Anna Freud and her patients – encouraged this association. It also connected psychoanalysis with its broader ethical remit: to address and work through the multifaceted trauma caused by the displacement, exile and extermination of people. In the case of Body Missing, the particular trauma invoked was associated with the rise of European fascism and its aftermath. What one soon realized, upon entering what was once Minna Bernays’ bedroom, was that in addition to the Freud family’s Home Movies, and Anna Freud’s raspy, accented voice speaking to us, there was another voice that also addressed us, that of Sigmund Freud. The only known recording of Freud’s voice, an audiotape, made on 7 December 1938, shortly after the family moved into Maresfield Gardens, is now a part of the Museum’s permanent 176  inside the freud museums

display. In a short, pre-written English text, Freud informs the BBC of his professional activity, the discovery of the unconscious, the resistance to that discovery, and the founding of psychoanalysis. The thick Austrian accent embodying the English words, and the slow halting nature of his communication, caused by his having to speak through a mouth prosthesis (needed because he suffered from an incurable jaw cancer), do not deflect our attention. In a lecture about Body Missing by Lydia Marinelli, she discussed how Freud, when he first arrived in England, found it impossible to transfer his experiences into a new language. In a letter to him, his friend Raymond de Saussure empathized with his situation and listed the losses an exile incurs. For Freud, the list remained incomplete because he answered his friend’s letter with the fol‑ lowing words: You left out one point that the emigrant experiences as particularly painful. It is – one can only say: the loss of the language one has lived and thought in and that in spite of all efforts towards empathy one will never be able to replace by any other. With painful understanding I observe how otherwise familiar means of expression fail in English and how even every fibre in me wants to struggle against giving up the familiar gothic handwriting. And yet one has heard so often that one is not German. And indeed, one is happy not to have to be German anymore.49

The linguistic failure that Freud was feeling and articulating was emphasized by the sound of the Body Missing voices inside the Freud Museum: voices that read, repeat and reveal fragments of a political, cultural and social history of displacement and exile in both languages. Body Missing and its precursor ...from the Transit Bar, another six-channel video installation and functional piano bar, first installed at Documenta IX, Kassel, in 1992, work with the failure of translation – the inability of one language to fully capture another – and the function of silence, of not speaking in a certain language, as a form of repressing trauma. Vera Frenkel was born in Bratislava into a Jewish family in what was then Czechoslovakia. In 1938, after the country’s secession to the Third approaching tr aum a  17 7

Reich, Frenkel’s father was able to escape to Britain. After many months of negotiation, in 1939, as invoked in a subsequent work, The Blue Train (2012), a baby Vera Frenkel and her mother were able to move across several European borders to reconnect with her father in London. Frenkel notes how language becomes a marker in her work on her family’s history and her own and her family’s immigrant status. This question of language in Frenkel’s work is taken up by visual culture scholar Irit Rogoff when she notes how, upon hearing the ‘polyglot speech’ in ... from the Transit Bar in Kassel in 1992, she was reminded of the ‘babel of languages’ in her childhood in Israel, her then present life in California, and in Europe at that time, with Yugoslav refugees on the move, and the news coverage of foreigners living in Germany being singled out for vicious attacks.50 Rogoff uses these personal anecdotes to set out the historical, political and ethical import of Frenkel’s use of language. She goes on to unpack the ways in which Frenkel’s work binds together the traumatic displacement and extermination of people from World War II, the breakdown of Eastern Europe, and violations of human rights beyond Europe, to trauma and its psychoanalytic formulations and facilitations. What Rogoff demonstrates is that psychoanalysis meets cultural politics in the act of translation, in voices. Although Rogoff is writing about …from the Transit Bar, the situat‑ ing of Body Missing within the Freud Museum, with its associations, partially constructed through the sounds of voices – throughout Marefield Gardens, by Anna Freud, Sigmund Freud, those at each of Frenkel’s Stations, the voices of the international visitors to the Museum – provoked a similar affect. The failure of translation, what Sigmund Freud considered the failure of expression in another language, is a reality for those living in between different worlds. This reality is not merely represented in Body Missing; it is also produced as an ethical imperative within the work, and provoked by the work as we engaged with it. We became active participants in this failure of language and trans­lation to speak and articulate the trauma of exile, dislocation and extermination. 178  inside the freud museums

Singular and yet Analogous

Along with the ethical imperative of Frenkel’s work situated within the sound of a voice and its failure to translate all that it contains, including its traumatic personal and social histories, in this chapter, we have seen other strategies, tactics and means of approaching trauma through a politics and ethics of art making. In Freeman’s work, the material traces of the artist’s political and aesthetic ambivalence towards documents he found concerning his Jewish parents’ exile from Nazi Europe became the matter through which he worked through the melancholia and mourning of this personal and civic encounter with the past. In having Koorland’s work inside the Freud Museum what was revealed was the way in which her mediated and palimpsestic artistic practice, the result of an astounding amount of physical labour over long periods of time, became a form of psychoanalytic afterwardsness. The temporality of this process, which engaged with the past within the present in material, narrative and methodological terms, defined a political and ethical art practice. What is most striking about all of these artistic practices is the way in which a profound material relationship is embodied between artist, his or her practice and postmemory. The transla‑ tion and transcription of the experience of trauma – personal, inherited, collective – constitute these radically different material approaches to trauma: Frenkel’s manifestation of the voice as a mode of articulating personal and social histories of trauma; Freeman’s engagement with the materiality of personal documents that encourage the working through of traumatic history from a process of personal melancholia to one of communal mourning; and Koorland’s attention on protracted artistic labour that insists on a recognition of the difficult and long process of engaging with trauma. The material process also embodied an ethical engage‑ ment with the political nature of trauma as a historical, collective and individual experience in relation to the self, the other within the self, and the other outside of the self. It is this bond between artistic practice, the larger political and ethical contexts, and the approaching tr aum a  179

Freud Museum as site that has motivated my readings of these artworks and interventions. My point in this chapter is not to claim that these artistic and material practices are the only means of approaching trauma. There will be, and have been, other political and ethical methods employed in the work of different artists. Rather, my proposition is that there is a site-responsiveness functioning between these exhi‑ bitions and practices, the personal and political histories that they referred to and recounted, and various political and psychoanalytic theories on trauma that are invoked by having the work within the Freud Museum London. When artworks produced through a materially, politically and ethically charged artistic practice that attempts to encounter trauma enters the Freud Museum, the artworks usefully activate the connection to the Freud family’s relationship to the rise of European fascism and the Holocaust. The artworks also address the way in which psychoanalytic practice and theory are key to our understanding of trauma. Inside the Freud Museum, the interpretation of the art practice as singular and yet analogous to psychoanalytic practice becomes the frame‑ work through which trauma can be approached in a politically and ethically sound way. In this chapter, I have been enabled by reference to a series of artistic practices to consider various means by which we may ethically confront, stand by and live with the trauma we may inherit and experience in our lives.

180  inside the freud museums

5 Autobiographical Fictions: Intimate Encounters in the Consulting Room

it still strikes me myself as strange that the case histories I write should read like short stories and that, as one might say, they lack the serious stamp of science. I must console myself with the reflection that the nature of the subject is evidently responsible for this, rather than any preference of my own. Sigmund Freud1 those who want to continue misleading themselves about the past write autobiographies; those who want to know themselves and their history have psychoanalysis. Adam Phillips2 Being with Freud

Some time in November 1937 a rather extraordinary photograph was taken of writer and practising psychoanalyst Princess Marie Bonaparte filming her friend and analyst Sigmund Freud. From entries in Freud’s diary, we know that during this winter Marie Bonaparte visited Freud for her ongoing psychoanalysis.3 She ar‑ rived at Berggasse 19 with her daughter Eugénie, who was about to commence her own psychoanalytic treatment with Freud. The photograph shows Freud sitting behind his desk in his study surrounded by his antiquities, his manuscripts and two bouquets of fresh flowers. He is turning away from his work and those beloved objects of antiquity that guided him in his writing, and facing his patient and friend. Bonaparte is crouching down, behind and to one side of Freud’s desk and is looking through an early

marie bonaparte and sigmund freud, 1937, at berggasse 19, vienna

movie camera that she had recently purchased. The viewfinder is resting against her left eye, her fingers are placed on its controls, and the apparatus is aimed at Freud. We don’t know if she is filming Freud, but she is certainly posing for the photograph, as is her analyst.4 Eugénie took the photograph. Together the three actors have constructed a moment for us to view and consider. What is fascinating about this image is what we see: the apparatus for looking/the movie camera, the operator of the camera/Bonaparte, and the object of her gaze/Freud caught by the photographer/Eugénie. This mise-en-scène makes it a compelling representation of representing: a photograph of a filmic encounter, specifically an encounter between Bonaparte and Freud. In addi‑ tion to this rather remarkable portrait of looking and representing, there is an intensity captured between the film-maker and the sitter, as each holds the gaze of the other.5 182  inside the freud museums

This photograph is less a portrait of Freud, or of Bonaparte filming Freud, although that is rather marvellous, and more a documentation of Marie Bonaparte’s engagement with Freud. It is an image that tells us a great deal about Bonaparte’s response to being with Freud, perhaps even a response to a cherished, intimate encounter with Freud. The focal point of this photograph, unlike most portraits of Freud, is not the elder psychoanalyst, but his analysand Marie Bonaparte. More specifically, the image rests on the relationship between the analysand and her analyst, between Marie Bonaparte and Freud. Because it concentrates on figuring the relationship between them, as a piece of documentation, and a complex piece of autobiographical construction, I consider it an autobiographical fiction. It is part-documentation and part-fiction as it conveys Marie Bonaparte’s desire to be a part of the world of her analyst. The image stages and represents subjectivity and in so doing fictionalizes it. In this instance, the autobiographical fiction is pointing us to a moment of analytic transference: a posi‑ tive transference. In her looking up at Freud with adoration, we witness the patient’s unconscious desire for her analyst as it rises to the surface and is captured in this representation. In a sense, then, Bonaparte has been photographed inside the psychoanalytic stage. One of the Freud Museum London’s most pressing provocations is to prompt a situation that has been captured in this photograph: to encourage its visitors and artists to enter the psychoanalytic stage. To walk into the Museum is to walk into Sigmund and Anna Freud’s consulting room. This is certainly a part of the Museum’s hagiographic power: its ability to make us believe we are in an active, living consulting room, from which the psychoanalyst has momentarily stepped out. As we wander through the room, we wait for the analyst to return. A group of exhibitions carry this fiction forward for us because the artworks rely on fragments and traces of the artist’s own life – anecdotes, stories, memories and objects – that once inside the Freud Museum respond to the psychoanalytic context of the site to create a fictional narrative of the artist in analysis.6 autobiogr aphic al fic tions  183

Freud understood the impossibility of representing a life without fictionalizing it. As early as 1892, when he was writing up his treat‑ ment of Fräulein Elisabeth von R., Freud had a rather astonishing insight. He realized that his case histories read more like short stories than scientific truths. Freud lamented this fact. But, as noted in the first epigraph to this chapter, Freud also consoled himself that the fictionalization of the ‘subject’ was inevitable. He understood that in psychoanalysis these fictions arose in all three parts of treatment. First, the analysand was a subject who told her ‘stories of suffering and symptoms’. Second, psychoanalysis itself appeared as a subject made up of ‘the detailed description of mental processes’. And, finally, the writing of case histories added to this fictionalization, because the case history took the form of the short story, but that did not mean it displaced the importance of the autobiographical. Autobiography, in the form of the analysand’s story and the analyst’s writing of that story, and their importance for psychoanalysis and our understanding of the human subject, remained primary. What Freud realized was that when autobiog‑ raphy, the patient’s life story, was spoken, narrated and re-narrated when written down it became part-fiction. Bonaparte was also aware of this, as are the contemporary artists who offer us their autobiographical fictions inside the Freud Museum. The focus of this chapter is on the Freud Museum London as a site that contains and preserves all of the accoutrements of Sigmund and Anna Freud’s consulting rooms. Moreover, the miseen-scène of psychoanalysis is laid out as though the analyst has just left the room, and thus represents the practice of psychoanalysis as a present and ongoing experience. When autobiographically inflected artworks and interventions enter this space, this aspect of the Museum is activated, and the site-responsive engagement between artworks and museum encourages us to read the exhibi‑ tions as different moments within a fictionalized psychoanalytic treatment. More specifically, I consider four exhibitions that ani‑ mate four essential moments within psychoanalysis. We begin with introductions, and a first analytic session where Sarah Lucas and 184  inside the freud museums

Sigmund Freud meet and reflect back on the artist’s work and its popular Freudian associations. This is followed by two exhibitions that shift us away from Sigmund Freud and the role of the father and turn us towards the work of Anna Freud and Melanie Klein, thereby invoking the legacy of psychoanalysis. This genealogy is also represented by the Freud Museum itself as a hallmark of psychoanalytic history. Alice Anderson’s intervention invokes our need to repeat childhood anxieties in adult rituals as a means of working them through, and here Anna Freud lends a hand. Louise Bourgeois’ artworks and, more importantly, her writings come to perform a psychoanalytic ‘acting out’ of a Kleinian subject that both loves and hates in equal measure. Finally, by way of Sophie Calle’s intervention we return to Sigmund Freud, and how this artist’s work offers us a ‘positive transference’ in the form of a love letter to Freud. By considering these site-responsive exhibitions, I propose that works of autobiographical fiction move inevitably towards psychoanalytic associations and interpretations once inside 20 Maresfield Gardens. The pivotal role of the consulting room in the Freud Museum London ensures that the interpretative context is both unique and markedly different from what is offered by any alternative personality museum or other exhibition space. This results in an interpretative narrative that places the artist within the consulting room. Whether intended or not by the artist, it is the site-responsive nature of the Freud Museum that insists on a productive encounter between artist and analyst. A First Session with Sigmund Freud

The invitation card to the Sarah Lucas show Beyond the Pleasure Principle (2000) says it all. It positions the artist and Sigmund Freud alongside one another. At one end of the invitation there is a portrait of Lucas smoking a cigarette. She holds the fag gingerly between her down-turned lips, neither allowing the growing ash to drop off nor getting smoke into her squinting eyes. She is dressed informally, wearing a wrinkled black T-shirt, is slouching, autobiogr aphic al fic tions  185

exhibition invitation for the pleasure principle, sarah lucas, 2000

defiant: a picture of in-your-face cool. At the opposite end of the card is a portrait of the elderly Freud. He too is smoking. Hold‑ ing a smouldering cigar between the fingers and thumb of his right hand, he looks serious with a penetrating gaze. He is in a well-tailored three-piece suit, with necktie, silk pocket-square and gold cufflinks. He is upright, earnest and perfectly turned out. In between Lucas and Freud are two photographs of chairs: one is of Lucas’s anthropomorphic bunny, seated on an ordinary, everyday chair; the other is of Freud’s unique anthropomorphic armchair, empty and beckoning the analyst to sit down and begin working at his desk. The portrait of Freud next to the empty chair suggests that Doctor Freud, the psychoanalyst, was not at his desk but in the consulting room, seated behind the analytic couch, smoking and ready to meet his next patient. It is difficult not to imagine that it is Lucas, with her bunny, who is ready to meet the analyst. 186  inside the freud museums

The witty challenge posed by this invitation card was to regard the exhibition as a meeting, and perhaps even a confrontation, between Lucas and Freud. This show consisted of a small and well-selected choice of artworks that highlighted the main focus of Lucas’s work to date: sex, pleasure and femininity. The larger survey exhibition, from which the Freud Museum show was selected, had its debut at the Sadie Coles Gallery in London where the same artworks must have had a vastly different effect on their viewers. In the Freud Museum, the artworks – which all refer back to Lucas’s previous work – carried a very precise evocation. With the site’s inherent psychoanalytic associations, the standard curatorial trope of a survey show came to perform the function of a first analytic session. As Freud explained, a first session with a new analyst is the moment in which the patient is invited to give a brief history of her life. It is an opportunity autobiogr aphic al fic tions  187

for the analysand to speak about herself, introduce her personal history and concerns, and for the analyst to make a decision as to whether the patient would benefit from psychoanalysis and work‑ ing with him. Beyond the Pleasure Principle offered just this narrative of Lucas’s artworks: a survey of past and present concerns. At the same time, it provided an expanded understanding of the work. Rather than simply viewing the artwork as a parody of some basic Freudian ideas as derived from popular culture – which is a common reading of Lucas’s work – the historicity of the site invited a more contextualized interpretation of the work as an unflinching take on some fundamental and profound Freudian ideas around femininity, sexuality and death. In a conversation between Lucas and James Putnam, curator of the Freud Museum show, the artist has the following to say about the relationship between her work and herself: SL: I’ve never been that keen to separate the person from the work, in fact I always wanted making art to be really close to myself. … something to do with how you present yourself … JP: The whole idea of sexuality in your work, that’s not supposed to be personal is it? SL: It’s not autobiographical or confessional so it’s not personal in that way … JP: So is portraying yourself as coming across with a certain kind of image, or personality an important part of your work? SL: Yeah, but … the real difference is producing this thing which then is separate from you, which does have its own existence in the world. But that is the only difference. Apart from that it’s the same, a self-conscious activity.7

It is worth pausing over the connection and distinction that Lucas is making because it tells us a great deal about her under‑ standing of autobiographical fiction as a function of her art practice. For the artist, her work is neither autobiographical nor confessional, but it does bear a relationship to herself; thus the act of art making is a self-conscious activity. It is a part of the artist and it produces something that is also separate from her. Hence 188  inside the freud museums

artistic practice is self-conscious and autobiographical, and yet also separate, constructed, a fiction. The duality that Lucas is articulating was made visible upon entering Freud’s consulting room: we were confronted by a strik‑ ing photograph situated behind Freud’s couch. It is a blown-up image of a fragment of Lucas’s torso looming suggestively over the divan. She is wearing a well-worn white T-shirt with several opportunely placed ragged holes. Through them we can glimpse her breastbone, a bit of flesh at the curve of her breast, and we get a seductive peek at her nipple. Self-conscious and autobiographical, the work is also constructed, a fiction. The sectional portrait is a partial image, chosen to elicit a particular response; inside Freud’s consulting room it also functioned as a first statement in an initial psychoanalytic session because it figured and reconfigured that which preceded it, in this case events in Lucas’s life, her work and the history of art. Entitled Prière de Toucher (2000), the photograph was named after Duchamp’s cover for the limited-edition exhibition catalogue which accompanied the first post-war Surrealist art exhibition, which was staged in Paris in 1947. In Duchamp’s work, a foam rubber breast, hand-painted, including a detailed nipple, was se‑ cured onto a ragged piece of black velvet that was glued onto cardboard. The artwork was then affixed onto the front cover of the catalogue. Art historian and critic Claire Bishop has called Duchamp’s work a ‘decadently chauvinist gesture’, which she sees as being ‘complicated’ by Lucas’s ‘potent and fascinating image in its own right’.8 We know that Duchamp collaborated on the design and produc‑ tion of the catalogue’s cover with painter Enrico Donati. Donati, based in New York City, purchased 999 pre-fabricated foam and rubber breasts, known as ‘falsies’, from a warehouse in Brooklyn. Once in Paris, the two men began the laborious and protracted process of painting each readymade to resemble a female breast. Discussing their creative method, Donati recalled a conversation between himself and Duchamp: ‘I remarked that I had never autobiogr aphic al fic tions  189

sarah lucas, prière de toucher (2000), installation view, beyond the pleasure principle, freud museum, london, 2000

une leçon clinique du dr charcot à la salpêtrière, e. pirodon after the oil painting by andré brouillet, 1887

thought I would get tired of handling so many breasts, and Marcel said, “Maybe that’s the whole idea.”’9 The conjunction of this artwork’s ‘decadently chauvinist gesture’ with the boredom and tedium the artists felt in repeatedly handling so many breasts brings to mind a conversation Lucas had with journalist Lynn Barber, where the artist explained: I was quite a tomboy when I was growing up, I liked hanging out with a lot of boys, and I sort of got used to their way of talking about sex. And at the same time as thinking it was funny, I suppose I was a bit aware that it also applied to me, and I’ve always had those two attitudes. I did enjoy it – but at the same time I must have shuddered inwardly, I think. It stayed with me anyway, didn’t it?10 autobiogr aphic al fic tions  191

Lucas’s Prière de Toucher, like her first self-portrait Eating a Banana (1990) and many others that followed, including SelfPortraits 1990–1998 (1999), speaks to this ‘disquiet’ of being one of the lads and enjoying the joke, and yet at the same time realizing that the joke was also on her. On the one hand, the portrait above Freud’s couch which invited us to ‘please touch’ rehearsed the male gaze that she appropriated as one of the lads, and consciously and courageously positioned it onto herself. It also referenced and laid bare the function of the photograph that usually hangs above Freud’s couch: the lithograph of a painting by Brouillet of Freud’s mentor Charcot teaching his colleagues about female hysteria. The lesson is focused on one of his patients, Marie Wittmann, known as ‘Blanche’, who is swooning for the audience and being physically touched by one of Charcot’s assistants. The male gaze penetrates and touches the female body in both the nineteenth-century and the contemporary photograph. On the other hand, having the Lucas photograph above Freud’s couch evoked a startling self-consciousness, in the constraint of the arms behind her back, in the upright position of the torso, in the nipple refusing to get out of your face. In viewing the photograph, it was difficult not to feel the oscillation, the contradictions between what we saw and the discomfort we felt in looking and seeing, which echoed those felt by the artist. In the Freud family’s dining room resided The Pleasure Principle. Two figures having sex: one male, one female. She, one of the Freud family’s dining chairs, wore a beige bra and matching panties. The bra was filled with two big globe light bulbs. He, another chair, wore a white vest and Y-fronts. She was placed on top of the oak dining table. He was on the wooden floor. A strip light coming out of the Y-fronts and inserted beneath the panties connected them. ‘Let’s do it on the table, one half of the work seems to say. ‘Don’t put me on a pedestal, says the other half. It is all very rumbustious and absurd: all that striving, all that posing, all that getting it up and getting it down’, art critic Adrian Searle commented. He concluded by claiming that through Lucas’s work 192  inside the freud museums

sarah lucas, the pleasure principle (2000), installation view, beyond the pleasure principle, freud museum london, 2000

we come to notice that ‘the language of sex and the language of sculpture aren’t so different – it is all about mistaking one object for another’.11 Lucas’s use of chairs and objects as a shorthand for the human figure having sex stretches right back to the beginning of her career. In The Old Couple from 1991 two chairs were placed perpendicular to one another: one had a wax penis, the other a pair of false teeth, and together they represented a sexually active elderly couple. Writer Raichel Le Goff notes how having Lucas’s The Pleasure Principle in the Freud Museum brought to mind something the psychoanalyst wrote: ‘We have all experienced how the greatest pleasure attainable by us, that of the sexual act, autobiogr aphic al fic tions  193

sarah lucas, beyond the pleasure principle (2000), installation view, beyond the pleasure principle, freud museum london, 2000

is associated with a momentary extinction of a highly intensified excitation.’ Le Goff surmises that ‘this would have been a good quote to place next to Lucas’ piece with a switch inviting the viewer to turn off the power and extinguish the hot white tube of sexual heat. For without the throbbing tube, the piece would look quite banal.’12 It is this same banality that was felt by Enrico and Duchamp. Although ‘squeamish’, and ‘not something [she] could really talk about’, in looking back through Lucas’s work, like Duchamp, sex seems to have always been on her mind.13 194  inside the freud museums

Upstairs, in what was once Sigmund and Martha Freud’s bed‑ room, next to one of their small side tables and chair and beside a glass cabinet full of Freud’s memorabilia, was Lucas’s installation Beyond the Pleasure Principle. A red futon mattress was suspended from a garment rail; a neon tube pretended to be a penis piercing the mattress, while two globe lights were wrapped around it. The tube jutted out towards the back of a rusty metal bucket-cumbottom. Inside the bucket was a single orange bulb as vagina. Above it a wire coat hanger with two small white light bulbs tentatively secured below it referred to breasts. This work, like The Pleasure Principle downstairs, parodied heterosexuality and popular culture’s romantic depictions of it. What gave this installation its edge was the disconcerting and sobering fact that the red mattress rested on a white cardboard coffin. Like the other interventions in this show, Beyond the Pleasure Principle referred back to Lucas’s previous work, telling a story that was both autobiographical and fictitious. There was reference to the very early work from 1994 Au Naturel that spoke of the vulgari‑ ties of sex: the dirty yellow mattress, the two small oranges and upright cucumber, the medium-sized melons and metal bucket. Only a few years later, in 1997, cardboard coffins and neon lights flicker in Cosmic Dream Texture. What made this particular installa‑ tion in the Freud Museum important was how it activated Freud’s ideas from his 1920 text Beyond the Pleasure Principle. In this book, the psychoanalyst provides us with a major shift in his work by demonstrating how sex (and pleasure and life) functions not as a drive unto itself but in relation to the death drive. It was clear that the allusion to Freud’s work was here in this installation, but, as art historian Briony Fer remarks, ‘Lucas’s objects are evacuated of the storytelling drive which surround them at the same time as they are so heavily laden with them that the place is full of their innuendo.’14 This is certainly the case; an in-depth Freudian narra‑ tive was not found here, and yet his ideas were implied everywhere. Two important interpretative frameworks emerged from having these artworks in the Freud Museum. The first is how the artworks autobiogr aphic al fic tions  195

functioned as autobiographical fictions that invoked a first session with Freud: a looking back to the past from the present. This occurred because the present artworks referenced their predeces‑ sors, and behaved as ubiquitous and banal objects that function as stand-ins for sexual organs, male and female, which in turn stand in for representations of gender and sex that ultimately transform basic aspects of human life into a parody. The second site-responsive aspect of this exhibition was to be found in how the artworks referenced Lucas’s ambivalence towards femininity and sex. Lucas sees her practice as being the ‘same’ as herself, a ‘self-conscious activity’, while also different from herself. At the same time, her artwork contains a laddish quality in the way it activates the male gaze onto the female body that the artist (and perhaps a female viewer) finds disconcerting. In the Freud Museum this disquiet and ambivalence implicated Freud’s patri‑ archal understanding of femininity and the female body. This was evidenced, for instance, in the way in which Lucas’s self-portrait hung above the couch took the place of the Charcot lithograph and thus aligned itself with the way in which hysterical women were placed under the scrutiny of a male gaze in order to develop key ideas for psychoanalytic theory and practice. In the end, Lucas’s work gestured towards the importance of psychoanalytic ideas around femininity, sex, pleasure and death through its usual crass form of parody, but also gained a more sober take on these ideas because of the Museum’s conservation of Freud’s consulting room, and its historical framing of psychoanalysis. Childhood Rituals and Adult Repetitions with Anna Freud: Almost Fiction

In 2001 the artist Alice Anderson related her childhood rituals, and particularly her use of red fibre and thread. This is her articulation of the memory: I remember the terrible fears I used to have when I was a child left alone at home for many long hours waiting for the return of my mother. At that time I invented rituals for myself to calm 19 6  inside the freud museums

my anxieties. These rituals consisted of undoing the thread from seams and I would wind these threads around parts of my body and other objects.15

Through this moving personal avowal, Anderson acknowledges her emotional investment in the ubiquitous use of red fibre within her art practice.16 Anderson holds on to this narrative and repeats it often, almost unchanged, when discussing the autobiographi‑ cal dimensions of her work. In its repeated use, this childhood memory functions as a confession does for philosopher Jacques Derrida: a vignette that is repeated again and again and works to ‘broach something unclosable, something which can never be laid to rest, something that exceeds rationality’.17 Hoping to broach it at some point, Anderson informs us that as time passes she is ‘getting to the point’ where she can conceive of this memory as something that can be constantly reconstructed in order to resolve itself and turn into fiction.18 In effect, she is working towards an understanding of how the autobiographical is always a form of fiction as a means of working through the acuity of this childhood memory and the hold it has on the artist. There is a flickering between the potential exact authenticity of the memory and its fic‑ tionalization.19 Anderson’s show Childhood Rituals (2011), curated by Joanna S. Walker, was a part of this ongoing process. It examined a daughter’s continuing analysis of her relationship to her mother.20 In looking closely at three key works, each of which have been previously shown in a gallery context, Anderson’s autobiographi‑ cally inflected art practice, once inside the Freud Museum, invoked a conversation with Anna Freud that elicited the psychoanalyst’s work with children and her theories of subject formation in order for the artist to work towards an understanding of her practice as a means of fictionalizing difficult childhood memories. Upon entering Sigmund Freud’s study and consulting room during Anderson’s intervention, one quickly noticed that it was darker than usual. The lights had been dimmed and the ambience had changed. Slowly approaching the consulting room and desk, we discovered that a fine web made of a single red thread had autobiogr aphic al fic tions  197

alice anderson, web (2009), childhood rituals, freud museum london, 2011

been used to veil the door jamb. A confrontation, humorous and intriguing, Web (2009) impaired our visual access to this important museological space as well as restricting our physical admission to the psychoanalyst’s lair. All viewers were barred from the father. As Anderson puts it, Web was a means of displacing ‘the heavy shadow’ of Sigmund Freud, the ‘masculine and authoritar‑ ian’ within the Museum. With this quiet yet assertive tactic, the father remained present but barred.21 Barred from the father, the intervention asked us to consider the role of the mother and the feminine. Upstairs in the Anna Freud room, a silicone figure was seated at the psychoanalyst’s loom. She had bright red hair and was wearing a pink dress with gold shoes. She was called Mother Figure (2001). Mother Figure was weaving picture frames from bundles of red fibre scattered around the room. Fibre was also available to her from that wrapped around the entire outside of 20 Marshfield 198  inside the freud museums

alice anderson, mother figure (2001), childhood rituals, freud museum london, 2011

Gardens (Housebound, 2011). These Cocoons referred back to the web of thread that barred us from the father in Freud’s consulting room, but here the fibre did not restrict our access to Anna Freud’s workspace. We could approach the analytic couch, the loom, Anna Freud’s library and worktable. We could stand very near to the loom, the doll, and the cocoons of red fibre. We were not mere spectators; we were not barred from the activity; we were a part of the action and installation. Inside this workspace the red fibre was being used. Literally, it was being woven and turned into grid-like structures. Metaphorically, this act of weaving, which is a process of transformation, invited an analogy between itself and the way in which memories are worked through within the consulting room. In the room across the hall we encountered Confinement Room (2011). And a silicone figure (Daughter Figure, 2000) of a little girl, the spitting image of the artist and closely resembling Mother Figure, autobiogr aphic al fic tions  199

was wearing a red and blue dress with white tights and blackbanded shoes. She was seated in a confined space. Resembling a child’s playpen, but raised up high, the enclosure was constructed from skeins of red fibre woven around wooden frames, the same grids that Mother Figure was weaving next door. The child doll was confined by Mother Figure’s creations while also protected by them. She, in turn, was confined to her place at the loom and protected by the room. In interviews with Anderson, the story of this girl doll’s emer‑ gence is repeated and worth recounting in full. It functions as another confession. This is the artist: In 2000, to make a replica of myself, I contacted Madame Tussaud’s and a sculptor, Livia Turco, came to work at my studio every day for two months. During the work sessions I couldn’t move, and we talked about very private matters, even though I hardly knew her. We established a very strange relationship between us. Looking back, I think the doll witnessed a kind of psychoanalytic session. The more I talked, the more the doll grew. I remember being very sick at that time, while the doll got stronger and stronger. Later she became a sort of guardian, my invigilator. And then, little by little, I felt threatened by its presence.22 alice anderson, confinement room (2011), daughter figure (2000), childhood rituals, freud museum london, 2011

20 0  inside the freud museums

This doll that grew out of something resembling a psychoanalytic session is for the artist both inanimate and alive; she is a guard‑ ian and a threat, something outside of the artist and yet closely connected to her physically, emotionally and psychically. Having this child doll so near Mother Figure, and both of them within the Freud Museum, provoked the question: what is the psychoanalytic relationship between them? Thinking across both rooms, and between both figures within this highly charged psychoanalytic spatial context, we were asked to consider a complex set of relationships between different subjects and towards one’s self. Contemporary psychoanalyst and feminist Jessica Benjamin has theorized these relationships in a productive manner.23 To begin with, Benjamin defines the term ‘intrasubjectivity’ as the relationship one has to oneself, and sees this as central to what is examined in the psychoanalytic consulting room. Clearly this interior duality – our relationship to our self – becomes relevant when considering the matter of autobiography, or the representation and fictionalization of one’s life story, as in, for instance, Anderson’s work. The daughter’s relationship to herself was figured through the self as child doll, self as a mother doll, self as adult, self as artist. Jessica Benjamin also theorizes a second form of doubling that takes place within the consulting room: she calls this inter­ subjectivity. Intersubjectivity refers to the dynamic between analyst and analysand in which earlier bonds between, for in‑ stance, parent and child, are aroused, performed and interpreted between patient and psychoanalyst. Turning once more to An‑ derson’s work, we can see how the two dolls invoked a set of intersubjective relationships that brought together two subjects wherein feminine-to-feminine or female-to-female relationships were summoned, specifically those between daughter and mother, mother and daughter, and daughter and psychoanalyst.24 Barred from the father and fully ensconced in this feminine context, how did being in Anna Freud’s consulting room disentangle these relationships? autobiogr aphic al fic tions  201

The loom was important to this particular staging: not only did it belong to Anna Freud; in many ways it was representative of her work as a psychoanalyst. It promised action, productivity and change. By having the loom activated by Anderson’s intervention, the history of weaving as it pertains to psychoanalysis was called up. We know that for Sigmund Freud weaving was a feminine mode of concealing penis envy and genital deficiency;25 and he came to this interpretation by analysing his daughter Anna Freud’s passion for it. On several occasions he attempted to persuade his daughter to stop weaving, knitting and sewing. In contrast to this negative interpretation of these practices, Anna Freud and more recently feminist scholars have shown how weaving and knitting are highly generative activities. In Elisabeth Young-Bruehl’s biography of Anna Freud we learn that a young Anna was taught to knit so that she could participate in the family’s knitting circle; made up of all the women in her family, it was an important feminine experience. As a young woman, Anna Freud helped her sister Mathilde recover from the death of their nephew Heinerle by knitting through their mourn‑ ing.26 Anna Freud integrated her love of knitting, sewing and weaving into her daily life as a type of cure, making all of her own clothes, and these activities even extended into her psychoanalytic practice. Late in life she told her niece that ‘of course’ she sewed all of her clothes by hand; ‘it would after all not be practical to use a sewing machine while I see patients’.27 Anna Freud knitted and sewed ‘so silently’ during her sessions with patients that one of her training analysts said he ‘hardly noticed it’.28 Knitting – a silent, productive and repetitive activity – enabled her to think differently, as appropriate to an analyst. Thus knitting, sewing and weaving functioned in many productive therapeutic ways for Anna Freud, and Anderson’s reliance on weaving as a vital activity in her art practice and installation called upon these associations. Anderson’s use of red fibre as the skeins of thread employed in these activities denoted a further set of connections. With its auto­ biographical reference to the artist’s memories of the long hours 202  inside the freud museums

spent anxiously awaiting the return of her mother, we entered further into Anna Freud’s consulting room and her ideas around childhood memories. Anna Freud developed Sigmund Freud’s initial psychoanalytic theories on this topic. For Anna Freud the transformation of childhood anxiety and unpleasure into pleasure was key to her practice. Through it she demonstrated how some children deal with anxiety and aggression via negative forms of signification such as repression, reaction formation, inhibition, projection, displacement or turning inwards; while others were able to transform displeasure into positive forms of sublimation in which, ‘when fused with the erotic impulses, the aggressive urges are relieved of their destructive qualities and make a decisive contribution to the purposes of life’.29 In adult life, this positive transformation can be accomplished by psychoanalytic treatment through its conversion of unpleasurable memories into a subject that once distanced from oneself can be recollected and worked through. In doing so, the memories are relieved of their destruc‑ tive qualities and can contribute to the purposes of life, in this instance through an art practice.30 The active reworking of personal history through the use of red fibre in Anderson’s art practice was not, as one might expect, accomplished by the girl–daughter doll in Confinement Room, but through the figure seated at the loom. This replica of the confined daughter functioned as a surrogate: as a mother–child she wove new stories out of the red fibre. The cocoons that were already processed and spun into balls may have represented bound memo‑ ries, perhaps a childhood memory of anxiety and longing. As a mother–daughter figure, she was taking action: weaving the grid that protected the girl–daughter figure as much as it confined her. As a daughter–mother, the figure at the loom both narrated and fictionalized the mother, and in coming to understand the mother as other, in turning her into a subject, perhaps the necessary distance between the figures was created. In moving back and forth between Anderson’s mother–daughter figure seated at Anna Freud’s loom and daughter doll confined and autobiogr aphic al fic tions  203

protected by the former doll’s activities, productive site-responsive psychoanalytic associations with knitting, weaving and sewing were activated. Anna Freud was very well aware of the generative aspects of these feminine practices as she relied on them within her psychoanalytic practice and everyday life. Certainly the father was barred in Anderson’s intervention, literally and figuratively; the relationships being attended to were feminine and female. In fact, the relationships involved a triangulation of three women: a daughter, a mother and a female psychoanalyst. By putting into play an analysis with Anna Freud, Anderson’s autobiographical fiction involved a set of intrasubjective and intersubjective doubles. Inside the consulting room we performed these different roles: as daughters, as our mothers, perhaps even as mothers. In all cases, the work that took place in the consulting room involved revision, interpretation and the rewriting of our personal histories in order to work them through. Not to work them through once and for all, but to work them through for the moment. Our histories and memories are in constant transformation. What became clear from situating Anderson’s intervention inside the Freud Museum was that the red skeins of fibre come to signify a process of becoming: as works of art and as a means of psychoanalytically understanding familial relations. In analysis with Anna Freud, ever-present childhood memories of fear and longing, of being alone, anxious and yearning for mother to return, were approached as a means of transforming difficult and painful personal memory into something usable, something closable, something approaching autobiographical fiction.

Acting Out with Melanie Klein: The Return of the Repressed

At the age of 60, Louise Bourgeois wrote the following note: The violence, grief and hatred has [sic] calmed down I have taken into my arms my memories (bad or good) and I have cradled them and soothed them.31 204  inside the freud museums

In this pithy and insightful self-reflection, the artist condensed the intensity of the complex dynamics she was living out between her emotional and psychic life, her memories, her relationships with those around her and the connections each had to her artistic prac‑ tice. This note was one of over 1,000 pieces of the artist’s ‘psycho‑ analytic writing’ – notes, thoughts, lists, sometimes accompanied by doodles or drawings written on ubiquitous sheets of typing or graph paper, index cards, writing pads or stationery – that were discovered in batches, first in 2004 and then in 2010, by Bourgeois’ assistant Jerry Gorovoy in the artist’s Chelsea home in New York City. These texts, not formal artworks by any means, were personal pieces of writing related to the more than 30 years of psychoanalytic treatment that Bourgeois undertook between 1951 and 1985. This is a dramatic discovery given Bourgeois’ long-standing criticism of psychoanalysis, her denial of its importance within her art practice, and her disregard for the value of psychotherapy. As Freud reminds us, to his chagrin, all case histories are a form of fic‑ tion, and these documents are no exception, offering an important insight into the complex negotiation of femininity at stake in being an artist, and the dynamic affective potential of the emotional and psychic work that is necessary: what Bourgeois forcefully articulates in the epigraph above as the violence, grief and hatred that need to be cradled and soothed. This form of aggressive holding echoes the psychoanalytic process of ‘acting out’. Connected to Bourgeois and yet displaced into the context of an exhibited case history, these autobiographical documents become a form of fiction. To begin to make sense of this cache and its position within Bourgeois’ œuvre, art historian and curator Philip Larratt-Smith brought together many of these papers along with a number of Bourgeois’ artworks for the landmark exhibition The Return of the Repressed. A portion of this show travelled to the Freud Museum London in 2012. The intervention that took place within the Freud Museum included 79 items, which is a vast number of artworks and pieces of writing to be exhibited in the rather small and already crowded space of 20 Maresfield Gardens.32 Even though autobiogr aphic al fic tions  205

louise bourgeois, untitled (2010), with small works and writings in the vitrines, louise bourgeois: the return of the repressed, the freud museum london, 2012

the dining room, Martha and Sigmund Freud’s bedroom, and Minna Freud’s bedroom were stripped back to form an armature for the texts and artworks, the space was still filled to the brim with Bourgeois’ sculptures, drawings and writings. Bourgeois’ favourite artwork, the bi-gendered Janus Fleuri (1968), was hung above Freud’s couch. The amputated and armed Knife Figure (2002) and three other major sculptures of partial bodies were located in the dining room. There were artworks on both of the landings, including The Dangerous Obsession (2003), while Untitled (2010) was installed in Sigmund and Martha Freud’s bedroom. Eight smaller sculptures were placed in the Museum’s vitrines, nestled in close proximity to almost 30 sheets of writing. Next door, in Minna Freud’s bedroom, Cell XXI (Portrait) (2000) and Cell XXIV (Portrait) (2001) were exhibited, surrounded by a set of watercolours and many more pieces of writing. Finally a human-scale Spider from 1994 was consigned to the garden. 20 6  inside the freud museums

The site-responsive affect of this crowded intervention consti‑ tuted something rather extraordinary. On the one hand, we were granted access to documents and artworks that would transform our collective understanding of Bourgeois’ art practice and its psychoanalytic dimensions. The writings offered us an opportunity to spend time with the artist’s perceptive, powerful and unflinch‑ ing accounts of herself, and her conflicting experience of being in psychoanalysis. Born out of her complex understanding of herself and her life as a psychoanalytic subject, once narrativized the texts become a remarkable form of autobiographical fiction. On the other hand, the curation of the show, particularly the choice and density of the material, produced an intense love–hate experience of being with the work. Confined and held by the Freud Museum’s powerful psychoanalytic and domestic setting, the engagement with Bourgeois’ intimate and powerful accounts of her feminine subjectivity took on a complex psychoanalytic experience of acting out of a negative transference. For Freud, transference is the process whereby conscious and unconscious libidinal impulses from the patient’s childhood are actualized as immediate sensations during psychoanalysis. In the clinical setting these impulses are directed towards the analyst and can be positive (affectionate) or negative (hostile). Acting out is a form of negative transference. This is when a patient is unable or unwilling to remember anything of what he or she has forgotten and repressed, and instead acts it out through aggression. For Freud, transference is the foremost form of resist‑ ance within psychoanalysis, and the patient’s cure is dependent upon the analyst discovering, interpreting and communicating the transference in such a way as to dissipate it for the analysand. In order to unravel this complex interpretation of the Bourgeois intervention in 20 Maresfield Gardens it is helpful to focus on Bourgeois’ psychoanalytic writings that dominated in creating the exhibition’s affect. By having these personal writings framed and displayed, they were turned into a form of art; works that spoke to the many sides of someone we know as Louise Bourgeois. autobiogr aphic al fic tions  207

framed archival documents by louise bourgeois from the louise bourgeois archive, louise bourgeois: the return of the repressed, the freud museum london, 2012

In 1958, six years into her psychoanalysis with the Freudian Dr Henry Lowenfeld, Louise Bourgeois wrote the following note in pencil on a blank sheet of white typing paper: The analysis is a jip is a trap is a job is a privilege is a luxury is a duty is a duty towards myself my husband my parents my children my is a shame is a farce is a love affair is a rendez-vous is a cat + mouse game is a boat to drive is an internment is a joke makes me powerless makes me into a cop is a bad dream is my interest is my field of study – is more than I can manage makes me furious is a bore is a nuisance is a pain in the neck – 208  inside the freud museums

In another piece of her psychoanalytic writing from c.1962, jotted down on typing paper in red ink with black and blue ink additions, we encounter Bourgeois’ ‘wants’: I want to get I want to keep I want to say. I want to tell I want to see I want to learn I want to know I want to know I want to control I want to hold I want to feel I want to remember I want to go I want to want I want to find I want to finish I want to get rid of I want to clean I want to be good I want to be better I want to do it I want to show I want to outdo I want to top it I want to accomp lish mastery

The insistent wanting continued for another four pages. All five pages, handwritten, were framed and hung side by side in the room that was once the parental bedroom. Close by, we also encountered her sense of failure, noted in pencil on white typing paper, c. 1957: step No 4 – I have failed as a wife as a woman as a mother as a hostess as an artist as a business woman and as any 47 – autobiogr aphic al fic tions  209

as a friend as a daughter as a sister I have not failed as a truth seeker lowest ebb33

A little further along, we read a note Bourgeois wrote in pencil on ruled paper in 1965, at the age of 64, When I do not ‘attack’ I / do not feel myself alive.34

In terms of interpretative frameworks for these writings, the psychoanalytic one was most prominent because they were shown in the Freud Museum, but also because we now know that Louise Bourgeois was extremely well read in psychoanalysis, even before she began her treatment.35 The list of references in her diaries and her psychoanalytic writings is long and varied: Sigmund Freud, Alfred Adler, Marie Bonaparte, Josef Breuer, Helene Deutsch, Françoise Dolto, Erik Erikson, Anna Freud, Karen Horney, Carl Jung, Melanie Klein, Ernst Kris, Jacques Lacan, Otto Rank, Wilhelm Reich and Wilhelm Stekel are all present. Although the language that Bourgeois uses in her notes is not necessarily the technical language of psychoanalysis, the meanings that are presented and evoked within her self-reflections and her artwork bear the stamp of psychoanalysis. What is even more striking is the way in which psy‑ choanalytic praxis, more than its theory, is manifest in Bourgeois’ thinking and emotional life, in her writings and in her art practice.36 We know that Louise Bourgeois first saw a psychoanalyst after the death of her father in 1951. His death, a traumatic event in the artist’s life, resulted in a deep depression. The depression lasted more than a decade and during this time she was unable to produce any artwork.37 Bourgeois’ first show after this hiatus occurred in 1964 at the Stable Gallery in New York. The first ten years of the artist’s psychoanalytic treatment enabled her to come out of her depression and make art once more. Bourgeois first saw Dr Leonard Crammer in late 1951 for a very short time, only a few months, and 210  inside the freud museums

then commenced her lengthy treatment with Dr Henry Lowenfeld in January 1952 and continued to work with him, with more regular or less frequent sessions, over the next thirty-three years until the analyst’s death on 5 August 1985. Lowenfeld, a Jewish, Marxist, Freudian psychoanalyst, had studied in Vienna with Freud. Like Freud, he fled Nazi Europe in 1938, and in Lowenfeld’s case he moved to the United States. Bourgeois’ work with Lowenfeld included an analysis of what scholar of English and American stud‑ ies Elisabeth Bronfen has called Bourgeois’ ‘idiosyncratic psychic drama’.38 Bronfen describes Bourgeois’ complex childhood that witnessed the early death of her mother in 1932, and a domineering, arrogant and philandering father who for many years had an open relationship with Bourgeois’ English nanny. From here, Bourgeois is said to have had a supportive adult relationship with art historian Robert Goldwater, to whom she was married in 1938 until his death in 1973, and with whom she had two children, adopted a son, and took on the role of motherhood while remaining an artist. Struggling to understand her childhood memories and balance her life as a mother and artist, Bourgeois managed to produce a prolific output of artworks and pursue her artistic ambitions. At the same time, the therapy confirmed Bourgeois’ sense of herself as a psychoanalytic subject, and clarified the strong and intertwined relationship between her artwork and treatment. The artist once said ‘I carry my psychoanalysis within the work.’39 By exhibiting Bourgeois’ artwork and her psychoanalytic writ‑ ings side by side in the Freud Museum, the history and practice of psychoanalysis were invoked by this site-responsive intervention, particularly the way in which Melanie Klein, a supporter and follower of Sigmund Freud’s ideas, was called upon by it.40 The Kleinian affect of the intervention can be understood by turning to psychoanalyst and feminist Juliet Mitchell’s interpretation of Bourgeois’ writings as a form of acting out, a form of repeat‑ ing a repressed memory through negative actions that are not understood, rather than remembering it and working it through. Mitchell argues in her analysis that the artist was able to ‘use’ her autobiogr aphic al fic tions  211

symptoms, in a psychoanalytic sense, to continue to make her artwork. Mitchell notices that Bourgeois’ art objects and writings are filled with ‘an imbrication of various and multiple preoc‑ cupations such as would arise within a clinical session’. Because these issues are ‘overdetermined’, Mitchell chooses to consider the ‘pervasive and violent jealousy’ that Bourgeois notes is ‘my strongest / emotion’.41 By focusing on an analysis of Bourgeois’ jealousy Mitchell concludes that, if psychoanalysis is a process through which the patient is relieved of their symptoms, there seems little to suggest that Bourgeois was relieved of many (or any) of the symptoms that beset her: her psychosomatic pains and illnesses, her terrible insomnia, her depressions, her phobias, her petite hystérie or her violent emotions – above all jealousy. She needed them all.

Mitchell argues that Bourgeois’ wish to become cured was sub‑ ordinated to her drive for artistic production. The psychoanalyst continues: She did have an analysis, it ‘cured’ her of nothing, nor should it have done; she used it to become an important artist. The talismanic precept of psychoanalytic treatment is ‘where id (unconscious) is, there (ego) conscious shall come to be’; for Bourgeois it was ‘where id (unconscious) is, there shall a sculpture (consciousness) come to be.’

The paradox that Mitchell is highlighting is the way in which Bourgeois worked with the knowledge that making manifest her repressed emotions, such as her jealousy and rage within her psychoanalysis, meant getting better. But, if that were to happen, her work would suffer, as these repressed emotions fuelled the creative process. Thus, Bourgeois’ conflict was feeling that ‘“get‑ ting better” and becoming a significant artist were in tension.’42 Because of this tension, Mitchell was attuned to the frequent references in Bourgeois’ writings to ‘acting out’ rather than the desideratum of psychoanalysis, the process of ‘working through’, which Bourgeois calls association. In psychoanalytic terms, the process of remembering, repeating and working through is the 212  inside the freud museums

means through which repressed memories are dealt with and dissipated, leading to a cure, whereas acting out is a form of repeating repressed memories through negative actions, which does not lead to a cure. Mitchell explains how in acting out, rather than working through, Bourgeois was able to keep the emotions raw and alive because her sculpture was to make conscious what we all experience unconsciously. She thus has to have more not fewer of her symptoms; both bad and good experiences must be intensified. … she goes into what is unbearable/unknowable (which is why it is repressed) and makes it conscious in visual form.43

In a careful and engaging way, art historian Mignon Nixon adds to the Kleinian reading of Bourgeois’ writings by tracing the artist’s use of the letter ‘L’ – ‘L’ for Louise and for her analyst Lowenfeld. Tracing this letter and its meanings, Nixon uncovers the ways in which Bourgeois’ politically and ethically charged artwork and her psychoanalysis function in relation to the complex machinations of the Kleinian subject. Feelings of aggression and violence are followed by anxiety, guilt and fear, and then the need for reparation. This is the case because, as Nixon explains, Bourgeois holds herself to account daily, even hourly, in a painstaking catalogue of self-examination, duly acknowledging the pleasures of her own beastliness … and the pain of its boomerang effects … Unsparing but never self-lacerating, [… Bourgeois] recounts the ‘psychic facts’ of life, … the destructive impulses in one’s life.

However, Bourgeois expresses chronic disappointment with the [psychoanalytic] process. It repeatedly fails her. Her hopes are dashed. She sinks into depression, anxiety, colère, and despair. But she does not give up. … Bourgeois’s direct references to Lowenfeld and to the analytic sessions are sparse. She writes for the analysis, not about it, recording dreams, feelings, fights, fits, fears, conversations, frustrations, recollections, accusations. … She writes about the writing itself.44 autobiogr aphic al fic tions  213

Nixon concludes by proposing that Bourgeois’ relationship to her psychoanalysis is a form of negative transference. For Klein, nega‑ tive transference is at the centre of analysis: feelings of violence, aggression, anxiety, and guilt are key. With each new visit to the show, these documents and artworks, so heavily laden with Kleinian acting out and negative transfer‑ ence, altered the site.45 On the one hand, the Museum formed a type of psychoanalytic ‘cradling and soothing context’ for them, something akin to the terms Bourgeois used for the supportive context she had found within her psychoanalysis. Made up of Sigmund and Anna Freud’s work spaces, as well as the Freud family’s domestic quarters, the space functioned as a comforting container for the products and traces – objects, notes, drawings and doodles – of an artist’s psychic, emotional and artistic life. On the other hand, time spent with Bourgeois’ artworks and texts, engaging with these items and the literature on them, the intensity of the relationship between the artist’s presence and the Freud Museum, the Museum itself as a site, and the role of a viewer became much more complicated. The experience became much closer to the complex love–hate relationship that the artist articulated as central to her self-understanding. As the encounters with the work and show developed, a difficult form of reciprocity emerged: the work attacked the context and viewer, as the site and viewer attacked it. This site-responsive symbiosis, to be attacked and attack, requires focus and explanation. Spending long periods of time with this writing and work meant spending time with, on the one hand, delightful, surprising, stimulating and thought-provoking insights and truths, and, on the other hand, with forthright, aggressive, demanding, claustrophobic and exhausting objects and texts. The dichotomy that the show effected opens up an important consideration: what is the correla‑ tion between the use to which Bourgeois put her psychoanalytic treatment, a use that enabled an acting out and making visible the unbearable and unknown of psychic life, and the way in which the work and show acted out and used the site and the viewer? 214  inside the freud museums

Bourgeois was aware of the dilemma she faced as a modern artist: a need for psychological release, and an audience to wit‑ ness that release. She wrote, at the beginning of her treatment in 1951, the following statement along with several doodles on her personal stationery: The drawing is the most basic psychologique [sic] release the modern artist is caught in a delemna [sic] in that he considers art as a psychological release and at the same time wants to have an audience46

As viewers of this particular intervention, we were members of that audience of whom Bourgeois spoke; and so was the Museum. In entering The Return of the Repressed inside the Freud Museum, we moved into a site with its own pressures and intensities to confront a condensed version of Bourgeois’ complex world. Layer upon layer of material objects, artworks, words and memories came together to create an almost claustrophobic space. This was a result of the artwork and writing itself, as well as the enclosed and restrictive space of the Museum: a space that when filled to the brim with intense work, such as that of Bourgeois, left a viewer little room to escape psychologically, emotionally or liter‑ ally for a breath of fresh air. The site, with its powerful sense of psychoanalytic history and memories bearing down, as well as the intimacy of the domestic and analytic spaces, resulted in a compressed relationship to Bourgeois’ writing and artwork. And this work gave us no relief. There were so many forceful verbal, visual and tactile objects, images and texts in the exhibition. Artworks were fragmented, broken, missing parts, in bits and pieces. The artist’s writing was strong, aggressive, overwhelming. Slowly moving through the intervention, looking, reading, listen‑ ing, seeing, engaging, remembering, sympathizing, withdrawing, autobiogr aphic al fic tions  215

shaking one’s head in astonishment, disbelief and frustration, and then in recognition and wonder, we were being asked to constantly reposition ourselves and our emotions, moving from sympathy and acknowledgement to hostility and anger, back and forth, over and over again. The site-responsive experience of this intervention was dramatically conflictual. We were subsumed into Bourgeois’ world: the dramatic world of a Kleinian subject. Following Nixon, we were witnessing a form of negative trans‑ ference. Following Mitchell, the experience was not one of work‑ ing through but acting out. If, as Mitchell suggests, Bourgeois’ acting out allowed her to go into that which was ‘unbearable/ unknowable’ and present this in visual and textual form, then the attacks that we sometimes encountered in our experience of this show in the Freud Museum resembled the traces of this process. Perhaps, then, the love–hate relationship that we experienced is one that rehearsed the acting out of a negative transference. As a complicated form of autobiographical fiction, it was as though Bourgeois’ artworks and psychoanalytic writings, as well as the curatorial fullness of the show, were acting out the complex situation that the artist negotiated all of her life, and as a viewer we were asked to give it back: loving it and hating it, both at the same time. A Love Letter to Sigmund Freud

Freud once said that transference is a ‘new edition of an old object’. The old object of our unconscious phantasies and wishes is made new when it is transferred onto our relationship with our analyst. Is this what happens when Sophie Calle’s old work is transferred into a new context; more precisely, when previously made and exhibited objects have an appointment with Freud? Sophie Calle’s intervention Appointment from 1999, curated by James Putnam, self-consciously mixed fact and fiction, objects and stories to create a discontinuous autobiographical fiction of the artist’s life. As Freud’s patients relayed to him vignettes, images, objects, phantasies and desires of their conscious and unconscious 216  inside the freud museums

sophie calle, the wedding dress, 1999

lives, so Calle left traces of hers throughout the Freud Museum. The rather banal personal relics that were placed within this context, such as a wig, a shoe, a painting, a typewriter and a letter, were transfixing when considered in relation to their textual counterparts: short, compelling accounts of the object written and narrated by Calle. Almost forms of confessions, these personal anecdotes were typed onto seductive pink cards, and they offered us clues to the objects’ potency.47 In the entrance hall, a blonde wig that Calle once used for a job she held as a stripper sat on the Freud family’s coffee table. The artist’s wedding dress rested upon Sigmund Freud’s couch, a memento of Calle’s youthful infatuation with an older man that was eventually consummated when she was 30 years old, while the bathrobe of the man who became her first lover at the age of 18 was draped upon one of Freud’s chairs. We were told that it was the same sort of dressing gown that Calle’s father had worn. Placed next to several of Freud’s phallic figurines from antiquity was one of the artist’s pithy narratives. This one recounted Calle’s autobiogr aphic al fic tions  217

sophie calle, the rival, 1999

wedding night, a lamentable evening from which she remembers that ‘An erection was the first thing marriage had given me.’ On a side table decorating the upper landing was a photograph of Calle’s fake wedding – her partner did not want to marry other than in an artistic performance – next to the image of Martha and Sigmund Freud’s nuptials. Placed on Anna Freud’s worktable, a love letter to Calle’s rival (her husband’s mistress) was partially obscured beneath an old typewriter, while next to it was a second love letter, this time one that Calle paid to have written to her by an imaginary suitor. Calle’s note explained that she wished she were the true recipient of both letters. The exhibition also included stories recounting non-sexual forms of love: for instance, the anecdote of a young Calle stealing treats from shops with her 218  inside the freud museums

childhood friend; the death of her grandmother; and the strength and fortitude exhibited by her great-aunt, who died at the age of 100. Together, these objects and texts formed a kind of love letter to Freud, a positive transference onto the site, and one of its most important inhabitants. Freud wrote about transference throughout his career.48 In his papers on technique, published between 1911 and 1915, the psy‑ choanalyst explained transference as a process whereby conscious and unconscious libidinal impulses are actualized as immediate sensations. In the clinical setting these impulses are directed towards the analyst and can be positive (affectionate) or negative (hostile). Sometimes, within the ‘especially favourable conditions’ of the consulting room, an intermediary transference can take place: a transference that is both a part of the ‘illness and real life’.49 This process is complicated and can be dependent on many things, including the patient’s childhood, adult life, personality and type of neurosis. For Freud, transference is the foremost form of resistance within psychoanalysis, and the patient’s cure is dependent upon the analyst discovering, interpreting and com‑ municating the transference in such a way as to dissipate it for the analysand. Calle’s personal objects and private narratives recount tales of lust, sex, pain, sadness, conquering fear, humour, penis envy and disappointment. Inside the Freud Museum, a site that contains two formidable consulting rooms – that of Sigmund Freud and a representation of the one used by Anna Freud – these narratives functioned as moments of transference: unconscious and conscious libidinal desires that were projected onto the analyst. In this case it was the figure of Sigmund Freud that was called up, or his proxy: us. The invitation card that accompanied and was included in this exhibition showed Calle standing in front of 20 Maresfield Gardens, about to enter and wearing Sigmund Freud’s coat. This is the coat Freud bought especially for his trip to England in order to be warm during the cold winters he anticipated finding here. In wearing the coat, Calle was taking on the cloak of the father, autobiogr aphic al fic tions  219

sophie calle at the freud museum london

making it a perceptive and witty instance of positive transference: where conscious or unconscious libidinal impulses – to be ‘with’ the father in the Oedipal complex – were actualized as immediate sensations. This speaking to the father continued throughout the show. The letters were almost all about the men in Calle’s life: her father, her father’s friend, her first sexual encounter with a man, her time as a stripper seducing and eliciting men’s desires as she danced, her husband and his infidelities. These narratives spoke to the figure of Freud – a male analyst onto whom she was projecting and narrating her innermost experiences of intimacy and seduction, as well as emotional upset, loss and sadness. Having these works in this site activated the figure of Freud, who became one and all of these men. For instance, in having Calle’s wedding dress laid out on Sigmund Freud’s couch, it was Freud who became the groom to the artist as analysand/bride. Or the use of his phallic antiquities 220  inside the freud museums

become stand-ins for Freud himself, as well as being metonyms for the ‘gift’ the artist received on her wedding night – her husband’s erection. Even when the memory was one of loss, it was still a positive transference that was played out: the picture of Calle’s fake wedding sitting next to Freud’s picture of his marriage to his beloved Martha worked to elicit Freud as a potential suitor and the experience of what love could have been for Calle. Taking on the role of the ‘ethnographer of everyday life’, Calle offered us a vast array of objects and narratives that provided us with a great deal of knowledge about the artist.50 By viewing and considering these personal details and anecdotes, we were asked to take on the role of the viewer/analyst. We, as viewer/analyst, were after all being asked to piece together a narrative of the subject/patient’s life through a series of fragments, which is one of the basic features of psychoanalysis. However, as viewer we may have responded in ways that an analyst should not: we may have been riveted or discomforted by what unfolded in front of and within ourself. Each station of the Calle intervention encouraged our desire to simultaneously know more, and the uneasiness of being told and knowing any of it at all.51 In effect, we were unable to perform the role of the non-sympathetic and non-judgemental psychoanalyst – which is the position to be taken by an analyst within the consulting room. Even though we couldn’t quite assume the role of analyst to Calle’s analysand, there was an overriding awareness of a sort of transference taking place from object and artist to viewer and site, the viewer as Freud’s proxy and the site as manifestation of Freud’s persona. Calle’s invitation, therefore, was ultimately for Sigmund Freud, as her objects and anecdotes spoke of their affection towards him, as though awaiting his return.52 Calle’s striking use of narrative in this show brought to mind the way in which Freud used his case histories to work out his understanding of transference. Often the case histories were at odds with his theoretical writings on transference because in the actual practice of psychoanalysis the theory did not always match it. Calle’s narratives also directed our interpretation of autobiogr aphic al fic tions  221

the objects, even if what we imagined them to be was not what she envisaged. Calle’s writings as a form of artistic practice also echoed Freud’s understanding of his case histories as a form of fiction. In the artist’s rather affective stories, placed next to her and Freud’s objects, Calle used a descriptive and non-judgemental language. She spends a great deal of time editing and re-editing her texts so that they evolve into unsentimental excerpts, fictitious autobiographical fragments that resemble the best of Freud’s case histories. Art critic and curator Robert Storr notes how in Calle’s writing, she ‘sabotages’ bourgeois propriety through the most subtle of changes to its codes.53 Freud, too, did something similar. Often apologizing to his audience and reader for impropriety, he spoke to them about the most inappropriate bourgeois activities, in the most bourgeois tone and manner. The similarities between Freud’s and Calle’s abilities at storytelling are stated rather nicely by curator and writer Ralph Rugoff when he writes: Not unlike the father of psychoanalysis, Calle is first and foremost a storyteller. While her art draws on the often-surreal melodrama of her life, it also frequently leaves us wondering if we are being told more, or less, than the truth. Vaguely suspicious details lurk in her most matter-of-fact accounts, yet at the same time her vignettes – however uncanny – never seem implausible.54

Like Freud’s concern, noted in the epigraph to this chapter, that ‘the case histories I write should read like short stories’, the fictional drive of storytelling and its relationship to psychoanalysis has always been an uneasy one.55 Having Calle’s work in the Freud Museum led us to wonder if she was in fact deliberately playing with this relationship, since in reading these intimate narratives we began to feel as though she was revealing, to us personally, her most private secrets – secrets that intrigued and discomforted; secrets that should only be recounted in the consulting room, to one’s analyst. When we looked at them more closely, and read them more carefully, we came to understand that the narra‑ tives functioned as a means of deferring and displacing any real 222  inside the freud museums

understanding of her interior life, for us, or for herself.56 In fact, what we were experiencing was storytelling at its best. All of the objects and narratives in Calle’s Freud Museum show were previously shown as Histoires Vraies, true stories. Some of the texts from the Freud exhibition go as far back as the Récits Autobiographiques/Autobiographical Stories from 1988–89 and others to Double Blind aka No Sex Last Night from 1992.57 In a discussion of Calle’s reuse of material in her work Double Game, art writer Rosa Saverino notes that ‘Calle engages the retrospective character of autobiographical writing in a process of rediscovering and reinventing the past through a revisionary act of writing.’58 From the point of view of autobiography and psychoanalysis, the continu‑ ous and consistent retelling of specific stories in the artist’s life becomes a process of writing and rewriting the self (this is, after all, what happens in the consulting room). However, in Calle’s previous works, in lectures, in interviews, these stories reappear with almost identical narrative plot, tone, language and structure. The stories offer a potential certainty of what is being relayed, while being attuned to their uncertainty.59 The artist seems to be aware of the voyeuristic position in which she places her viewer, and the concomitant desire to know that is being solicited, and one begins to wonder if we are being misled, and perhaps rightfully so. In an interview, art historian and curator Bice Curiger asks Calle, ‘What is your relation to the false and the real?’ To which Calle answers: Everything is real, everything is true in the works, there is just generally one lie included, but the lie is related to a frustration. … So every time there is a lie, and generally there is only one in each work: it is what I would have liked to find, and didn’t.60

Calle makes it abundantly clear that in the autobiographical fictions she creates one never knows what is real and what is a lie. This makes the transference in Appointment different from what takes place in psychoanalysis. In psychoanalysis we are expected to tell the truth in order for transference and a cure to take place. autobiogr aphic al fic tions  223

In Calle’s exhibition we are told carefully crafted truths that also include one lie, a lie we cannot locate, which makes everything a potential lie. As Rugoff remarks, ‘Calle’s art ultimately insists that, despite our self-scrutiny, we remain strangers to ourselves, largely unaware of the degree to which we fictionalise our lives.’61 Thwarted Desire

In psychoanalytic terms, as we repeat our stories to ourselves and to one another, we misrecognize a lie for a truth, and a truth for a lie. This is our thwarted desire rehearsing itself as a truth, or a lie. Repetition and fiction characterize each of the autobiographical exhibitions and artistic practices we have encountered. There is a sense in which the autobiographical traces or stories produced are reproductions, representations that are supposed to provide a stability and certainty to the artworks and the artists. We have seen how Calle’s anecdotal narratives and objects and Anderson’s working through of a childhood anxiety in adult life produce a form of repetition in which the same stories from their lives are found within their work and within the narratives that they construct about their art practice and their lives. This repetition is highlighted and transformed once their work is located within the Freud Museum and framed by psychoanalysis. In this context, the site-responsive nature of the framing becomes very specific, with Calle’s narratives teeming with affection for Sigmund Freud, and Anderson’s work calling upon Anna Freud for analysis. These interpretations are contingent upon the Freud Museum. In the case of Bourgeois, the insightful documenting of her feelings of aggres‑ sion and violence, followed by anxiety, guilt and fear and then the need for reparation that accompanied her emotional catharsis in the process of acting out, come to elicit this same affect from us. Calling upon Klein, we are compelled to rehearse this love/hate affect while acknowledging and empathizing with what we read, and at the same time feeling hostility and anger. The conflict we have with this work is heightened because we are inside the space of Sigmund and Anna Freud’s consulting rooms. Having Lucas’s 224  inside the freud museums

work in this space highlights the similarities in the work that has come before and functions as a form of rehearsal similar to a first analytic session, while at the same time the artworks garner a deeper understanding of their relationship to sex and sexuality. In the end, though, perhaps Adam Phillips is right when he states that ‘those who want to continue misleading themselves about the past write autobiographies; those who want to know themselves and their history have psychoanalysis’. His point is that when undertaking psychoanalysis, the repetition of the actions and stories we practise and tell ourselves are broken down, then rebuilt and told differently. That is how we stop misleading ourselves about the past and come to know something of ourselves, and our history. Clearly, the access granted by the artists, and Bonaparte in the photograph with which I began this chapter, is access to a representation of themselves that they construct through various forms of autobiographical fictions: a Calle, or Lucas, or Anderson or Bourgeois that I have encountered before. The stories that these artists tell are repetitions: the unyielding nature of the stories makes them both dependable and unreliable. Each time we write and speak the word ‘I’, we encounter something of ourselves and construct ourselves. Each story becomes the signature event in our understanding and knowledge of the artist, by which I mean we have often heard it before. It becomes how we know the artwork or how the story performs our knowledge of Lucas, Calle, Anderson or Bourgeois. In the main, these signatures, these artworks that we recognize as being of this individual artist, succeed in reinforcing what has come before, but sometimes, when they function as siteresponsive events within the Freud Museum for instance, they fail to do so and evoke something that is unknown, something that is unique and captivating about the artist, about ourselves and about the world around us. Certainly, both art and psychoanalysis have a transformative potential, but ultimately, because art is not psycho‑ analysis and psychoanalysis is not art, what we are presented with through these exhibitions is autobiographical fictions.

autobiogr aphic al fic tions  225

6 Seemingly Empty: A  Conceptual Museum in  Vienna

Now let us, by a flight of imagination, suppose that Rome is not a human habitation but a psychical entity with a similarly long and copious past – an entity, that is to say, in which nothing that has once come into existence will have passed away and all the earlier phases of development continue to exist alongside the latest one. Sigmund Freud1 In 1975, the time of my first visit [to the Sigmund Freud Museum Vienna], it was an apartment with bare walls, no furniture, and a few glass cases with manuscripts and other minor memorabilia. It was dominated visually by [Edmund Engelman’s 1938] photographs, blown up to life size, of how it once had been, photographs that stood in for all the objects that had been removed to London when the Freuds escaped from the Nazis. It had a derisible atmosphere, perhaps one deliberately induced to remind visitors of yet one more loss that the war had visited on Vienna; but it still prompted the thought that a museum of fake souvenirs is a fake museum – a screen museum, the Freudian might say. John Forrester2 Empty Spaces: A Radical Difference

‘I remember that I was both excited and afraid as I walked through the empty streets [of Vienna] toward Berggasse 19 that wet May morning in 1938.’3 So begins the young photographer Edmund Engelman’s memoir, recounting his journey to visit the ageing and ailing Freud at the behest of the psychoanalyst’s close friend and colleague August Aichhorn. The surreptitious, and highly

dangerous, visit was undertaken in order to photograph and record Freud’s professional and personal living quarters at Berggasse 19, apartments 5 and 6. He was to do so immediately as the Freud family was in the midst of the complex coordination of their flight from Nazi Vienna to a life of exile and freedom in London. Engelman shot 106 photographs of Berggasse 19.4 Enlargements of the photographs he took of Freud’s consulting room and study, together with a collection of archival material, form the basis of the display at the Sigmund Freud Museum Vienna. Other­w ise, the Museum is almost entirely empty. As Lydia Marinelli and Georg Traska succinctly put it, the Freud Museum Vienna is ‘a site stripped of its material core’.5 This stripping highlights and echoes the Freud family’s departure. It ensures that the site has a pervasive impression of absence and embodies this irreducible rupture in history. The Museum’s emptiness and the profound sense of absence that it has on its visitors have been negatively remarked upon since it opened. One of these commentators was John Forrester. Forrester’s first visit to the Sigmund Freud Museum Vienna produced in him, as he remembered it, a rather harsh and negative reaction. The ‘derisible atmosphere’ that he recalled of the Museum was based on the fact that, ultimately, it was a great disappointment. ‘With bare walls, no furniture, and a few glass cases with manuscripts and other minor memorabilia’, and dominated by Engelman’s photographs, the Freud Museum in Vienna held within it a host of ‘fake souvenirs’. It was, and it has been argued that it remains, devoid of any real, proper objects. It is filled with nothing, and thus ostensibly empty. For Forrester it is a ‘fake museum’, which, he suggested, Freudians may refer to as a ‘screen museum’. For‑ rester is not alone in his assessment of the Museum; many other visitors throughout its history have shared his negative reaction. I return to consider Forrester’s and some of the other comments made about the Sigmund Freud Museum Vienna quite closely, but for now I would like to pose a few questions in order to frame my discussion in this chapter. What exactly is it that Forrester seemingly emp t y  227

and others, including myself, see and experience when visiting the Sigmund Freud Museum Vienna? What is it that we wish or desire to see and experience? And what, in the end, do we not see but do experience? My proposition is that at Berggasse 19 we have so much that is present, but not in the traditional way in which a museum functions. In the Sigmund Freud Museum Vienna, and other museums that are founded upon empty spaces, something different occurs. Rather than a museum’s objects and collections driving our visit, a museum of empty spaces institutes a radical difference in what a museum is, how it functions and our experi‑ ence of it. That is, the empty spaces have their own histories, representations, memories, and these combine with our experience of them come together to form what I call a conceptual museum. The Sigmund Freud Museum Vienna is just such a conceptual museum. In this chapter I consider the history of the Freud family’s living and work spaces and the documentation of these spaces as a vital, living archive. I see the negative critiques of the seemingly empty Museum and what they offer us in terms of our under‑ standing of a museum of radical difference. The Vienna Freud Museum’s small yet permanent conceptual Contemporary Art Collection guides me, and leads me to propose that the Museum should be understood as modelled on conceptual art. Through my argument and analysis I posit that a conceptual museum more generally and the Sigmund Freud Museum Vienna specifically are based upon a complex interweaving of the historical, theoretical and imaginative potentialities of a site, and their affect on the viewer. This results in a seemingly empty space being, paradoxi‑ cally, rather full. A Living Archive In the Making

Freud and his family were forced to leave Vienna after the German Anschluss of Austria by Hitler’s Third Reich on 12 March 1938 had a very real impact on them.6 On 15 March the Gestapo searched Freud’s home. On 22 March the Nazis detained Freud’s youngest daughter Anna for interrogation. ‘In her bag, she hid a capsule 228  inside the freud museums

with a lethal dose of Veronal that she had received from Dr. Schur, the family physician’, so that, if necessary, she could take her own life. After an entire day of being held and ‘several hours of inter‑ rogation, Anna Freud was released’.7 On that day, Freud, anxious for the safety of his daughter and taking heed of the spread of anti-Semitism across Europe, made a decision. Although, as Freud wrote to his friend and colleague Arnold Zweig, he was still in a frail condition and recuperating on ‘the couch which is meant for others’ in ‘unusually violent pain’ from one of his ‘normal operations’ for the mouth cancer that he had been battling for 15 years, Freud knew without a doubt that emigration was a necessary measure for the survival of his family.8 In this hostile climate the Jewish photographer Engelman under­stood what was at stake in his visit to the Freuds less than two months later. Engelman continued his memoir by stating that I carried a little valise filled with my cameras, tripod, lenses, and film and it seemed to become heavier and heavier with every step. I was convinced that anyone who saw me would instantly know that I was on my way to the offices of Dr. Sigmund Freud – on a mission that would hardly have pleased the Nazis. It had only recently stopped raining. The sky was still dark and the cobblestones of Berggasse were glossy and wet. The dark day worried me. I was afraid that there might not be enough light for good interior photographs of the Freud apartment. Flash and floodlights were out of the question. I had been told that the apartment was under constant surveillance by the Gestapo. The only permanent record of the place where Freud had lived and worked for the last forty years would have to be made without arousing any suspicion whatsoever. I felt fear for my own safety and also for the Freuds, for I did not want to be responsible for some misstep which would endanger them now that they were so close to leaving Vienna safely.9

Having met with Aichhorn at the Café Museum on Karlsplatz a few days earlier, Engelman agreed that, as the historic apartment and offices were about to be broken up for storage and shipment, it would be of utmost importance seemingly emp t y  229

exterior of berggasse 19, 1938

for the history of psychoanalysis, … to make an exact record of every detail of the place where it was born so that, in Aichhorn’s courageous words, ‘a museum can be created when the storm of the years is over.’10

In effect, Engelman was asked to create a living archive, one dedicated to the past, present and future. Engelman’s archive was meant to be, and is today, both a documentation of Berggasse 19 in 1938, an archive of prime importance for the history of psychoanalysis, as well as a record that had prescient value and use. As imagined, Engelman’s photographs became essential in the creation of a future museum dedicated to Freud. And, as we have seen throughout this book, Engelman’s archive has been put to use by contemporary artists, theorists and psychoanalysts in various important ways. Thus, Engelman’s photographs were made in the past for posterity but continue to have a life in the present and, one can reasonably suppose, in the future. Engelman spent four days taking photographs of Berggasse 19. He documented the mise-en-scène of the consulting room, and its exterior spaces. Engelman took shots of the building’s 230  inside the freud museums

freud’s consulting room at berggasse 19, 1938

exterior, including the street, the building’s facade with all of the windows of the Freud family’s residence, Kornmehl’s kosher butcher’s shop, and the cooperative food hall that was a branch of a Social Democratic Consumers’ Union on the ground floor, as well as the imposing front door to the building, which as Engelman noted ‘on this day was draped with a swastika flag; another large swastika flag hung from the roof of the building’.11 Once inside, Engelman photographed the spacious entrance and hallway, the nineteenth-century stone staircase, and the exterior doors to apartments 5 and 6 (Freud’s living and professional quarters respectively). Stepping inside Freud’s apartments, he shot detailed photographs of their interiors. Engelman’s mission was to photograph the spaces of Freud’s personal life and professional practice, including his study, the consulting room and his patients’ waiting room, while always ‘keeping in mind that some day these photographs might be the only record available to recreate Freud’s offices and living quarters.’12 Engelman was prescient in his thought: these are the photographs that form the basis of the Freud Museum London, in terms of its antecedent, and in its seemingly emp t y  231

restaging of Berggasse. In effect, as discussed in Chapter 1, the Engelman photographs haunt Maresfield Gardens in representing the historical accretions that constitute it, and that bring us back to Berggasse. The presence of these photographs also disrupts the London Museum’s privileged and hagiographic sense of Freud’s consulting room as singular to London. Engelman, using two cameras (a Rolleiflex and a Leica), two lenses (150 mm and 28 mm wide-angle) and a light meter, wanted to record as much as possible ‘from positions where Freud usually stood or sat. … to see things the way Freud saw them, with his own eyes, during the long hours of his treatment sessions and as he sat writing’.13 However, in practice this presented technical difficulties and Engelman conceded to taking photographs from different vantage points, including those of the patient or visitor. Most of Engelman’s photographs are of what he called the ‘im‑ portant rooms’ – the study and consulting room – that he rushed to enter, unwittingly having taken only a couple of photographs of the waiting room.14 Upon entering the consulting room his ‘first glance’ of ‘the famous couch’ left him somewhat disappointed, as it struck him as ‘relatively small’; but he was ‘overwhelmed’ by the ‘masses of figurines which overflowed every surface’ and ‘filled every available spot in the room’.15 Engelman photographed the consulting room in detail, including the couch and its surround, the chair Freud sat in during his patient’s analysis, the many pictures and pieces of art in the room, the mementos and awards hanging on its walls, the typical Viennese ceramic tile stove, and the cabinets holding some of Freud’s vast collection of antiquities. Engelman visited the Freuds over only a few days, which afforded him very little time to photograph the study, including Freud’s extensive library and antiquities collection; his desk with its army of antique figurines which faced him while he read and wrote; the ‘quite strange’ chair that was designed especially for Freud; the ‘oddly decorative mirror’ that hung from the large windows in his study; and the view from the windows which looked out onto a courtyard.16 232  inside the freud museums

freud’s study at berggasse 19, 1938

Engelman made notes as he worked across the consulting room and study: his archival gaze documenting the spaces and their contents was meant to ensure that nothing was missed and that the photographs overlapped one another, thereby creating a detailed and complete panorama of the rooms.17 And yet, as literary theorists Diana Fuss and Joel Sanders note, at times Engel‑ man’s working methods became ‘slightly manic’ as he ‘obsessively transvers[ed] the same spaces’ and found it difficult to ‘negotiate the crowded terrain of Freud’s office, so cluttered with objects that many of the two thousand antiquities can be seen in these photographs spilling onto the study floor’.18 During one of these visits, while Engelman was at work, Freud unexpectedly interrupted him by walking into his study. Surprised by the meeting, as Engelman was told explicitly that he would not be meeting Freud, who was not well enough to receive guests, the two men were introduced by Aichhorn. Upon meeting and liking seemingly emp t y  233

Engelman, Freud agreed to have his portrait taken by him, as did his wife Martha and daughter Anna. Engelman continued his work and photographed the family’s living quarters, which were furnished in traditional upper-middle-class Austrian fashion, with hardwood furniture, oriental rugs, decorative crystal and china objects, family photographs and other memorabilia. Engelman also documented Anna Freud’s consulting room and sitting room, which she used for her professional psychoanalytic work with children. Each day as the photographs were shot, Engelman spent the entire evening and much of the night developing his pictures. The photographer organized and collated all of the images into an album, which, upon completion, Engelman presented to Freud. Engelman understood that, as a Jew, he too needed to escape Nazi Vienna. He knew that the photographic negatives could not travel with him, just in case they were found by the Nazis on his person, and threatened his life and the lives of the Freud family. As such, he left the negatives with Aichhorn in Vienna. After many months of hope, despair and hardship, Engelman managed to leave Vienna in January 1939, spent some time in a French detention camp, and finally made his way to New York in early 1940. Many years later, Engelman followed the trail back looking for the negatives. He found out that Aichhorn’s secretary Miss Regele had sent them to Anna Freud in London for safe keeping. Engelman visited Anna Freud at Maresfield Gardens and collected the negatives. These then became the basis for Engelman’s memoir of his experience of documenting Berggasse 19. An Absence Made Present

Vienna did not recognize the significance of Freud’s life and work until 1953, when a plaque was attached to Berggasse 19. It states simply: ‘From 1891 to 1938, in this house, lived and worked Professor Sigmund Freud, creator and founder of Psychoanalysis. ’ The history of the Sigmund Freud Museum Vienna is an in‑ teresting one and worth recounting in some detail. It is, like the Freud Museum London, a story of a Foucauldian dispositif. In 234  inside the freud museums

this case the ideological formation of the Vienna Museum is a story based on its constitution and demonstration of the absence and trauma at its core. This absence works to constitute it as a conceptual museum: one that is paradoxically seemingly empty and all too full. The strategic play of power required in creating, reproducing and maintaining this paradox is practised through its staging of Freud’s consulting room and study, its guidebooks and audio-guide, its education programme and Contemporary Art Collection. Maintaining the paradox of emptiness and fullness, of it not being a ‘proper’ museum, has been a part of its make-up from its inception and continues to this day. In 1968, with the founding of the Sigmund Freud Society in Vienna, Frederick J. Hacker, its first president, received grants from the federal government and the Vienna city council to begin the process of acquiring apartment 6 in order to establish a museum. This apartment included the central spaces of Freud’s professional practice between 1907/8 and 1938, including the entrance hallway, waiting room, consulting room and study. (Apartment 5, Freud’s family home, was not acquired by the Museum until 1986.) Under the purview of Dr Harald Leupold-Löwenthal, who later became president of the Sigmund Freud Society, the rooms of apartment 6 were quickly renovated in order for the Museum’s opening to coincide with the 27th International Psychoanalytic Congress in 1971 in Vienna. This was the first Congress to take place in Vienna since the rise of National Socialism. These spaces formed, and remain to this day, the core of the Sigmund Freud Museum Vienna. In 1971, almost 35 years after Freud was forced to leave Vienna, the empty spaces of Berggasse 19, once alive with the private lives and the intellectual and professional labour of Freud, his family, colleagues and friends, became a museum dedicated to Freud. On 15 June 1971 the Freud Museum opened to the public. Anna Freud, having been kept abreast of the Museum’s development, returned to Vienna for the first and only time since the Freuds fled Austria, to celebrate this occasion: a museum in Vienna dedicated to her father’s life and work. seemingly emp t y  235

view from freud’s study into his consulting room, sigmund freud museum vienna

Before the Museum’s launch many design options were dis‑ cussed by the committee that was headed by Leupold-Löwenthal. In charge of its design, organization and display, the committee conferred upon but decided against an extremely barren arrange‑ ment that would have only two pieces of furniture within the entire museum: a replica couch and a single armchair placed in their original positions during Freud’s time, within an otherwise empty consulting room.19 Instead ‘the basic idea of [the Museum’s] design’ was ‘to present the 1938 appearance of the rooms by means of enlargements of Engelman’s photographs and, in addition, to give a pictorial presentation of Sigmund Freud’s life and develop‑ ment and of his creation, psychoanalysis’, as Leupold-Löwenthal states.20 And thus the image archive as the basis for the Museum’s display was established. Still extreme in its effort to maximize the idea of absence, this is the design the committee duly employed for apartment 6. During the Museum’s planning stages Anna Freud was con‑ tacted, and as a part of her contribution to the Museum she sent from London the furniture that once inhabited the waiting room in Berggasse, so that that space would to a certain extent resemble 236  inside the freud museums

the layout during her father’s lifetime. Anna Freud also donated a small selection of Freud’s antiquities, several volumes from his book collection, and various other documents to the newly formed Museum. Because the bulk of Freud’s collection of antiquities, books and furniture remained at Maresfield Gardens, where Anna Freud was still living and practising, the Museum staff in Vienna decided to produce a purposefully ‘didactic’21 display of Freud’s consulting room and study through various types of archival documentation: photographs by Engelman and others; diagrams; first editions and offprints of Freud’s work lent by various institutions and private collectors; handwritten inscriptions; souvenirs; as well as other archival material.22 For the first decade of the Museum’s life a total of 140 photographs and original documents were placed in the consulting room only, which is a great deal of material for a rather small room. In 1974 further material was added.23 The archive and documentation on display in this core part of the Museum – the waiting room, consulting room and study – now totals 351 pieces. This is quite an archive, and quite an extensive exhibition of material. Intriguingly, the bulk of the archive is displayed around the edges of the consulting room and study, and housed within flat, built-in wall cabinets. Engelman’s enlarged photographs are displayed on the bottom half of the cabinets, forming a flat, panoramic screen-like display of how the vibrant and brimming rooms once were. Thus the two-dimensional display emphasizes both what is absent – all of the objects, artefacts, books and furniture that were once held within the two rooms – and the emptiness of the rooms themselves. It is this sense of emptiness that provokes such confusion, hostility, anger and disappointment in the Museum’s visitors. It is also one of the most intriguing and meaningful aspects of the Sigmund Freud Museum Vienna. I return to this later. For now, I would like to simply introduce a context for this type of radically conceptual installation in relation to conceptual art exhibitions. In order to do this, I bring to mind both the seemingly emp t y  237

freud’s study, sigmund freud museum vienna

radical possibility that the Freud Museum committee entertained – that of having only a replica couch and chair in the consulting room – and the display that the Museum ended up with, which produces a concerted sense of emptiness. Both of these spatial arrangements echo, and in fact contribute to, the long history of the radical empty gallery space as employed by artists, mainly conceptual artists, from 1958 to the present as a means of signalling the constitution of the gallery and the art work as an ideological, social, economic and cultural construction.24 The opening of the Sigmund Freud Museum Vienna in 1971 occurs in the middle of this history, and notably coincides with the focal point of the empty gallery exhibition at the height of conceptual art. This coincidence draws our attention to the wider reverberations induced by the Freud Museum: the relationship between the Museum and con‑ ceptual art’s exhibition history; the Vienna Museum’s conceptual Contemporary Art Collection; the radically conceptual emptiness of the Museum and the criticisms it provokes; and the historical, cultural and ideological context for the Museum. The opening of the Sigmund Freud Museum Vienna in 1971 and the creation of this seemingly empty museum with its paradoxical excess of archival documentation necessitate further reflection. Leupold-Löwenthal thought that the visitor required some support in garnering a sense of what was once in these spaces, and enacted 238  inside the freud museums

through the proliferation of the archival documentation on display. For this purpose, he and Hans Lobner produced with the simplest apparatus … the first mimeographed catalogue, which was needed because it was our policy to avoid having captions under the pictures, so as not to disturb the graphic representation and the arrangement of the photographs and documents.25

To this day, the visitor is presented with the option of using one of these catalogues, now photocopied and translated into several languages, to assist her as she makes her way through the Museum. The catalogue gives detailed information on each of the 351 items on display. This abundance of archival material and documentation resonates with the ways in which, at its height, conceptual art also relied on this type of material. The visitor to the Freud Museum cannot possibly read the hundred-page booklet of documentation that she is given upon her arrival, or consider it in its entirety while visiting and viewing the 351 item-strong archive on display. There is simply not enough time to read through the documentation, and thus I suspect that very few visitors use it in an extensive or exhaustive manner. Instead, the visitor is left to view the archive on display in a rather cursory fashion, glancing from one item to the next, until her gaze lands upon something that is of particular interest. This item is then looked up in the catalogue and read about in detail. This sense of vagueness about what one is looking at must certainly add to the sense of absence and emptiness that the visitor experiences in the space. As each item on display is numbered and referenced in the catalogue, this programmatic structure within the display de‑ termines to a large extent how the visitor moves in and around Freud’s professional spaces. Beginning with the entrance hallway and through the analysands’ waiting room, the visitor, like the analysand, is guided into the consulting room. We move around the edges of half of the consulting room viewing the display and then reach the doors to Freud’s study, which are open, as they seemingly emp t y  239

were in Freud’s time, emphasizing for him the correlation between practice and theory, between listening and writing. Stepping into the study, the visitor is guided around the edges of the room in a clockwise rotation. Eventually we arrive at the small mirror that hangs at the centre of the large windows in the study, so that the visitor, like Freud before, can gaze upon his or her own image. From here, the visitor returns to the double doors and moves back into the consulting room to complete the viewing, and then moves back out to the waiting room. This clockwise movement through the consulting room and study establishes their integral connection to each other, a connection that was of vital importance to Freud.26 What is striking about this path is that the visitor is made to walk around the edge of the exhibition space, rather than across or through it. This route emphasizes the overall emptiness of the space and underscores its strong sense of absence. This also makes clear that there is a radical difference between this museum and a traditional museum filled with objects in vitrines situated within its exhibition space rather than simply around its edge.27 Together, the archival, documentary and anthropological approach taken in the Freud Museum’s display – the flattened, two-dimensional layout creating a screen-like display; the use of souvenirs; the prevalent use of photography; the didactic nature of the catalogue; and the way in which visitors are guided around the space – come together to emphasize a seeming emptiness, and thus make apparent what is seemingly absent in the Museum.28 Seemingly empty, seemingly absent. I return to this ‘seemingly’ later. For now, the overriding sense of the Museum is that it is paradoxically full of absence. This paradox, a museum that is both overflowing and yet empty, reminds us, as Ingrid Scholz-Strasser, former director of the Sigmund Freud Museum Vienna, insists, There is no replacement, no reconstruction; one just realizes that there are empty rooms [in the Sigmund Freud Museum Vienna], and one has to find one’s way through them. There is no memorializing; rather, the experience is always different, 240  inside the freud museums

and is concerned with challenging and playing with the viewer’s expectations. The challenge of the last 25 years has been to communicate through space (rather than objects) and ask questions of space, its histories, etc.29

Scholz-Strasser makes it clear that any endeavour to retrieve and represent the past, to replace or reconstruct it, is impossible. What this means in light of my analysis is that the aura of these spaces during Freud’s lifetime is irrecoverable, the historical rupture is irreducible, and the images thus function as loss through and with which we live. It is this absence and paradox that produce such negative reactions in visitors, and that also provide them with some rather disturbing fantasies. This is Not a Museum

Lydia Marinelli, affiliated with the Freud Museum since 1992, and director of the Research Division from 2004 until her untimely death in 2008, writes about the complicated responses that visitors and museum experts have had – and, one can conjecture, continue to have – towards the Museum. Marinelli reflects upon a course she attended for museum professionals. During this event, the functions and conditions of what constituted a museum were being discussed, and one participant spoke up and said, ‘I don’t think you [the Sigmund Freud Museum Vienna] deserve the name. You shouldn’t call yourselves a museum, what you have here has nothing to do with a museum. Museums exhibit works of art or collections, but this…’ Although the seminar leader attempted to explain the ways in which the definition of the museum had been opened up, and the possibilities it could now serve had shifted, even the most liberal and open-minded of the participants had difficulty in accepting this Museum as a museum. Marinelli explains that [t]he reservations expressed concerned the Sigmund Freud Museum in Vienna, which had been branded the product of name usurpation. … It was not a matter of revising the definition of ‘museum’ or of less outmoded objectives for the seemingly emp t y  241

institution. What was being expressed here was the inadequacy of this place itself, the incongruity between the notion and the location, the idea and the social institution, which initially eluded conceptual systematization. This sense of incongruity is caused by the fact that this museum does not offer to the eye what the associations surrounding the institution demand; instead of satisfying visitors’ expectations, it disappoints them.30

This is the radical difference between the Sigmund Freud Museum Vienna and other more traditional museums, including its counter­ part in London. Disappointment and frustration are responses that the Vienna Museum has provoked for some time. In the 1960s, psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan visited Berggasse 19, and ‘found to his disappoint‑ ment nothing but a shabby and locked door. What had he hoped to see but a house, plain and simple?’31 Other visitors bring such longing and desire with them that they imagine seeing what is not there: the couch for instance. Marinelli mentioned how visi‑ tors coming back to Vienna to visit the Museum once more insist that during their last visit Freud’s couch was in Vienna, which of course it was not, since it has not been at Berggasse 19 since Freud’s exile in 1938. It is in London, and perhaps they saw it in London, or happened upon one of Engelman’s photographs and imagined having seen it in Vienna. Berggasse 19 and Freud’s life signify so many things to so many visitors. For some it is an everyday residence where they have led their day-to-day lives since the end of the Second World War; others confront this life with traumatic memories in which this mundane, everyday life was founded on violence; still others believe that a center of the psychoanalytic world lays buried here.32

The radical difference of the Sigmund Freud Museum Vienna, especially as a personality museum, means that all of these in‑ terpretations and desires of what will be found at Berggasse are thwarted. It simply does not function in the way that traditional personality museums based on the life and work of a famous person (most often a man) must do. As Marinelli points out, 24 2  inside the freud museums

traditionally the visitor expects to see ‘the remains of an authenticlooking interior, preferably one that creates the impression that the poet, philosopher, etc. has just left the room’. This creates ‘a continuum between past and present through a suggestive inter‑ play of absence and presence. Things of the past do not seem lost in this context, but rather aufgehoben in both senses of the Hegelian term, i.e., both preserved and raised to a higher level.’33 This is certainly what the Freud Museum in London accomplishes. It is a memorial and mausoleum to Freud. It is full of Freud’s possessions, and constitutes itself as a hagiography to Freud. This is precisely the function that the Freud Museum in Vienna cannot perform. In Vienna, ‘normality, banishment, genocide, and psychoanalytic myths of origin commingle’ and these ‘stories converge that in other narratives move apart’.34 This convergence of narratives, and its irreducibility, must be maintained within the Freud Museum Vienna in order for it to resonate with its own history. The core of the Museum must remain an empty place, an empty apartment, which has nothing but an address to mark it and serves as a permanent reminder of obliteration and banishment[;] the room resists the affirmative construction of meaning and remains inherent as a block in traumatic constellations. The story that can be told about it creates no safe horizon that could lend itself to stabilization. In fact, the exhibited emptiness is not merely the product of history, but is equally the product of a form-giving intervention – as are other undertakings working in three dimensions also. The museum answers the question of what there is to see here by highlighting the moment of disappearance and becoming the signpost to a place located elsewhere.35

What Marinelli’s analysis points to, and enables me to argue, is the way in which the Sigmund Freud Museum Vienna puts the issue of representability itself into question. Here it is not a matter of representing trauma but the impossibility of doing so that is embodied, enacted and affected by the Museum. This Museum is not a trauma museum. Rather, it is a site of trauma. The Freud seemingly emp t y  243

Museum Vienna does not function as a form of memorialization and positive reassurance, as Marinelli rightly states. Instead, it maintains the displacement and irreducibility of history, memory and meaning. In these ways, the Museum’s seeming emptiness functions in such a way as to point to a radical difference from other trauma museums.36 These radical differences form the basis for an alternative understanding of what a museum can be and does by enabling me to conceive of it as a conceptual museum. Here, in Vienna, there is no stabilization, no safe horizon. It is, as Marinelli puts it, a ‘signpost to a place located elsewhere’.37 Having said that, I think it is vital to remember in this Freud Museum that this ‘elsewhere’ is actually located here, in and at the Sigmund Freud Museum Vienna. It is here that the lieux de mémoire, as Pierre Nora would say, are located; where ‘memory takes root in the concrete, in spaces, gestures, images, and objects’.38 In fact, Berggasse 19 is similar to what Freud says about Rome in the first epigraph to this chapter: it is ‘a psychical entity with a similarly long and copious past – an entity, that is to say, in which nothing that has once come into existence will have passed away and all the earlier phases of development continue to exist alongside the latest one’. As we will continue to see, the Sigmund Freud Museum Vienna as a site of radical difference and as a site of memory is exemplary of a conceptual museum.39 Conceptual Art Inside the Museum

The archival, documentary, anthropological and screen-like aspects of the Museum’s core display, as well as the relationship between the Sigmund Freud Museum Vienna and the history and criticality of the radically empty exhibition, constitute the Museum’s radical difference, and its constitution as a conceptual museum. Addition‑ ally, this Freud Museum’s Conceptual Art Collection plays a unique role in its constitution as a conceptual museum. There are three main phases in this history: the first in 1989, the second in 1997, and the final phase beginning in 2002. As we will see, under the directorship of Ingrid Scholz-Strasser (1996–2013) there was a very 24 4  inside the freud museums

tight understanding of the relationship between contemporary art and the Vienna Museum. Each of the pieces in its small col‑ lection was especially chosen for its conceptual perspicuity, and its resonances with the Sigmund Freud Museum Vienna.40 This is quite different to the Freud Museum London’s open policy to its exhibitions that has resulted in a diversity of interventions and potential meaning for the Museum and the artwork. In the case of Vienna, the idea was, as Scholz-Strasser notes, to draw ‘a link between psychoanalysis and art … at Berggasse 19’ that would define the Museum in quite precise conceptual ways.41 The first phase of the Museum’s relationship to contemporary art began in 1989. On the occasion of the fiftieth anniversary of Freud’s death, and the centenary of the Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein’s birth, Vienna planned a series of celebra‑ tory events. One of these was an invitation extended by ScholzStrasser and curator and gallerist Peter Pakesch to conceptual artist Joseph Kosuth. Scholz-Strasser and Pakesch invited Kosuth to create an artwork that would mark the occasion of these sig‑ nificant historical milestones, and to coincide with the Museum’s opening to the public of apartment 5 at Berggasse 19. Being the first exhibition by a contemporary artist at the Museum, this was an important moment in the Museum’s history. As well as marking Vienna’s and Austria’s acknowledgement of Freud and his legacies, it highlighted the relationship between conceptual art and psychoanalysis. Kosuth wanted to ensure that all of this was suitably recognized. In order to achieve this, the artist, work‑ ing together with Scholz-Strasser and Pakesch, came to invest the Freud Museum, and Vienna, with a vital link to conceptual art. They decided to procure a contemporary art collection for the Museum. To begin, they asked six of the most prominent conceptual artists of the time to donate one work each to what they initially called the Foundation for the Arts, Sigmund Freud Museum Vienna. Along with Kosuth’s Zero & Not and his work (O.&A./F!D! (to I.K. and G.F.) (1987), the Foundation acquired John Baldessari’s Study for a Red Intruder (Blue) (1989), Pier Paolo seemingly emp t y  245

Calzolari’s Avido (1968), George Herold’s Amor and Psyche (1989), a piece from Jenny Holzer’s The Living Series (1981–82), Ilya Kabakov’s The Man Who Flew into His Picture (1987–89) and Franz West’s Liège (1989). Thus, in 1989, what had originally been scheduled as a one-person show of Kosuth’s work in apartment 5 ended up being a group exhibition wherein all of the eight artworks were installed in the newly acquired space of the Freud Museum, and became its first contemporary art intervention, and its first site-responsive exhibition. In terms of Kosuth’s contribution, the artist decided to install a work from his Zero & Not series, a project that was indebted to Freud’s writings. The Zero & Not project was invested in the artist’s notion of a ‘conceptual architecture’, which involves an artwork’s activation of a space’s history and memory.42 In each of the works in the Zero & Not series, Kosuth took an excerpt from Freud’s writings and had the text silk-screened on paper and then applied as wallpaper onto the interior walls of the site. Each paragraph of the text is numbered, and the text is struck through by black masking tape so that the words remain barely legible. Having been given the opportunity to exhibit in the Freud family’s apartment, it seemed only appropriate that Kosuth construct a piece from this series for the space. For the Sigmund Freud Museum Vienna installation Kosuth used an excerpt from the original German version of Freud’s important – and in the psychoanalyst’s mind his best – work, The Interpretation of Dreams. Kosuth states that in the Zero & Not series there is an ‘absence presented’ which precipitates a manifold deconstructive play.43 This alternation and its discursive implications constitute the artwork’s site-responsive insight. The Freud Museum installation brought to mind the importance of the trace within psychoanalysis. Kosuth’s Zero & Not installation put Freud’s work under erasure; the psy‑ choanalytic text and its ideas were struck out, made seemingly absent, and yet were still present in their trace. The text under erasure, with its lasting trace, encouraged us to think about Freud’s insights into the functioning of memory, repression and screen 246  inside the freud museums

franz west, liège (1989) with joseph kosuth, zero & not (1989), sigmund freud museum vienna, 1989

memories, wherein experiences leave ever-present traces on the subject even when they become linked to another experience, or barely remembered, or not remembered at all. The textual erasure and concealed aspects of Kosuth’s artwork also invoked Freud’s understanding of the human subject as archaeological. As discussed in Chapter 2, for Freud our formation is stratified and covered over in various ways. It is the function of psychoanalysis to excavate these layers in order to bring our memories to the fore and offer us self-knowledge and relief from our symptoms. In addition, having an excerpt from Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams on the walls for us to consider reminded us of the psychoanalyst’s groundbreaking work on this subject, especially his use of condensation, displacement and translation as pivotal modes of understanding dreams, which were quoted in Kosuth’s seemingly emp t y  247

ilya kabakov, the man who flew into his picture (1987–89), with joseph kosuth, zero & not (1989), sigmund freud museum vienna, 1989

installation. The text as an imprint of language on the walls of Berggasse also reminded us of the importance of language for psychoanalysis – it is after all the talking cure – while also echo‑ ing the multitude of voices indebted to it; voices that spoke to Freud as his patients, colleagues, friends and visitors. Together, these interpretations of Kosuth’s artwork and the lessons it offered us function intriguingly as a type of screen memory, a form of layering memories and contingent histories (as well as text) that echoes the core installation of the Freud Museum itself. Kosuth’s Zero & Not placed on these walls, imbued as they are with layers of history and memory, became the intellectual and conceptual wallpaper for the exhibition: the piece and the site functioned as the context and ground against which all of the other works were displayed. 248  inside the freud museums

Within and in relation to Kosuth’s Zero & Not intervention, each of the other artworks found a place in apartment 5: the entrance hall, Freud’s bedroom, Anna Freud’s therapeutic quarters, and Freud’s sister-in-law Minna Bernays’ sitting room and bedroom are all inhabited by a work of art. Each work responds to the site and animates the space, its histories and psychoanalysis in its own siteresponsive way. Working with psychoanalysis’s more therapeutic aspects, Franz West’s installation Liège, named after a noun which refers to the German word for a divan-like couch, and to a city and province in Belgium, was made up of three items: an iron couch, a pedestal on which it sits, and a document that invited the viewer to lie down on the couch. The installation’s meanings as a work of art were based on its invocation of the key object within psychoanalysis – the couch. By inviting us to lie down on it, this participatory and social object invoked Freud’s initial arrangement of the mise-en-scène of the consulting room and his unique use of a couch. As we know from the history of the couch analysed in Chapter 1, the couch was enormously important to Freud. When his patients lay down on it, they were able to engage in free association that led to the release of repressed memories, slips of the tongue, transference, for instance, and ultimately the working through and curing of the patient’s symptoms. In West’s installation we are being asked to lie down on the couch and experience the history of this position in the space in which it was conceived. It also highlighted the way in which the theoretical work of psychoanalysis comes from a therapeutic practice. Kabakov’s installation The Man Who Flew into His Picture brought together a painting made up of an expanse of white background and a tiny, silver figure flying into (or perhaps out of) the picture frame. For this work, Kabakov reused objects found in the Freud apartment when the Museum purchased it: a wooden table, two chairs and a trestle. On the table were a series of notebooks recounting fictitious stories based on the artist’s life and memories of Soviet Russia. The furniture and painting were in positions that encouraged the viewer to sit down and read through the seemingly emp t y  249

notebooks. The site-responsive nature of the work is encapsulated in the analysis of it by art critic Jan Avgikos: ‘we know that all histories, in the retelling, are fictions. Who better than Kabakov to demonstrate? In the large outer sitting room, a free-standing banister demarcating zones signified by text and canvas, he or‑ chestrates a game of transference.’44 By presenting us with his childhood memories, Kabakov was working within the frame of transference, where childhood memories are projected onto the analyst during treatment. However, as fictitious accounts of his life, these narratives also interrogated the way in which we construct the truths we hold onto about ourselves: truths that can easily turn into fiction. As discussed in the previous chapter, Freud was attuned to the fictional character of his case histories, and perhaps this too is invoked in the site-responsivity of Kabakov’s installation. By calling up the history of the site in its use of found objects, as well as the notions of memory and transference, Kabakov’s work called up the ‘objects and memory of the site’.45 The second phase of the Freud Museum’s Contemporary Art Collection’s history occurred in 1997. At that time, the Foundation, still under Kosuth’s directorship, and always in discussion with Scholz-Strasser and Pakesch, expanded to include six additional new works that touched upon issues related to psychoanalytic theory and practice: Clegg and Guttmann’s Text in Context (1997), Jessica Diamond’s Tributes to Kusama: Me Constellation (1995), Marc Goethals’s Le Nom-du-Père (1996), Sherrie Levine’s A Pair of Shoes (1974), Haim Steinbach’s AHA! (1997) and Heimo Zobernig’s Untitled (1997).46 For instance, Clegg and Guttmann’s photograph depicts a life-size view of one of the bookshelves in the library at the New School for Social Research in New York, which holds the complete 24 volumes of Freud’s writings, nestled in between other texts related to the psychoanalyst’s thoughts. Having this work in the Sigmund Freud Museum Vienna invoked Freud’s ideas and genealogy. The enormous amount of literature related to Freud’s writings referred us back to Foucault’s important assertion that Freud was a ‘producer of discursivity’. 250  inside the freud museums

Another artwork which functions in a similar fashion, in that it demonstrates the importance of Freud’s work, is Zobernig’s silver-sparkled silkscreen print which represents an enlargement of the memorial plaque at the Belle Vue House on the outskirts of Vienna, wherein Freud is said to have discovered the secret of dreams. As we have seen in Chapter 3, Freud considered this to be his most important work. Freud’s account of The Interpretation of Dreams is significant for what it offers us in terms of dream analysis, but perhaps more importantly for what it held for him in relation to the death of his father, his crisis in self-confidence, and the precipitation of his own self-analysis documented in it. In a more lighthearted vein is Steinbach’s work, which at‑ tests to moments of humour and revelation that take place within the consulting room. In a witty tribute to psychotherapy, Steinbach had printed onto paper the exclamatory word AHA! In analysis, this word speaks to that strikingly revelatory and dawning moment when something becomes clear to a patient. It is a moment that we wait for, and one that can change our perception of ourselves, irrevocably. The site-responsive effect of having each of these works within the Sigmund Freud Museum Vienna is to point to the history and continued expansiveness of Freud’s ideas in the photograph of the complete volumes of his work and associated texts; the places in which his ideas emerged is invoked by Zobernig’s silkscreen of Belle Vue House, while the ongoing importance of the clinical work he initiated is pointed to in Steinbach’s print. Since 2008 one work from the Sigmund Freud Museum Vienna’s Contemporary Art Collection has always been on display in the storefront gallery found on the ground floor of Berggasse 19.47 As Kosuth succinctly states, the Collection is a ‘living monument’ honouring Freudian and post-Freudian thought.48 The third and final significant moment, to date, in the coor‑ dination and intervention of contemporary art into the Sigmund Freud Museum Vienna began in 2002 with a series of temporary exhibitions in the storefront gallery. Entitled A View from Outside, seemingly emp t y  251

the series has included nine installations of site-responsive and site-specific works. The series has been coordinated and curated by Scholz-Strasser and Pakesch in cooperation with the Society of Friends of the Fine Arts. The invited artists are given ‘free rein’ to work within the space and site – what Scholz-Strasser calls the Museum’s ‘laboratorium’.49 These interventions are not a part of the Contemporary Art Collection. As mentioned, they are commis‑ sioned for the storefront gallery, and exhibited in what was during Freud’s lifetime Siegmund Kornmehl’s kosher butcher’s shop. And yet they have a very particular relationship to the Collection and the Museum. As Scholz-Strasser has noted, In 2001, within the framework of the museum’s expansion, the integration of the street-level space created a new external surface through which it can communicate with a wider public. The ‘display window’ gave a new definition to the building’s entrance by providing a platform for artistic intervention. Since then, temporary installations on the museum’s ‘outer skin’ have been drawing attention to the Sigmund Freud Museum Contemporary Art Collection.50

The storefront gallery thus provides an exterior, outside, public space within which contemporary art can be viewed at the Museum. When it is not being used for these temporary exhibitions, the space is employed to exhibit one work from the permanent Contemporary Art Collection. The architectural and aesthetic make-up of the ‘display window’ storefront gallery is that of a glass-fronted white cube space. Standing outside the space, the viewer is able to look inside. It is not possible to walk into the space in order to be next to or view a work of art more closely. This makes for a very peculiar and specific type of viewing practice and scopic regime, where we are invited to look into the gallery but barred from being in the gallery. It also highlights two important differences in relation to the viewing practices of the Contemporary Art Collection within apartment 5, wherein we have the opportunity of being and inhabiting, momentarily, the spaces of Freud’s private life 252  inside the freud museums

joseph kosuth, a view to memory, sigmund freud museum vienna, 2002

and Anna Freud’s professional practice, while circulating in and around the artworks. In relation to history, as with Freud’s apartments, the space of the storefront gallery has a vital, though different, connection to history. In the butcher’s shop space we are offered a site that connects directly to, for instance, Freud’s everyday life, as well as to the lives of another Jewish family, the Kornmehls, who were also forced into exile in 1938 by the Nazis. Within this context, the interventions exhibited in the storefront gallery, like the artworks displayed in Freud’s apartment, have an immediate relationship to various social, cultural, personal and political histories, as well as to the ideas and genealogies of psychoanalysis. Kosuth’s intervention A View to Memory (2002–03) reflected the connection with these histories in a very clear and direct manner. The artist took one of Engelman’s photographs of the occupied, open and active butcher’s shop from May 1938, and enlarged a frag‑ ment of it to fit the inside of the display window of the storefront gallery, thereby bringing history to life. The entire photograph is duplicated, framed and hangs to the side of the gallery. Referring back to a time before the Nazis annexed Austria, before the Freud seemingly emp t y  253

family fled to London, and before the fateful death of Freud’s sister and their families in the Holocaust, this image took note of this history while at the same time taking us to a different time in Freud’s and his family’s life. Kosuth did this by placing at the top of the storefront an excerpt, in German, from Freud’s Psychopathology of Everyday Life. The text reads: It is universally acknowledged that where the origin of a people’s traditions and legendary history are concerned, a motive of this kind, whose aim is to wipe from memory whatever is distressing to national feeling, must be taken into consideration. Closer investigation would perhaps reveal a complete analogy between the ways in which the traditions of a people and the childhood memories of the individual come to be formed. SE

The site-responsive nature of this artwork was in its ability to refer back to the traumatic history that is memorialized by this ‘empty’ museum, while also opening up a history that preceded it, in which Freud and his family lived, worked and prospered in Vienna, at Berggasse 19, for almost 50 years. These are fitting images and text to have on the front window of the butcher’s shop that Freud and his family frequented: the artwork resonated so well with the site in its precise invocation of the various lived and traumatic histories embodied at Berggasse 19. Again, by employing Engelman’s photographs – this time those of Freud’s consulting room and study – the artist Lala Raščić in A Load from the Inside – Reviewed (2011) also engaged with the history of the site and everyday life, this time through Freud’s ideas on memory, forgetting and mistakes. By exhibiting a humorous video in which the artist has inserted herself walking, running, sitting, lying down, slipping, sliding and skipping within Engelman’s pho‑ tographs, Raščić brings to life Freud’s consulting room and study: as it was during Freud’s lifetime, and as it is now in the form of a museum. The mise-en-scène of psychoanalysis becomes the site of a mystery, clues are offered and detected, but the mystery is never solved. As art critic Jasna Jakšić has said of Raščić’s installation, 25 4  inside the freud museums

The key question is not ‘who did it’, but rather ‘where are the slips’ hidden in the formal or narrative weave and in which places does reality radiate through? The mechanisms of confusion, misreading, oblivion and faulty memories are significant in the construction of elliptical narrative structures. Along many examples from his own analytical practice and from the experiences of people close to him, Freud also mentions several examples of slips in literature in his ‘Psychopathology of Everyday Life’, placing these slips at the same level with the narratives of ‘real life’.51

Another artwork that dealt with the histories of Berggasse 19 is Clegg and Guttmann’s complex installation Sha’at’nez or The Displacement Annex (2004). This intervention wove together Freud’s exile and displacement, psychoanalytical ideas and books on displacement, and the biblical Hebrew term sha’at’nez (Leviticus 19:19): a combination of things that are foreign to one another, and thus displaced. The installation was of a usable library and desk, open to guests. It brought together for the first time since 1938 volumes of books (originals, facsimiles and dummy books) on the topic of displacement that had been a part of Freud’s library at Berggasse. Clegg and Guttmann’s assemblage also reproduced parts of the libraries where these books are now kept: Freud’s study at Berggasse; the new library in the Sigmund Freud Museum Vienna; the study at the Freud Museum London; and the library and collection at the Psychiatric Institute of New York City, which bought books from an antiquarian bookseller known to have purchased volumes directly from the Freuds in 1938.52 The installa‑ tion was ‘a hybrid, leaning tower of books, temporarily reuniting his dispersed collection’.53 This annex to Freud’s libraries, past and present, was represented in an installation where knowledge sat seemingly unsteadily, yet securely in place. Through a series of displacements, and absent presences, various histories were brought together in a displaced site: Kornmehl’s butcher’s shop, now the storefront gallery. Kosuth’s, Raščić’s, and Clegg and Guttmann’s interventions evoke, respond to and activate the site of Berggasse 19 in different seemingly emp t y  255

ways: Kosuth’s through its personal and traumatic history of what had been and remains forever absented; Raščić’s invokes the constitution of memory and the practice of psychoanalysis as a process of detection where slips and distractions are integral to a cure; while Clegg and Guttmann’s turn to the Freud family’s exile and contingently refer to it through a collection of the analyst’s books on displacement. As Scholz-Strasser states, the A View from Outside series ‘confronted passersby, museum visitors and art lovers with a variety of artistic approaches to the site Berggasse 19, and with artistic interpretatons of key concepts in the work of Sigmund Freud’.54 This is certainly the case. However, it is also clear that the Museum’s relationship to contemporary art does much more than iterate these alliances between art, site and psycho­analysis. Like the earlier pieces acquired in 1989, the 1997 donations to the Museum, and the A View from Outside series, function as siteresponsive artworks, enlivening the Museum in specific ways, while also being animated by the particularity of the site’s contexts. What is especially important to remember is that the exhibition spaces in the Freud Museum are spaces that are inhabited by history and memory, haunted by them not by objects. The Freud Museum Vienna retains its histories and memories. In this space, the Contemporary Art Collection, its presence and display, and the A View from Outside series form an important and subtle con‑ nection to Freud’s interest in art, which was not concerned with aesthetics but with meaning and interpretation.55 A Conceptual Museum

For Forrester, as I have noted, the memory of his visit to the Sigmund Freud Museum Vienna was highlighted by its ‘derisible atmosphere’, albeit one deliberately induced, made up as it was of ‘fake souvenirs’ within a ‘fake museum’. This reference to ‘fakeness’ evokes the analogy he goes on to make between the Museum and Freud’s notion of screen memories. Simply put, a screen memory is one where a memory is screened over by 256  inside the freud museums

another memory. So, in the case of the Sigmund Freud Museum Vienna, Freud’s life and career in Berggasse are screened over by the ‘fake souvenirs’; by the photographs and rather unimportant collection of objects which, although numerous (there are 315 items), cannot stand in for Freud’s couch, his chair, his desk, his extraordinary collection of antiquities and impressive library. But is this necessarily the case? In bringing this chapter to a close, I would like to take a closer look at Freud’s theory of screen memory and the way in which visitors, including Forrester and Lacan, have reacted to the Freud Museum. In so doing, I continue to argue that what we have here is not so much a screen museum as a conceptual museum. For Freud, screen memories are a function of memory based on distortion, displacement, substitution, a form of forgetting and remembering. Freud posits that in screen memories a child has an important experience that is essentially to do with thwarted desire; it is repressed and seemingly forgotten. This process leaves a distorted trace of the experience as a mnemic image. This image is screened over by a manifest congruent, earlier or later, and often unimportant experience and its image trace. The screening over takes place through contiguity, displacement (meto­nymically), substitution (metaphorically) or translation. The screen memory becomes manifest, substituting the important experience and memory. Sometimes the memory is ‘falsified’, but, as Freud makes clear, ‘these falsifications of memory are tendentious’.56 The mnemic image becomes entangled and remains so, until it is, as Freud puts it, ‘formed’ by being remembered, unknotted, reinvented and understood later in life, often during a patient’s psychoanalysis. Thus at the centre of screen memories and the mnemic image is desire: forbidden, thwarted, repressed and forgotten. We would do well here to bring to mind Adam Phillips’s work on forgetting: Forgetting, in its versions of disguise, makes desire accessible by making it tolerable. We can only desire because we can hide things from ourselves. The defences, as described by Freud, are seemingly emp t y  257

a repertoire of forms of forgetting. … psychoanalysis is a cure by means of the kind of remembering that makes forgetting possible.57

This is a rather complex formulation, and becomes more compli‑ cated in light of the Freud Museum Vienna. To begin, we can now understand why, for many, visiting the Sigmund Freud Museum Vienna is disappointing and frustrating. The archive constitutes the Museum’s main display, and evokes an understanding of the image as screen image and mnemic image; what I have called a screen-like display. As we see clearly in Freud’s analysis of screen memories, the image is key to understanding the formation and function of memory, as well as to understanding psychoanalysis as a theory and practice. The archive on display in the Vienna Museum and the few objects in the waiting room are supposed to function contiguously, metonymically, synecdochically or through translation as substitutions for our desires – fulfilling, at least momentarily, our earlier thwarted, repressed and forgotten desires. But they do not and cannot fulfil our expectations and desires. Why? The photographs for Forrester are fake souvenirs, and perhaps this is the case, but they are also a form of documentation, a type of screen image, a memory trace of what once was, and in this way they function as a form of remembering. Whether it be the history of Freud’s life and work, or the trauma of his exile, or displacement more generally, they are a reminder of what is missing, of what has been seemingly forgotten, repressed and hidden from memory. Again, there is this ‘seemingly’ to think and work through. To a certain extent our frustration, anger, resent‑ ment, confusion, and the fantasies that confront us in the Freud Museum Vienna are the function of what Freud calls the working through of psychoanalysis: the remembering, uncovering, acting out, resisting and repeating that takes place over a long period of time, through the transference in a psychoanalysis that leads to our understanding and overcoming of our histories. Freud never suggested that working through was pleasurable.58 258  inside the freud museums

We bring so much to the Museum. We bring our expectations, desires, understanding, longing, fantasies, and forgotten memories and their relations to Freud. They relate to his life and exile; to the objects we know or want, or falsely remember even, to be in the Museum and on the site; to psychoanalysis as a history, theory, practice; to ourselves as human subjects; to what our expectations are as tourists and visitors to a site of historical significance, and to what a museum should be. Mundane, serendipitous, highly significant, conscious or unconscious – we do not come to the Museum empty-handed. When we enter the Museum and are confronted by its absences, our desires are seemingly screened off and thwarted: we are frustrated and disappointed as we encounter seemingly empty spaces. But it is vital to remember that we have not arrived emptyhanded. Although there is seemingly nothing to see, I would like to suggest that, with our desires and fantasies in hand, there is too much to see, and too much to remember in these spaces. Too much, that is, ‘of desire’, as Freud would say. And this makes personal, historical and collective forgetting impossible. Our resistances are down, as our memories and desires rise to the surface, emerge and re-emerge in these spaces; we remember too much, and are able to forget too little.59 As we know, in psychoanalysis forgetting is vital to the formation of the human subject, whether this occurs through the function of the unconscious or our conscious capacity to forget. The Sigmund Freud Museum Vienna is problematic because it is all about remembering: it does not allow the visitor to forget. The challenge that the Freud Museum Vienna presents us with is not that it is a fake museum made up of fake souvenirs, but that it is all too real. In its seeming emptiness and absence, the mnemic images confront us with our own desires, by eliciting us to remem‑ ber, and insisting upon the impossibility of forgetting. As Phillips reminds us about the interplay of forgetting and remembering, Remembering, at any given moment, is a process of redescription; the echo can be different each time. The past is in the remaking. Remembering is a prospective project. But it seemingly emp t y  259

is as though we are continually remaking something that to all intents and purposes never existed; or perhaps because we are making copies without an original – a representable original – all the copies are different? Meaning is made, according to Freud, in the revision consequent upon deferral. The status, or the state, of what is forgotten is, in his account, indeterminate, so memory is a way of inventing the past. We are compulsive revisionists with an unknowable vision.60

Our singular subjectivities and points of view fill the seemingly empty conceptual museum. Upon encountering a conceptual museum, something that seems so empty without objects and collections, we are provoked into remembering what we bring to it. In doing so, we are made to reinvent and remake the past – as well as the present and future – of the museum, and our own lives. Thus the seeming emptiness and absence played out through the spaces and display of the Sigmund Freud Museum Vienna open up to the viewer to be filled again. In this conceptual museum there is no restitution on offer for our expectations, for our desires, with the past, and with our memories. And this lack of restitution, encountering the fullness that we bring to it, makes the seeming emptiness and absence all too full; all too present.

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Afterword

I began this book inspired by the contemporary art exhibitions that I had visited at the Freud Museum London over many years. Discovering that the Sigmund Freud Museum Vienna had an equally strong connection to contemporary art consolidated my en‑ thusiasm for this project. My initial intention was simple: to analyse the relationship between these histories of artistic and curatorial activity in both museums. During the early stages of my research I realized that what had begun as a seemingly simple idea for a book quickly became a complicated task that drew me into the history of museums in general, and personality museums in particular; a wide range of contemporary art practices, artworks and curatorial strate‑ gies; as well as Freud and his ideas around psycho­analytic theory and practice, and various genealogies that grew out of them. I came to understand several things simultaneously: first, that the connec‑ tion between contemporary art and these two Freud Museums was singular with regard to how each institution uniquely approached this form of cultural production, and that the Museums themselves were dramatically different in how they took on and carried out their museological functions; second, that their institutional situa‑ tions were framed very differently from one another by the complex history of psychoanalysis, from its beginning to its present-day formulation and implementation; and, finally, that individual and communal histories and memories cut across these museological, artistic and psychoanalytic objects, discourses and sites.

Developing my analysis of these objects, discourses and sites – as embodied in the personality museum, contemporary art and psychoanalysis – required that I undertake research, thinking and writing on each of them separately; but, once I embarked upon these tasks, some very strong connections between them emerged, and these too required close attention. These relationships between the museum, contemporary art and psychoanalysis began to steer the project in particular directions. Two of these connections led the way: the reciprocal relationship between the museological site and contemporary art; and, by extension, the framing of the interpretation of the artworks by the site’s discursive regime, in this case psychoanalysis. By spending time viewing, research‑ ing and analysing the 90 exhibitions held at the Freud Museum London and the Contemporary Art Collection and exhibitions in Vienna, the extraordinary potential of art’s intervention into these and other museological sites became clear. What emerged was a persuasive account of the reciprocity between the museological sites and contemporary art, which developed into this book’s three main contributions to knowledge. The first argument I have made has been in the form of a proposition to museology: that the personality museum is a living monument; a mausoleum that is enlivened by encounters with its spaces, objects and practices. Certainly one of the first reactions we have when entering a personality museum – and perhaps this extends to all museums – is the way in which the museum assumes the status and atmosphere of a mausoleum: there is something seemingly deadening about its space and the objects within it. Even if the staging is such that the objects remain within their primary context, as they have within personality museums (as opposed to having been decontextualized like the objects in most museums), the atmosphere of a mausoleum persists because the objects are no longer being used, and the person who once employed them is now also dead. Having said that, it is our encounter with these objects and spaces that enlivens them. We animate them and bring them to life. Working in parallel, but radically different to an 262  inside the freud museums

individual’s visit, this book proposes that contemporary art inter‑ ventions take on the task of enlivening these museological spaces, objects and practices in ways whose effects are distinctive and not imitable by any other form of encounter. In having contemporary art intervene in the personality museum, and other museological sites for that matter, many forms of disruption may take place: the museological logic of the site may be troubled, or new and critical interpretations may be added to the museum’s standard narratives of itself, or something of its forgotten or repressed history may be invoked and revealed. Often these intrusions are momentary, and everything within the museum reverts to the status quo ante once the art exhibition has left the site. But, as this book establishes, during an exhibition’s manifestation, the disturbances that occur engender a unique and valuable understanding of both these sites and the artworks; something that conditions our understanding of both the museums and artworks, in their particularity and more generally. As complex spaces of institutional practice – displaying their objects and narrating their history – personality museums most often work as hagiographic testaments to the life and work of the individual who is being commemorated. The ideological function of most personality museums is to validate the importance of the author, artist or, in the case of the Freud Museums, the psycho‑ analysts who lived and worked in their premises. This is certainly the case with both Freud Museums: they are both testaments to Freud’s life, work and legacy. Having said that, these two spaces also afforded me the opportunity of critically engaging with this hagiographic tradition of the personality museum, and to think outside of it. On the one hand, the Freud Museum London sets up this for‑ mulation of a hagiographic museum, a site dedicated to Sigmund Freud, while also dissipating it. Its dissemination occurs through the museum’s commemoration of Anna Freud as well as Sigmund Freud. Moreover, the multiple historical accretions that constitute 20 Maresfield Gardens disrupt any singular narrative it may present af terword  263

of itself, and we are always taken back to Berggasse 19, a space that the Freud Museum London is not. On the other hand, the Sigmund Freud Museum Vienna rep‑ resents itself as entirely different to most personality museums. With its seemingly empty spaces and absence of objects, the Museum lacks some of the basic possessions and characteristics of a personality museum, or a museum full stop. This emptiness and lack are vital to representing the trauma that is at the core of this site: the rise of fascism in Europe, the exile of the Freud family, and the extermination of members of the family and entire communities of people within the Holocaust. It is this trauma that also signals the fullness of this museum, the history of Freud and his family, the history and memory of psychoanalysis within this site, and the socio-historical events that constitute it. When we visit it, we also bring to it an astonishing amount of history and memory that renders this museum too full, and far from empty. I consider this dialectic between its empty and full status as the foundation of the conceptual museum, of which the Sigmund Freud Museum Vienna is exemplary. In the end, then, the Sigmund Freud Museum Vienna and the Freud Museum London have enabled me to examine in great depth the disparate ways in which the personality museum can be constituted, can function and can be experienced. This is why these case studies are so valuable to museology. The second assertion that I set out throughout this book has been concerned with contemporary art: I argue that our under‑ standing of contemporary art requires a new category, namely siteresponsivity. This theory of art is attuned to the reciprocal nature of art’s intervention into museological spaces whose primary function is not the exhibiting of contemporary art. When an art exhibition enters a museum that is dedicated to the preservation and display of its own objects, objects that are not contemporary art, the artworks within it take on a secondary status to them. The intervention is in a position of anteriority, one that comes after the museum’s primary function and responsibility. In this 264  inside the freud museums

position, the art intervention is belated; and it is this position of belatedness that gives it its critical strength. For psychoanalysis, the importance of something that is belated is in the way in which it impacts upon all the preceded it, and all that will follow. By having an artistic intervention take on this unique and crucial position, the artworks in any given exhibition are able to critically engage with the site, its history and its future. This critical disruption of the site can occur in a multitude of ways. The museum’s logic and narratives, for instance, may be interrupted, or the story a museum tells about its objects and the individual being commemorated may be disturbed, or repressed histories may be revealed. In effect, the museum’s ideology, its formation and function as a dispositif, is put under pressure and the status quo challenged. This makes hosting contemporary art interventions risky. But the risk is mutual. In site-responsive practices it is not only the site that takes a risk; the artworks also risk something in entering the site. The site creates an interpretive and critical framework for the artworks. The spatial and discursive framing is particular to the site and informs the interpretations of the artworks to analyses that would not necessarily emerge other‑ wise. These accounts extend the hermeneutic parameters of the artworks, practices and curatorial strategies employed, sometimes to an unexpected place that forms a hermeneutic limit point for them. These interpretative limits may work against the normative interpretations of the artworks and practice, or expose something that has been repressed, or invoke a history that would not have emerged other than as a response to this particular site. The his‑ tory of the exhibitions and artworks also implicate one another and the site. They, too, function belatedly in relation to each other. As a genealogy, the artworks and exhibitions shuttle back and forth from one to another, informing the meaning and function of each intervention, and the exhibitions collectively. This belated‑ ness cuts across the history of these interventions in non-linear ways. A focus on this artistic belatedness has provided me with a set of themes that have been examined in each of the book’s af terword  265

chapters: the consulting room, archaeology, dreams, trauma and autobiography as fiction. Only belatedly can the implications of these genealogies within the sites, and the work that they have accomplished, be analysed. The third argument I have offered in this book is a testament to the significance and importance of psychoanalysis within culture. Certainly, Michel Foucault was right in pointing out that Freud was a producer of discursivity. The myriad ways in which I have appealed to psychoanalysis, its history, its theory and its practice as a hermeneutic for analysing contemporary art in the Freud Museums are a striking demonstration of this. The conception of psychoanalysis as a theory of the human subject and as a therapeutic practice has been invoked throughout this book, as have their diverse histories and legacies. With each separate approach to an individual exhibition, a new psychoanalytic trope or therapeutic is summoned and brought to bear on the art intervention, and the site. In visiting the Freud Museums in London and Vienna we encounter the objects, histories and memories of psychoanalysis: Freud’s passion for antiquities that became his personal interlocu‑ tors as well as representatives of archaeology as a key scientific model to his understanding of psychoanalysis as a metapsychology and a therapeutic practice, or the important ways in which the interpretation of dreams persists within our psychology, or our need to visit Freud’s consulting room as a means of exploring our individual histories (who we are, how we function), or engaging with our traumatic histories and memories of the past, in order to restore our well-being. Freud has given us the knowledge and the means to achieve these things, individually and collectively, and the Freud Museums in London and Vienna attest to this in their own ways. In writing this book, what began as a form of archaeological excavation of the museums and their contemporary art inter‑ ventions has shown itself to be otherwise: rather than being a linear, teleological analysis, the critical engagement has been dy‑ namic and transformative. Both the site and the artworks assumed 266  inside the freud museums

unexpected roles and interpretations. This is the reciprocal nature of site-responsivity, to provide alternative functions and meanings to both the site and the artworks. Objects are key to this reciproc‑ ity. I have used objects to think with: from museological objects, including the site itself, to the objects within it; to an art interven‑ tion’s thematic, its curatorial strategies, an individual artwork, or a particular artistic process. Encompassing these are the objects of psychoanalysis; its theories, its histories, its therapeutic practices have also been put to work within this book. In particular, I have been interested in examining practices as objects of analysis: from museological practices to artistic and curatorial practice, to psychoanalytic practices, to the practice of everyday life. Daily life is significant within the personality museum. The site commemorates the everyday life and work of an individual. Throughout this book, Freud’s everyday life has been put to use: for instance, I point to his analysis of daily occurrences within his life, his diary entries, letters and postcards to his wife Martha or to his colleagues and friends, as well as his dreams and travels abroad, the loss of his father, his self-analysis, his theories born out of his lifelong work with patients. I wanted to include these aspects of Freud’s life and the life of others for two reasons. First, psychoanalytic practice is in the end about daily life. In the consult‑ ing room, after the avalanche of pain that has brought us there is articulated and worked through, it becomes a space concerned with everyday life: how to become conscious of how we encounter and deal with its vicissitudes. Second, I believe it is in the articulation and sharing of these experiences that a book opens itself up to its reader. I began this book with a personal encounter with the Freud Museum London and contemporary art. This encounter resonated with my pedagogic and academic roles within an art school, and my investment in psychoanalysis. My intention throughout this project has always been to put these personal experiences to use in a book that would open up for others the rather extraordinary worlds I encountered working in between contemporary art, personality museums and psychoanalysis. af terword  267

Notes

acknowledgements 1. Information related to the Sigmund Freud Museum Vienna can be located at: www. freud-museum.at. The emergence and sustaining of the relationship between contemporary art and this museum occurred under the long-standing directorship of Inge Scholz-Strasser. It is continuing under the director Monika Pesslar. This history is fully analysed in the last chapter of this book. Information about the exhibitions held at the Freud Museum London can be found at www.freud.org.uk/exhibitions. Three exhibitions held at this museum are not included on its website. These were shows by Rachel Withers (1989), Celia Reid (1994) and Gabrielle Rifkind (1998). David Newlands, the Museum’s first director, speaks of the Museum’s policies in keeping it ‘alive’ in his article ‘The Significance of the Freud Museum’ (in Edward Timms and Naomi Segal (eds), Freud in Exile: Psychoanalysis and its Vicissitudes, New Haven CT and London: Yale University Press, 1988, pp. 290–98). In 1989, under the directorship of Richard Wells (1988–94), the Museum had its first contemporary art exhibition, Real Life, showing the work of Rachel Withers. See Rachel Withers, ‘House of Games’, Women Artist’s Slide Library Journal 31–32 (January–February 1990), pp. 10–11; and Mark Gisbourne, ‘A Freudian Intervention?’, Apollo, January 1990, pp. 40–41. However, it was under Erica Davies, the Museum’s director 1994–2004, that the Freud Museum London really invested in its contemporary art exhibitions programme; during this decade it held over 30 interventions. The Freud historian Michael Molnar took over the directorship in 2004, and continued the Museum’s exhibitions policy, carefully choosing shows appropriate to the site. The current director, Carol Siegel, appointed in 2009, has sustained an exceptionally diverse programme of artists. Siegel has also instituted a working group of curators, academics and Museum staff to consider, discuss and advise on the Museum’s exhibitions policy and programme.

introduction 1. The field of museum studies is vast. These are some of the works that formed my understanding of it in ways that are pertinent to this book: Gail Anderson (ed.), Reinventing the Museum: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives on the Paradigm Shift (Oxford: Altamira, 2004); Tony Bennett, The Birth of the Museum: History, Theory, Politics (London: Routledge, 1995); Tony Bennett, Pasts Beyond Memory: Evolution, Museums, Colonialism (London and New York: Routledge, 2004); Daniel Buren, ‘The Function of the Museum’, Artforum, September 1973, p. 68; Fiona Candlin, Art, Museums and Touch (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2010); Steven Conn, Do Museums Still Need Objects (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010); Sandra Dudley, Museum Materialities: Objects, Engagements, Interpretations (London: Routledge, 2010); Carol Duncan, Civilizing Rituals: Inside Public Art Museums (London: Routledge, 1995); Reesa Greenberg, Michael Ferguson

and Sandy Nairne (eds), Thinking About Exhibitions (London: Routledge, 1995); Hilde S. Hein, The Museum in Transition: A Philosophical Perspective (Washington DC and London: Smithsonian Institution, 2000); Michelle Henning, Museums, Media and Cultural Theory (Maidenhead: Open University Press, 2006); Eilean Hooper-Greenhill, Museums and the Shaping of Knowledge (London: Routledge, 1992); Suzanne MacLeod, Re-Shaping Museum Space: Architecture, Design, Exhibitions (London: Routledge, 2005); Suzanne MacLeod, Museum Architecture: A New Biography (London: Routledge, 2013); Kylie Message, New Museums and the Making of Culture (Oxford: Berg, 2007); Griselda Pollock, Encounters in the Virtual Feminist Museum: Time, Space and the Archive (London: Routledge, 2007); James Putnam, Art and Artifact: The Museum as Medium (London: Thames & Hudson, 2001); Irit Rogoff and Daniel J. Sherman, Museum Culture: Histories, Discourses, Spectacles (London: Routledge, 1994); Julian Spalding, The Poetic Museum: Reviving Historic Collections (Munich and London: Prestel, 2002). 2. The single most important book dedicated to the small, independent museum, of which the personality museum is a part, is Fiona Candlin’s Micromuseology (London: Bloomsbury, 2015). Coining the term ‘micromuseum’, Candlin’s book is an ‘experiment’ to see whether an analysis of these museums can ‘revolutionize’ our understanding of the traditional museum and its study. Taking an anthropological approach Candlin interrogates different aspects of the micromuseum, from the role of the public to the diversity of their displays, histories, donors and ideologies. My take on the personality museum complements Candlin’s work, and my focus on the Freud Museums adds to and shifts the debate in two important ways. On the one hand, I add a distinctly psychoanalytic framework to the micromuseum. On the other hand, I offer an in-depth consideration of what is made possible by contemporary art’s intervention into these museological spaces. For writing specifically on the personality museum, see: Alison Booth, ‘Houses and Things: Literary House Museums as Collective Biography’, in Kate Hill (ed.), Museums and Biographies: Stories, Objects, Identities (Woodbridge and New York: Boydell Press, 2012), pp. 231–46; Kim Christensen, ‘Ideas Versus Things: The Balancing Act of Interpreting Historic House Museums’, in Sandra H. Dudley (ed.), Museum Objects: Experiencing the Properties of Things (London and New York: Routledge, 2012), pp. 173–87; Jessica Foy Donnelly (ed.), Interpreting Historic House Museums (New York: Alta Mira Press, 2002); Sophie Forgan, ‘“Keepers of the Flame”: Biography, Science and Personality in the Museum’, in Hill (ed.), Museums and Biographies, pp. 247–63; Diana Fuss, Four Writers and the Rooms that Shaped Them (London and New York: Routledge, 2004); Simon Goldhill, Freud’s Couch, Scott’s Buttocks, Brontë’s Grave (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2011); Harald Hendrix (ed.), Writers’ Houses and the Making of Memory (London and New York: Routledge, 2008); Mignon Nixon, ‘Dream Dust’, October 116 (Spring 2006), pp. 63–86; Rosanna Pavoni, ‘Towards a Definition and Typology of Historic House Museums’, Museum International, No. 210, 53/2 (2001), pp. 16–21; Nicola J. Watson, The Literary Tourist (London: Macmillan, 2016); Nicola J. Watson (ed.), Literary Tourism and Nineteenth-Century Culture (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009); Linda Young, ‘Is There a Museum in the House: Historic Houses as a Species of Museums‘, Museum Management and Curatorship 22/1 (2007), pp. 59–77; Linda Young, ‘House Museums Are Not All the Same! Understanding Motivation to Guide Conservation’, International Committee for Conservation conference ‘The Artefact, its Context and their Narrative: Multidisciplinary Conservation in Historic House Museums’ (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 2012), www.icom-cc.org/ul/cms/fck-uploaded/documents/demhist%20_%20icom-cc%20 joint%20interim%20meeting%202012/25–young-keynote-demhist_icomcc-la_2012.pdf (accessed 15 February 2015). 3. After arriving in London, the Freud family rented 39 Elsworthy Road for three months, during which time Freud’s son Ernst, the architect, renovated Maresfield Gardens. 4. I am referring to specifically the work of cultural theorist Michel de Certeau and his theory of space as a ‘practiced place’ from The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven Rendall

note s  269









(Berkeley CA: University of California Press, 1984), pp. 117–18. I think that there are properties of the personality museum that align themselves with a set of other ideas that are worth mentioning. Gaston Bachelard’s work in The Poetics of Space, trans. Maria Jolas (Boston MA: Beacon Press, 1969 [1958]); Mieke Bal’s notion of the ‘theoretical object’ as discussed in Mieke Bal, Louise Bourgeois’ Spider: The Architecture of Art-writing (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001); Jacques Derrida’s idea of ‘architectural thinking’, from his interview in Neil Leach’s edited collection Rethinking Architecture: A Reader in Cultural Theory (London: Routledge, 1997); Michel Foucault’s work on ‘complex of visuality’ in The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (New York: Vintage, 1973 [1966]); and Georges Perec’s Species of Spaces and Other Pieces, ed. and trans. John Sturrock (London: Penguin Books, 1999). 5. Theodor W. Adorno, ‘Valery, Proust Museum’, in Prisms, trans. S. and S. Weber (Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 1983), pp. 173–85 (p. 173). 6. Sigmund Freud, ‘Shorter Writings’ (1938–41), in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. XXIII, trans. James Strachey et al. (London: Vintage, 2001), p. 300. 7. Michel Foucault, ‘What is an Author?’ (1969), in Language, Counter-Memory, Practice, ed. Donald F. Bouchard, trans. Donald F. Bouchard and Sherry Simon (Ithaca NY: Cornell University Press, 1977), pp. 113–38 (p. 132). 8. Ibid., p. 132. 9. Michel Foucault, Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972–77, ed. Colin Gordon (New York: Pantheon Books, 1980), pp. 194–6. For a productive reading of Foucault’s notion of dispositif, translated as ‘apparatus’, see Giorgio Agamben, ‘What Is an Apparatus?’, in What Is an Apparatus? and Other Essays, trans. David Kishik and Stefan Pedatella (Stanford CA: Stanford University Press, 2009), pp. 1–24. See also Louis Althusser, ‘Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses (Notes Towards an Investigation)’, Lenin And Philosophy and Other Essays, trans. Ben Brewster (London: New Left Books, 1971), pp. 123–73. 10. See also Jacques Derrida’s understanding of the Freud Museum as an archive: ‘It has the force of law, of a law which is the law of the house (oikos), of the house as place, domicile, family, lineage, or institution. Having become a museum, Freud’s house takes in all of these powers of economy.’ Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression, trans. Eric Prenowitz (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1996), p. 7. 11. After developing the term ‘site-responsive’ to think about the complexity of having artistic interventions in the Freud Museums and museums more generally, I was delighted to come across the use of it by a group of Royal College of Art MA Applied Arts students in their exhibition Einfall: Beyond Spontaneity (2009). They used the term to describe the fact that they wanted ‘to make new work in response to the museum’. I believe it is important to acknowledge this use here. The classic text on the white cube is of course Brian O’Doherty, Inside the White Cube: The Ideology of the Gallery Space, intro. Thomas McEvilley (Berkeley CA: University of California Press, 1999), as well as Brian O’Doherty, Studio and Cube: On the Relationship between Where Art Is Made and Where Art Is Displayed (Princeton NJ: Princeton Architectural Press, 2007). See also the important texts by Daniel Buren: ‘The Function of the Museum’, Artforum, September 1973, p. 68; ‘The Function of an Exhibition’, Studio Inter­national, December 1973, p. 216; ‘The Function of Architecture’ (1975), in Reesa Greenberg, Bruce W. Ferguson and Sandy Nairne (eds), Thinking About Exhibitions (London: Thames & Hudson, 1996), pp. 313–19. 12. Several important books offer partial genealogies of the ways in which contemporary art has intervened inside the museum, rather than inside the gallery. These books are in addition to the lengthy history of one-off critiques of particular exhibitions. See James Clifford, Route: Travels and Translations in the Late Twentieth Century (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1997); Douglas Crimp, On the Museum’s Ruins (Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 1993); Hal Foster The Return of the Real: The Avant-Garde at the End of the

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13. 14.

15. 16.

Century (Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 1996); Kynaston McShine, The Museum as Muse: Artists’ Reflect (New York: MOMA, 2000); James Putnam, Art and Artifact: The Museum as Medium (London: Thames & Hudson, 2001); Peter Vergo, ‘The Reticent Object’, in Peter Vergo (ed.), The New Museology (London: Reaktion Books, 1989), pp. 41–59; Claire Robins, Curious Lessons in the Museum: The Pedagogic Potential of Artists’ Interventions (Farnham: Ashgate, 2013) – Robins offers the first full-length genealogy of artists’ interventions, taking a look at the 1920–30s, the 1960s–70s and the 1990s onwards. The first contemporary art exhibition at the Freud Museum took place in 1989; it was the work of Rachel Withers. The regularity of the shows, as well as the Freud Museum London’s online archive, began with Susan Hiller’s exhibition At the Freud Museum in 1994. See James Meyer, ‘The Functional Site; or, The Transformation of Site Specificity’, in Erika Suderberg (ed.), Space, Site, Intervention: Situating Installation Art (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), pp. 23–37; and Suderberg’s ‘Introduction’, pp. 1–22. See also Miwon Kwon, One Place After Another: Site-Specific Art and Locational Identity (Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 2004). See Mieke Bal’s reading of Gayatri Spivak’s Critique of Postcolonial Reason, in Travelling Concepts In the Humanities: A Rough Guide (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2002), pp. 286–323. There is one striking absence in this book: the lack of a chapter on sex and gender. This gap has more to do with circumstance than intention. There were simply very few exhibitions and artworks that focused on Freud’s ideas around sex, gender and sexuality. The familiar Oedipus complex, the castration complex, the stages of psycho-sexual development, etc., were simply not taken up by many artists; and when they were, for instance in the case of Lucas, the reference to sexuality became superseded by a different kind of work performed by the show. In Sarah Lucas’s case, I was drawn to the rather tempting invitation it made as a first analytic session with Freud. I also wonder if the rather banal association between Freud and sexuality meant that the exhibitions and artworks chosen from the Museum’s perspective consciously or unconsciously moved away from this subject. Whatever the reasons, I am grateful for this as it enabled me to explore themes that are not always at the forefront of the literature on psychoanalysis and art.

one 1. Hilda Doolittle (H.D.), ‘Writing on the Wall’, Tribute to Freud (New York: New Directions Books, 1974 [1956]), pp. 1–112 (pp. 15–16). 2. Jean Laplanche, ‘Transference: Its Provocations by the Analyst’, Essays on Otherness, trans. Luke Thurston (London and New York: Routledge, 1999), pp. 214–33 (p. 233). 3. Simon Goldhill, Freud’s Couch, Scott’s Buttocks, Brontë’s Grave (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2011), pp. 114–15. 4. Marina Warner, quoted in Mignon Nixon, ‘Dream Dust’, October 116 (Spring 2006), pp. 63–86 (p. 80). 5. Freud calls his statues his ‘old and grubby gods’ in a letter to his colleague otolaryn­ gologist and psychoanalyst Wilhelm Fliess dated 1 August 1899. Sigmund Freud, The Complete Letters of Sigmund Freud to Wilhelm Fliess, 1887–1904, ed. and trans. Jeffrey Mousaieff Masson (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1985), p. 363. 6. For a reading of the pictures over Freud’s couch in Vienna and London and their relationship to psychoanalysis, see George Dimock, ‘The Pictures over Freud’s Couch’, in Mieke Bal and Inge E. Boer (eds), The Point of Theory: Practices of Cultural Analysis (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 1994), pp. 239–50. 7. Goldhill, Freud’s Couch, p. 118. 8. The Freud Museum, 20 Marefield Gardens: A Guide to the Freud Museum (London: Serpent’s Tail and Freud Museum, 1998), p. 4. 9. On the preservation of Freud’s study, see also John Forrester, ‘“Mille e tre”: Freud and Collecting’, in John Elsner and Roger Cardinal (eds), The Cultures of Collecting (London: Reaktion Books, 1994), pp. 224–51.

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10. Of course, the belief that Freud spent almost 50 years working in apartment 6 at Berggasse, the space that Maresfield Gardens replicates, is also a fiction. On 25 April 1886, as a bachelor, Freud rented an apartment at Rathausstrasse 7 and began to see patients in a room that included a medical couch and his already sizeable library. Then, in July 1886, the newly wed Sigmund and Martha Freud moved into the recently reconstructed Ring Theatre at Maria-Theresienstrasse 8, into which his practice migrated and opened on 4 October. Known as the Sühnhaus (House of Atonement) because of the tragic loss of lives when it burnt down in 1881, this building was where Freud saw his patients for five years. Freud moved into apartment 5 at Berggasse 19 with his family in 1891, and worked in this space until 1892–3, when apartment 4 on the mezzanine floor became available. Freud moved into it and saw patients there for almost 15 years, until 1907–8, when his sister Rosa Graf and her family vacated apartment 6 – the flat adjoining the Freud family quarters – and the analyst relocated his practice once again. 11. The Museum’s Charter and the staff’s keen awareness of their responsibilities towards it were discussed during an interview with Carol Siegel (Director) and Ivan Ward (Head of Education) on Tuesday, 3 May 2016. The citations are taken from the Charter, pp. 1–2. 12. Michael Molnar, ‘Antiquities Terminable and Interminable’, unpublished manuscript, n.pag. 13. See The Relevance of the Couch in Contemporary Psychoanalysis, ed. George Moraitis, special issue of Psychoanalytic Inquiry 15/3 (1995). 14. Freud first specifies the new mise-en-scène in 1904 in ‘Freud’s Psycho-analytic Procedure’, in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. VII, trans. James Strachey et al. (London: Vintage, 2001), pp. 249–56. On the history of Freud’s ‘experimental’ construction of the psychoanalytic setting, see Andreas Mayer, ‘Lost Objects: From the Laboratories of Hypnosis to the Psychoanalytic Setting’, Forgetting Freud? For a New Historiography of Psychoanalysis, ed. Lydia Marinelli and Andreas Mayer, special issue of Science in Context 19/1 (2006), pp. 37–64. 15. Doolittle (H.D.), ‘Writing on the Wall’, pp. 15–16. 16. In 1923, after surgery for oral cancer, Freud lost much of the hearing in his right ear. His biographer, Peter Gay, informs us that Freud moved the couch from one wall to another to accommodate this loss of hearing. Peter Gay, Freud: A Life for Our Time (New York: Anchor Books, 1988), p. 427. Then, in 1934, because of the increasing deafness in Freud’s right ear, he rearranged the angle of his armchair to the couch. See Edmund Engelman and Inge Scholz-Strasser, Sigmund Freud Vienna IX. Berggasse 19, trans. Lonnie R. Johnson (Vienna: Verlag Christian Brandstätter, n.d.), p. 43. 17. Bertha Pappenheim, known as Anna O., was an early patient of Josef Breuer. She dubbed psychoanalysis the ‘talking cure’, and jokingly referred to it as ‘chimney sweeping’. Josef Breuer, ‘Fraülein Anna O.’, in Josef Breuer and Sigmund Freud, Studies on Hysteria (1893–95), in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. II, trans. James Strachey et al. (London: Vintage, 2001), pp. 21–47 (p. 30). 18. In September 2013 work began on Freud’s couch by conservators Poppy Singer, Annabel Wylie and Kate Gill. The process was documented by artist Jeremy Millar and resulted in his film Analysis (2015). 19. www.freud-museum.at/e/inhalt/museumausstellungenCouch.html (accessed 14 March 2011). Lydia Marinelli, ed., Die Couch: Vom Denken im Liegen (Munich: Prestel, 2006). See also Mayer, ‘Lost Objects’. 20. Marina Warner, ‘The Couch: A Case History’, in Stranger Magic: Charmed States and the Arabian Nights (London: Chatto & Windus, 2011), pp. 405–24 (pp. 410–11). 21. Marina Warner, ‘Preface’, 20 Maresfield Gardens: A Guide to the Freud Museum (London: Freud Museum, 1998), pp. vii–ix (p. viii). 22. Warner, ‘The Couch’, p. 416. On Freud and textiles, see Liliane Weissberg, ‘Ariadne’s Thread’, MLN 125/3 (April 2010), pp. 661–81. 23. Stacy B. Schaefer, ‘The Crossing of the Souls’, in Divan: Free Floating Attention Piece, exhibition catalogue (London: Freud Museum, 2010), n.pag.

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24. Catalina Lozano, ‘Productive Anachronism’, in Divan, n.pag. 25. Suzanna Chan, ‘Astonishing Marine Living: Ellen Gallagher’s Ichthyosaurus at the Freud Museum’, in Griselda Pollock (ed.), Visual Politics of Psychoanalysis: Art and the Image in Post Traumatic Cultures (London: I.B.Tauris, 2013), pp. 102–15 (p. 103). See also Amna Malik, ‘Patterning Memory: Ellen Gallagher’s Ichthyosaurus at the Freud Museum’, Wasafari 21/3, pp. 29–39; and the exhibition catalogue Ichthyosaurus at the Freud Museum (London: Hauser & Wirth, 2005). 26. Edward Said, Orientalism (London: Vintage, 1979). 27. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality: Volume 1: An Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Pantheon Books, 1978), p. 119. 28. Ranjana Khanna, Dark Continents: Psychoanalysis and Colonialism (Durham NC and London: Duke University Press, 2003), p. 5. 29. An important essay on contemporary art and the psychoanalytic setting is Mignon Nixon, ‘On the Couch’, October 113 (Summer 2005), pp. 39–76. 30. Claudia Guderian, quoted in Freud Museum London archives. 31. Edmund Engelman, ‘A Memoir’, in Edmund Engelman and Inge Scholz-Strasser, Sigmund Freud: Vienna IX. Berggasse 19, trans. Lonnie R. Johnson (Vienna: Verlag Christian Brandstätter, 1998 [1976]), pp. 89–103 (p. 89). See also Arnold Werner, ‘Edmund Engelman: Photographer of Sigmund Freud’s Home and Offices’, International Journal of Psychoanalysis 83 (2002), pp. 445–51. For a personal account of Berggasse 19, see Bruno Bettelheim, ‘Berggasse 19’, in Recollections and Reflections (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1989 [1956]), pp. 18–23. 32. Engelman, ‘A Memoir’, p. 96. 33. Jennifer Branwell, ‘Review’, Journal of the British Association of Psychotherapists, n.d., n.pag., quoted in Freud Museum London archives. 34. See, for instance, H.D., Tribute to Freud; and Georges Perec, ‘The Scene of a Stratagem’ (1977), in Species of Spaces and Other Pieces, trans. and ed. John Sturrock (London: Penguin Books, 1999), 
pp. 165–73. 35. The exchange between H.D. and van der Leeuw occurred on the lawns of Freud’s house in Grinzing, a suburb of Vienna, where he spent some of his summers and saw patients. See Beate Lohser and Peter M. Newton, Unorthodox Freud: The View from the Couch (New York: Guildford Press, 1996), p. 70. 36. H.D. ‘Writing on the Wall’, p. 6. 37. Branwell, ‘Review’. 38. Cunard, press release, Freud Museum London. 39. Siobhan Wall, ‘Nick Cunard: Head Spaces, Photographs of Psychotherapeutic Environments’, Eyemazing 6 (Spring 2005), pp. 159–60 (p. 159). 40. D.W. Winnicott, ‘The Importance of the Setting in Meeting Regression in Psycho-analysis’, in D.W. Winnicott, Psycho-Analytic Explorations, ed. Clare Winnicott, Ray Shepherd and Madeleine Davis (London: Karnac Books, 1989), pp. 96–102 (p. 96). The earliest use of the term ‘psychoanalytic setting’ is by Winnicott in 1954; see D.W. Winnicott, ‘Metapsychological and Clinical Aspects of Regression within the Psycho-Analytic Set-Up’ (1954), in Collected Papers (New York: Basic Books, 1958), pp. 278–94; see also Caterina Albano et al., ‘The Psychoanalytic Setting’, in Caterina Albano, Liz Allison and Nicola Abel-Hirsch (eds), Psychoanalysis: The Unconscious in Everyday Life, published in conjunction with the exhibition at the Science Museum curated by Albano (London: Artakt and Institute of Psychoanalysis, 2010); José Bleger, ‘Psycho-Analysis of the Psycho-Analytic Frame’, International Journal of Psycho-Analysis 48/4 (1966), pp. 511–19; Henrik Carpelan, ‘On the Importance of the Setting in the Psychoanalytic Situation’, Scandinavian Psychoanalytic Review 4 (1981), pp. 151–60; Diana Fuss with Joel Sanders, ‘Freud’s Ear: Berggasse 19 Vienna Austria’, in Diana Fuss, The Sense of An Interior: Four Writers and the Rooms that Shaped Them (London and New York: Routledge, 2004), pp. 71–106 (passim); M. Masud R. Khan, ‘On Freud’s Provision of the Therapeutic Frame’, in The Privacy of the Self (London: Karnac Books, 1996 [1974]), pp. 129–35; Mayer, ‘Lost Objects’; Luciana Nissim

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Momigliano, ‘The Analytic Setting: A Theme with Variations’, in Continuity and Change in Psychoanalysis: Letters From Milan (London: Karnac Books, 1992), pp. 33–62; Moustafa Safouan, Jacques Lacan and the Question of Psychoanalytic Training, trans. Jacqueline Rose (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2000). On the relationship between the confessional and psychoanalysis, see Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Volume I. 41. On Freud’s adherence or not to his own advice for psychoanalysts, see Luciana Nissim Momigliano, ‘A Spell in Vienna – But Was Freud a Freudian?’, in Continuity and Change in Psychoanalysis, pp. 1–32; and Lohser and Newton, Unorthodox Freud, particularly ‘Freud’s Theory of Technique’, pp. 11–23. On Freud’s breaking of ‘rules’ within H.D.’s analysis, see Susan Stanford Friedman, Psyche Reborn: The Emergence of H.D. (Bloomington IN: Indiana University Press, 1981); and Susan Stanford Friedman, ‘A Most Luscious Vers Libre Relationship: H.D. and Freud’, The Annual of Psychoanalysis XIV (1986); see also the Wolf Man’s discussion of his ‘working together’ with Freud during his analysis, in Sergei Pankejeff, The Wolf Man, particularly ‘My Recollections of Sigmund Freud’, pp. 135–52. 42. The Freud Museum London show also included work by Renate Ferro. Ferro’s installations speak to the contemporaneity of psychoanalysis, and its ubiquity within our daily lives. See Mieke Bal, Michelle Williams Gamaker and Renate Ferro, Saying It (London: Occasional Papers, 2012). 43. Françoise Davoine, ‘La Boîte à Transfert’, in Mère Folle: Rècit (Strasbourg: Arcanes, 1998), pp. 155–80. Thanks to Marie Morra and Lucia Fitzsimmons for their helpful translation. 44. Sigmund Freud, ‘On Beginning the Treatment (Further Recommendations on the Technique of Psycho-Analysis I)’ (1913), in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. XII, trans. James Strachey et al. (London: Vintage, 2001), pp. 121–44 (pp. 133–5). 45. See Edward Said, Beginnings: Intention and Method (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985); Mieke Bal, ‘Description Shipwrecked’, in Louise Bourgeois’ Spider: The Architecture of Art-writing (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), pp. 9–30; David Carrier, ‘Beginnings in Narrative Art Histories’, in Artwriting (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1987), pp. 15–41; J.B. Pontalis, Love of Beginnings, trans. James Greene with Marie-Christine Réguis, Foreword by Adam Phillips (London: Free Association Books, 1993 [1986]). 46. Mieke Bal and Michelle Williams Gamaker, ‘Towards a Babel Ontology’, European Journal of Women’s Studies 18 (November 2011), pp. 439–47. 47. Freud, ‘On Beginning the Treatment’, p. 139. 48. On narrative structure and psychoanalysis, see Peter Brooks, Psychoanalysis and Storytelling (Oxford and Cambridge MA: Blackwell, 1994); ‘The Freudian Hiatus: Psychoanalysis and Narrative in Fragment of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria’, in Patient Tales: Case Histories and the Uses of Narrative in Psychiatry (Columbia SC: University of South Carolina, 2008), pp. 100–128; ‘Fictions of the Wolfman: Freud and Narrative Understanding’, Diacritics 9/1 (Spring 1979), pp. 71–81. 49. On Françoise Davoine, see Psychoanalytic Dialogues: The International Journal of Relational Perspectives 17/5 (2007), pp. 621–82; Françoise Davoine and Jean-Max Gaudillière, History Beyond Trauma, trans. Susan Fairfield (New York: Other Press, 2004). See also the earlier work of the Italian Gaetano Benedetti, one of the pioneers of using the talking cure with psychotic patients, whose work influenced Davoine. Brian Koehler, ‘Interview with Gaetano Benedetti, M.D.’, Journal of The American Academy of Psychoanalysis and Dynamic Psychiatry 31/1 (2003), pp. 75–87; Gaetano Benedetti, Psychotherapy of Schizophrenia (Northvale NJ and London: Jason Aronson, 1995 [1987]); Marco Conci, ‘Gaetano Benedetti in his Correspondence’, International Forum of Psychoanalysis 17/2 (2008), pp. 112–29. 50. For a discussion of Bal and Gamaker Williams’s film Mère Folle and the Long History of Madness – the film out of which Sissi in Analysis emerged – see Psychanalyse et cinema, special issue of Le Coq-Héron 211/4 (December 2012). 51. Adam Phillips, ‘Psychoanalysis and Idolatry’, in On Kissing, Tickling and Being Bored: Psychoanalytic Essays on the Unexamined Life (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), pp. 109–21 (p. 120).

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52. Ibid., p. 121. 53. Jean Laplanche, ‘Transference: Its Provocations by the Analyst’, in Essays on Otherness, trans. Luke Thurston (London and New York: Routledge, 1999), pp. 214–33 (p. 233). 54. The allusion here is to Sigmund Freud, ‘Analysis Terminable and Interminable’, in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. XXIII, trans. James Strachey et al. (London: Vintage, 2001), pp. 209–54.

two 1. The title of this chapter echoes two texts: Hal Foster’s ‘An Archival Impulse’, October 110 (Fall 2004), pp. 3–22; and John Forrester’s insightful comment that Freud’s collection of antiquities forms a ‘museum within a museum’, in ‘“Mille e tre”: Freud and Collecting’, in John Elsner and Roger Cardinal (eds), The Cultures of Collecting (London: Reaktion Books, 1994), pp. 224–51 (p. 246). 2. Walter Benjamin, ‘Unpacking My Library: A Talk about Book Collecting’ (1931), in Illumi­ nations: Essays and Reflections (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1968), pp. 59–68 (p. 67). 3. Sigmund Freud speaking to his patient Pankejeff, known as the Wolf Man. Quoted by the Wolf Man in his memoirs, The Wolf-Man and Sigmund Freud, ed. Muriel Gardiner (London: Karnac Books and Institute of Psycho-Analysis, 1989), p. 139. 4. H.D., ‘Advent’, Tribute to Freud (Manchester: Carcanet Press, 1985), pp. 113–88 (p. 116). 5. Donald Kuspit, ‘A Mighty Metaphor: The Analogy of Archaeology and Psychoanalysis’, in Lynn Gamwell and Richard Wells (eds), Sigmund Freud and Art: His Personal Collection of Antiquities (New York: Harry N. Abrams for SUNY, Binghamton and Freud Museum, London, 1989), pp. 133–52. 6. Forrester, ‘“Mille e tre”’, p. 226. 7. The term ‘not-archaeology’ to describe psychoanalysis is from Whitney Davis, Replications: Archaeology, Art History, Psychoanalysis (University Park PA: Penn State University Press, 1996), p. 30. 8. Mary Bergstein, ‘The Dying Slave at Berggasse 19’, American Imago 60/1 (Spring 2003), pp. 9–20 (pp. 10–11). 9. On Freud’s relationship with his long-term friend and professor of archaeology Emanuel Löwy, see Diane O’Donoghue, ‘Negotiations of Surface: Archaeology within the Early Strata of Psychoanalysis’, Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association 52/3 (Summer 2004), pp. 653–71. 10. Janine Burke, ‘Sigmund Freud’s Collection’, in Janine Burke and Max Delany (eds), Sigmund Freud’s Collection: An Archaeology of the Mind (Victoria: Monash University Museum of Art, 2007), pp. 8–42. Burke posits that Freud asked Bonaparte to take two statues out of Vienna rather than just the Athena as has been historically thought. 11. Sigmund Freud, The Diary of Sigmund Freud 1929–1939, ed. Michael Molnar (London: Hogarth Press and Freud Museum, 1992), p. 239. 12. Joachim Sliwa, Egyptian Scarabs and Seal Amulets from the Collection of Sigmund Freud (Krakow: Nakladem Polskiej Akademii Umiejetnosci, 1999), p. 12 n19. 13. Sigmund Freud quoted in 20 Maresfield Gardens: A Guide to the Freud Museum (London: Serpent’s Tail, 1998) pp. 19–20. See also Hanns Sachs, Freud, Master and Man (London: Imago, 1945), p. 100. 14. Sigmund Freud to Margaret Stonborough-Wittgenstein, 5 November 1938, quoted in Michael Molnar, ‘Antiquities Terminable and Interminable’, unpublished ms, n.pag. 15. Mieke Bal explains how the beginning of a collection is only understood retroactively: ‘Telling Objects: A Narrative Perspective on Collecting’, in Elsner and Cardinal (eds), The Cultures of Collecting, pp. 97–115. 16. Sigmund Freud, in The Complete Letters of Sigmund Freud to Wilhelm Fliess, 1887–1904, ed. and trans. Jeffrey Mousaieff Masson (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1985), p. 214. Lynn Gamwell offers the second translation of Erquickung in ‘The Origins of Freud’s Antiquities Collection’, in Lynn Gamwell and Richard Wells (eds), Sigmund Freud and

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Art: His Personal Collection of Antiquities (New York: Harry N. Abrams for SUNY, Albany NY and Freud Museum London, 1989), pp. 21–32 (p. 24). There is a photograph of Freud seated next to a copy of Michelangelo’s David, which has been analysed by Michael Molnar: ‘From Image to Evidence: “At the Historic Corner Window. 17.6.1897”’, Visual Resources 23/1–2 (2007), pp. 119–27. 17. Sigmund Freud, ‘Second Preface’ (1908) to The Interpretation of Dreams, in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. IV, trans. James Strachey et al. (London: Vintage Books, 2001), pp. xxv–xxvi (p. xxvi). 18. Freud, in The Complete Letters, ed. Masson, p. 363. 19. The reference to Freud’s father’s death is now ubiquitous within the literature on Freud’s antiquities. Peter Ucko provides a summary of the literature from Freud’s lifetime up to the year 2000: see Peter Ucko, ‘Unprovenanced Material Culture and Freud’s Collection of Antiquities’, Journal of Material Culture 6 (2001), pp. 269–322. 20. Forrester, ‘“Mille e tre”’, p. 232. 21. Ibid., p. 246. 22. Since 1989 the antiquities collection has also been kept ‘alive’ by the international travels of this ‘museum within a museum’. These travels have included: The Sigmund Freud Antiquities: Fragments from a Buried Past (1989), which began at Binghamton University Art Museum and travelled to 12 cities in the USA between 1989 and 1992; the exhibition catalogue is Sigmund Freud and Art. This tour inspired a second volume, Excavations and Their Objects: Freud’s Collection of Antiquities, ed. Stephen Barker (Albany NY: State University of New York, 1996). Other exhibitions were: Le Sphinx de Vienne, held in Brussels at the Musée d’Ixelles (1993), www.museedixelles.irisnet.be/en; Freud as Collector, Tokyo (1996), www.kajima.co.jp/csr/culture/freud/index.html; ‘My old and dirty gods’: From Sigmund Freud’s Collection (1998), Sigmund Freud Museum Vienna, curators Lydia Marinelli and Dieter Bogner, with the catalogue Meine … alten und dreckigen Götter’. Aus Sigmund Freuds Sammlung (Vienna: Sigmund Freud-Museum, 1998); Sigmund Freud: Conflict and Culture, curated by Michael S. Roth, began at the Library of Congress, Washington DC (1999) and then travelled internationally; Freud’s Sculpture, curated by Jon Wood, was held at the Henry Moore Institute in Leeds (2006) and then was shown at the Freud Museum London. Sigmund Freud’s Collection: An Archaeology of the Mind, a touring exhibition, started at Monash University Museum of Art, Sydney, guest curator Dr Janine Burke (2007), and travelled to The Nicholson Museum (2008). A catalogue, Passion at Work: Rodin and Freud as Collectors, accompanied the exhibition at the Musée Rodin, Paris (2009). 23. Michael Molnar, ‘Half-Way Region’, in Penelope Curtis and Jon Wood (eds), Freud’s Sculpture (Leeds: Henry Moore Institute, 2006), pp. 19–27 (p. 19). 24. Quoted in Suzanne Cassirer Bernfeld, ‘Freud and Archaeology’, American Imago 8/2 (1951), pp. 107–28 (p. 109). 25. Louise Bourgeois, ‘Freud’s Toys’, Artforum 28/5 (January 1990), pp. 111–13. This text is a review of the exhibition The Sigmund Freud Antiquities: Fragments from a Buried Past, University Art Museum of the State University of New York, Binghamton. 26. Bal, ‘Telling Objects’, p. 111. 27. On Andy Hope 1930/Andreas Hofer’s work and popular culture, see Roger Tatley et al., Andreas Hofer: Phantom Gallery (Zurich and Los Angeles: Hauser & Wirth, 2008). 28. Diane O’Donoghue, ‘Moses in Moravia’, American Imago 67/2 (Summer 2010), pp. 157–82. 29. Adam Phillips, ‘Psychoanalysis and Idolatry’, in On Kissing, Tickling, and Being Bored (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), pp. 109–22 (pp. 109–11). 30. Ibid., pp. 110–11. 31. For my purposes, the most useful texts on Freud’s work, his collection of antiquities and Judaism are: Bergstein, ‘The Dying Slave at Berggasse 19’; Cassirer Bernfeld, ‘Freud and Archaeology’, American Imago 8; James Fenton ‘On Statues’, New York Review of Books, 1 February 1996, www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/1996/feb/01/on-statues/?pagi nation=false&printpage=true (accessed 10 July 2011); Gamwell, ‘The Origins of Freud’s

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Antiquities Collection’; Griselda Pollock, ‘The Object’s Gaze in the Freudian Museum’, Encounters in the Virtual Feminist Museum: Time, Space and the Archive (London: Routledge, 2007), pp. 67–86; Ellen Handler Spitz, ‘Psychoanalysis and the Legacies of Antiquity’, in Gamwell and Wells (eds), Sigmund Freud and Art, pp. 153–72. The interpretations of Freud’s Moses and Monotheism are diverse and at times contradictory. The ones I found most useful for my work are: Richard H. Armstrong, ‘Conclusion: The Myth of Ur’, in A Compulsion for Antiquity: Freud and the Ancient World (Ithaca NY and London: Cornell University Press, 2005), pp. 219–52; Jan Assmann, ‘Sigmund Freud: The Return of the Repressed’, in Moses the Egyptian: The Memory of Egypt in Western Monotheism (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1997), pp. 144–67; Mary Bergstein, ‘Freud’s Uncanny Egypt: Prolegomena’, American Imago 66/2 (Summer 2009), pp. 185–210; Richard J. Bernstein, Freud and the Legacy of Moses (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998); Harold P. Blum, ‘Freud and the Figure of Moses’, in Sander L. Gilman, Jutta Birmele, Jay Geller and Valerie D. Greenberg (eds), Reading Freud’s Reading, (New York: New York University Press, 1994), pp. 109–28; Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression, trans. Eric Prenowitz (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1996); Ilse Grubrich-Simitis, Early Freud and Late Freud: Reading Anew Studies on Hysteria and Moses and Monotheism, trans. Philip Slotkin (London and New York: Routledge, 1997); O’Donoghue, ‘Moses in Moravia’; Ritchie Robertson, ‘Freud’s Testament: Moses and Monotheism’, in Edward Timms and Naomi Segal (eds), Freud in Exile: Psychoanalysis and Its Vicissitudes, (New Haven CT and London: Yale University Press, 1988), pp. 80–89; Griselda Pollock, ‘Freud’s Diary: Trauma, Tradition, Writing, Death and Compassion’, in Art in the Time–Space of Memory and Migration: Sigmund Freud, Anna Freud, and Bracha L. Ettinger in the Freud Museum, Artwriting after the Event (Leeds: Wild Pansy Press and London: Freud Museum, 2013); Edward Said, Freud and the Non-European (London: Verso, 2003); Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi, Freud’s Moses: Judaism Terminable and Interminable (New Haven CT and London: Yale University Press, 1991). And then there is the elliptical footnote by Lacan on Freud’s collection, Egypt, the signifier and object in Jacques Lacan, ‘The Object and the Thing’, in The Ethics of Psychoanalysis 1959–60: The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller (London: Tavistock/Routledge, 1992), pp. 101–14 (p. 113). 32. Phillips, ‘Psychoanalysis and Idolatry’, p. 113. 33. Ibid. 34. Freud, in The Complete Letters, ed. Masson, p. 353. 35. Forrester, ‘“Mille e tre”’, p. 238. 36. Ibid., pp. 247–9; Alexandra Warwick, ‘The Dreams of Archaeology’, Journal of Literature and Science 5/1 (2012), pp. 83–97. 37. Susan Hiller, After the Freud Museum (London: Book Works, 1995), n.pag. 38. Susan Hiller, ‘Working Through Objects’, in Thinking about Art: Conversations with Susan Hiller, ed. with introduction by Barbara Einzig, preface Lucy Lippard (Manchester: Manchester University Press and New York: St Martin’s Press, 1996), pp. 41–8 (p. 42). 39. Ibid., pp. 47–8. 40. Molnar, ‘Half-Way Region’, pp. 19, 20, 25 nn3, 4, 5. 41. On the numerous antique dealers in Vienna during Freud’s lifetime, see Montserrat, ‘Freud and the Archaeology of Aspiration’. 42. On Freud’s relationship with his long-term friend and professor of archaeology Emanuel Löwy, see O’Donoghue, ‘Negotiations of Surface’. See also Gamwell, ‘The Origins of Freud’s Antiquities Collection’, p. 23; Ucko ‘Unprovenanced Material Culture and Freud’. 43. Werner, ‘Edmund Engelman’, p. 449. On collecting and narrativity, see Bal, ‘Telling Objects’, p. 100. 44. Jon Wood, ‘Re-staging Freud’s Sculpture’, in Penelope Curtis and Jon Wood (eds), Freud’s Sculpture (Leeds: Henry Moore Institute, 2006), pp. 6–18 (p. 15). 45. On the controversies surrounding these excavations, and the formation of archaeology

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as a ‘science’, see Lorelei H. Corcoran, ‘Exploring the Archaeological Metaphor: The Egypt of Freud’s Imagination’, The Annual of Psychoanalysis XIX (1991), pp. 19–32. 46. Kuspit, ‘A Mighty Metaphor’, p. 133. 47. On Freud’s life, work and collection and the development of archaeology, see Gamwell, ‘The Origins of Freud’s Antiquities Collection’; Armstrong, A Compulsion for Antiquity. See also Griselda Pollock, ‘The Image in Psychoanalysis’, in Griselda Pollock (ed.), Psychoanalysis and the Image (Oxford: Blackwell, 2006), pp. 1–29. 48. Sigmund Freud, quoted in Peter Gay, ‘Introduction’, in Gamwell and Wells (eds), Sigmund Freud and Art, pp. 15–20 (p. 16). 49. On Freud’s library, see Wendy Botting and J. Keith Davies, ‘Freud’s Library and an Appendix of Texts Related to Antiquities’, in Gamwell and Wells (eds), Sigmund Freud and Art, pp. 184–7. 50. Forrester, ‘“Mille et tre”’, p. 226, 51. For a discussion of Freud’s understanding of the superiority of psychoanalysis to archaeology, see Malcolm Bowie, ‘Freud’s Dream of Knowledge’, in Freud, Proust and Lacan: Theory as Fiction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), pp. 13–44. 52. Sigmund Freud, ‘Constructions in Analysis’ (1937), in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. XXIII, trans. James Strachey et al. (London: Vintage Books, 2001), pp. 235–70 (p. 259). On the recursive analogy used by Freud, see Armstrong, A Compulsion for Antiquity. 53. Freud, in The Complete Letters, ed. Masson, pp. 207–15. 54. Ibid. For opposing views of this dynamic reading, see Bowie, ‘Freud’s Dream of Knowledge’; Kuspit, ‘A Mighty Metaphor’; Donald Spence, The Freudian Metaphor: Towards A Paradigm Change in Psychoanalysis (New York: Norton, 1987). 55. Davis, Replications, p. 30. See also Danny Nobus and Malcolm Quinn, ‘Epistemological Regression and the Problem of Applied Psychoanalysis’, in Knowing Nothing, Staying Stupid: Elements for a Psychoanalytic Epistemology (London: Routledge, 2005), pp. 186–200. 56. Hiller, After the Freud Museum, n.pag. 57. Ibid. 58. Adam Phillips, Terror and Experts (London: Faber & Faber, 1995), p. 12. 59. On the politics of the appropriation of non-Western art and culture in modernity, see James Clifford, ‘On Collecting Art and Culture’, in The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth Century Ethnography, Literature, and Art (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1988), pp. 215–52. 60. See Hiller, quoted in Robinson: ‘scarce stains the dust…’, p. 103. 61. Jack J. Spector, ‘Dr. Sigmund Freud, Art Collector’, ARTnews, April 1975, pp. 20–26 (p. 21). 62. In this way, Freud’s, Brisley’s and Hiller’s collections are close to Walter Benjamin’s understanding of his book collection, which functions as a catalyst for memories rather than a collection that is propelled by its (impossible) completion, such as the one discussed by Baudrillard, ‘The System of Collection’. See Benjamin, ‘Unpacking My Library’. 63. Jean Baudrillard, ‘The System of Collecting’, in The Cultures of Collecting, ed. John Elsner and Roger Cardinal (London: Reaktion Books, 1994), pp. 7–24 (p. 12). 64. Gavin Lucas, ‘Modern Disturbances: On the Ambiguities of Archaeology’, Modernism/ modernity 11/1 (January 2004), pp. 109–20. For a materialist reading of Freud’s use of the archaeological metaphor, see Kenneth Reinhard, ‘The Freudian Things: Construction and the Archaeological Metaphor’, in Stephen Barker (ed.), Excavations and Their Objects: Freud’s Collection of Antiquity (Albany NY: State University of New York Press, 1996), pp. 57–80; Warwick, ‘The Dreams of Archaeology’. 65. Armstrong, A Compulsion for Antiquity, p. 160. 66. H.D., ‘Writing on the Wall’, Tribute to Freud (Manchester: Carcanet Press, 1985), pp. 1–112 (p. 14). 67. On Cobbing’s exhibition, see Gradiva Project: William Cobbing (London: Camden Arts Centre, 2007); Beth L. Williamson, ‘William Cobbing: Gradiva Project’, The Art Book 15/3 (August 2008), pp. 23–4. See also William Cobbing, Imprints of Gradiva: From

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Psychoanalysis and Surrealism to Contemporary Art, Ph.D. thesis, Middlesex University, London, 2009. 68. Sigmund Freud’s marginalia in his copy of Jensen’s Gradiva, quoted in Edward Timms, ‘Freud’s Library and His Private Reading’, in Timms and Segal (eds), Freud in Exile, pp. 65–79 (p. 75). 69. Sigmund Freud, ‘Analysis Terminable and Interminable’ (1937), in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. XXIII, trans. James Strachey et al. (London: Vintage Books, 2001), pp. 209–54. 70. Josef Breuer and Sigmund Freud, Studies on Hysteria (1893–95), in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. II, trans. James Strachey et al. (London: Vintage Books, 2001), p. 139. 71. Sigmund Freud, ‘The Aetiology of Hysteria’ (1896), in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. III, trans. James Strachey et al. (London: Vintage Books, 2001), pp. 189–224 (p. 192). See also O’Donoghue, ‘Negotiations of Surface’; Michael Shortland, ‘Powers of Recall: Sigmund Freud’s Partiality for the Prehistoric’, Australasian Historical Archaeology 11 (1993), pp. 3–20; Julian Thomas, ‘Sigmund Freud’s Archaeological Metaphor and Archeology’s Self-Understanding’, in Cornelius Holtorf and Angela Piccini (eds), Contemporary Archaeologies: Excavating Now (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 2011), pp. 33–45; Warwick, ‘The Dreams of Archaeology’. 72. Freud, in The Complete Letters, ed. Masson, pp. 391–2. 73. Sigmund Freud, ‘Fragment of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria’ (1905 [1901]), in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. I, trans. James Strachey et al. (London: Vintage Books, 2001), pp. 3–124 (p. 12). 74. Sigmund Freud, Civilization and its Discontents (1930 [1929]), in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. I, trans. James Strachey et al. (London: Vintage Books, 2001), pp. 59–148 (pp. 70–71). 75. Wilhelm Jensen, Gradiva: A Pompeian Fantasy, trans. Helen M. Downey (Copenhagen and Los Angeles: Green Integer, 2003), pp. 5–140. 76. Sigmund Freud, Delusions and Dreams in Jensen’s ‘Gradiva’ (1907 [1906]), in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. IX, trans. James Strachey et al. (London: Vintage Books, 2001), pp. 3–96. 77. For my purposes, the most useful literature on Freud’s Gradiva is: Mary Bergstein, ‘Gradiva Medica: Freud’s Model Female Analyst as Lizard-Slayer’, American Imago 60/3 (Fall 2003), pp. 285–301; Joan Copjec, ‘Transference: Letters and The Unknown Woman’, October 28 (Spring 1984), pp. 60–90; Derrida, Archive Fever; George Dimock, ‘The Pictures over Freud’s Couch’, in Mieke Bal and Inge E. Boer (eds), The Point of Theory: Practices of Cultural Analysis (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 1994), pp. 239–50; Sarah Kofman, ‘Appendix. Delusion and Fiction: Concerning Freud’s Delusions and Dreams in Jensen’s “Gradiva”’, in The Childhood of Art: Interpretation of Freud’s Aesthetics, trans. Winifred Woodhull (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988), pp. 175–99; Andreas Mayer, ‘Gradiva’s Gait: Tracing the Figure of a Walking Woman’, Critical Inquiry 38 (Spring 2012), pp. 554–78; Lis Moller, The Freudian Reading: Analytical And Fictional Constructions (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1991); Pollock, ‘The Image in Psychoanalysis’; Pollock, ‘The Object’s Gaze’; Peter L. Rudnytsky, ‘Freud’s Pompeian Fantasy’, in Sander L. Gilman, Jutta Birmele, Jay Geller and Valerie D. Greenberg (eds), Reading Freud Reading (New York: New York University Press, 1994), pp. 211–31; Timms, ‘Freud’s Library and His Private Reading’; Jensen, Gradiva. 78. Freud, letter to Martha Freud, 24 September 1907, in Letters of Sigmund Freud, trans. Tania and James Stern, ed. Ernst L. Freud (New York: Basic Books, 1960), p. 267. 79. See William Cobbing, ‘Pellegrinare’, and Cobbing and Stella Santacatterina interview, in Pilgrimage (London: Middlesex University, n.d.), pp. 65–87. 80. From Max Schur, Freud: Living and Dying (London: Hogarth Press, 1972), p. 247. 81. Ernest Jones, The Life and Work of Sigmund Freud, vol. 2 (New York: Basic Books, 1955), p. 393.

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82. Sigmund Freud, The Psychopathology of Everyday Life (1901), in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. VI, trans. James Strachey et al. (London: Vintage Books, 2001), pp. 167–70. 83. I am deploying within a psychoanalytic context Bill Brown’s theory of things. See Bill Brown, ‘Thing Theory’, Critical Inquiry 28/1 (Autumn 2001), pp. 1–22 (p. 16). My formation of an ontology of use for Freud’s antiquities is an echo of the way in which the British psychoanalyst D.W. Winnicott defines the word ‘use’ in ‘The Use of an Object and Relating through Identifications’, Playing and Reality (London: Routledge, 1971), pp. 115–37. The notion of play within analysis is, of course, also vital to Winnicott. See Winnicott, Playing and Reality. On ‘use’ within art history, see Tamar Garb and Mignon Nixon’s guest-edited issue of October 113 (Summer 2005). 84. H.D. ‘Writing on the Wall’, pp. 67–8. 85. See Lee Johnson, ‘Oliver Clegg: Nights Move at the Freud Museum’, http://whitehotmagazine.com/articles/nights-move-at-freud-museum/1670 (accessed 23 March 2013). 86. See Oliver Clegg, interview with Becky Pootschi, Garage Magazine, http://garagemag. com/docs/editorial-layer/garage-exclusive-15 (accessed 23 March 2013). 87. Oliver Clegg, interview with Lilly Jones, Dazed, http://old.dazeddigital.com/artsandculture/article/1369/1/olive-clegg-at-the-freud-museum (accessed 19 March 2013). 88. Sigmund Freud, ‘On Beginning the Treatment (Further Recommendations on the Technique of Psycho-Analysis I)’ (1913), in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. XII, ed. James Strachey and Anna Freud, trans. Joan Riviere (London: Vintage, 2001), pp. 121–44 (p. 121). 89. On the relationship between chess and psychoanalysis, see Michael Calderbank, ‘Review of Freud’s Sculpture’, Papers of Surrealism 5 (Spring 2007), pp. 1–11 (p. 6). See also Stefan Zweig, Chess (London: Penguin Classics, 2006 [1943]). 90. Molnar ‘Antiquities Terminable and Interminable’, n.pag. 91. H.D. ‘Advent’, p. 110. See Maryse Choisy’s account of her analysis with Freud and his use of antiquities as a means of precipitating the transference. Maryse Choisy, ‘Memories of My Visits with Freud’, in Hendrik M. Ruitenbeek (ed.), Freud As We Knew Him (Detroit MI, Wayne State University Press, 1973), pp. 291–5 (pp. 291–3). See also Michael Molnar’s analysis of the decor in Freud’s consulting room and its impact on his patients: Molnar, ‘Antiquities Terminable and Interminable’, n.pag. 92. On H.D.’s negative transference as a result of this encounter, see ‘Writing on the Wall’, p. 106. The various readings of this encounter between Freud and H.D. can be found in Martin S. Bergmann, ‘Science and Art in Freud’s Life and Work’, in Gamwell and Wells (eds), Sigmund Freud and Art, pp. 173–83 (p. 178); Marian Toplin, ‘“She Is Perfect… Only She Has Lost Her Spear”: The Goddess Athene, Freud, and H.D.’, The Annual of Psychoanalysis XIX (1991), pp. 33–49; Susan Stanford Friedman, Psyche Reborn: The Emergence of H.D. (Bloomington IN: Indiana University Press, 1981), particularly ‘Part I: H.D. and Psychoanalytic Tradition’, pp. 17–156; Susan Stanford Friedman, ‘A Most Luscious Vers Libre Relationship: H.D. and Freud’, The Annual of Psychoanalysis XIV (1986), pp. 319–44. On Freud’s use of objects, see Tim Martin, ‘From Cabinet to Couch: Freud’s Clinical Use of Sculpture’, British Journal of Psychotherapy 24/2 (2008), pp. 184–96; Lydia Marinelli, ‘Freud’s Fading Gods’, in Bruno Latour and Peter Weibel (eds), Iconoclash (Cambridge MA: ZKM and MIT Press, 2002), pp. 468–9 (p. 468). 93. Although H.D. was relieved of her writer’s block, she required further treatment throughout her life. 94. Freud, in The Complete Letters, ed. Masson, p. 363. 95. Spitz, ‘Psychoanalysis and the Legacies of Antiquity’, p. 154. 96. This is according to Freud’s maid Paula, cited in Jack Spector, The Aesthetics of Freud (New York: Praeger, 1972), p. 15. 97. On the various meanings of Freud’s chair, see Ivan Ward, ‘Freud’s Chair and Desk’, in Curtis and Wood (eds), Freud’s Sculpture, pp. 28–35; Gamwell, ‘The Origins of Freud’s Antiquities Collection’, p. 27.

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98. Hanns Sachs, Freud, Master and Man (London: Imago Publishing, 1945), pp. 99–100. 99. Calderbank ‘Review of Freud’s Sculpture’, p. 2. 100. Spitz, ‘Psychoanalysis and the Legacies of Antiquity’, p. 159. 101. H.D., ‘Advent’, p. 175. 102. Molnar, ‘Half-way Region’, p. 24. 103. Wood, ‘Re-staging Freud’s Sculpture’, pp. 6–18 (p. 15). 104. H.D., ‘Advent’, p. 172. 105. Ward, ‘Freud’s Chair and Desk’, pp. 34–5. 106. Forrester, ‘“Mille e tre”’, pp. 243ff.

three 1. Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams (1900), vols IV and V, in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. V, ed. James Strachey and Anna Freud, trans. Joan Riviere (London: Vintage, 2001), p. 608. 2. Siri Hustvedt, Dreams (London: Freud Museum, 2011), p. 3. 3. Sigmund Freud, The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. XXII, trans. James Strachey et al. (London: Vintage Books, 2001), p. 247. 4. Sigmund Freud, The Complete Letters to Wilhelm Fliess, trans. Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1986). 5. The following texts were vital in understanding the impact of The Interpretation of Dreams on Freud’s self-analysis, on his understanding of the formation of the unconscious and the subject, the history of the psychoanalytic situation, and the history of the psychoanalytic movement: Didier Anzieu, Freud’s Self-Analysis, trans. P. Graham (London: Hogarth Press, 1986); John Forrester, ‘Dream Readers’, in Dispatches From the Freud Wars: Psychoanalysis and Its Passions (Cambridge MA and London: Harvard University Press, 1997), pp. 138–83; M. Masud R. Khan, ‘Dream Psychology and the Evolution of the Psychoanalytic Situation’, The Privacy of the Self (London: Karnac Books, 1974), pp. 27–41; Lydia Marinelli and Andreas Mayer, Dreaming by the Book: A History of Freud’s ‘The Interpretation of Dreams’ and the History of the Psychoanalytic Movement, trans. Susan Fairfield (New York: Other Press, 2003); Mignon Nixon, ‘Dream Dust’, October 116 (Spring 2006), pp. 63–86; Diane O’Donoghue, ‘The Magic of the Manifest: Freud’s Egyptian Dream Book’, American Imago 66/2 (Summer 2009), pp. 211–30; J.B. Pontalis, ‘Dream As An Object’, The International Review of Psycho-Analysis 1 (1974), pp. 125–33; Jacqueline Rose, On Not Being Able to Sleep: Psychoanalysis and the Modern World (London: Vintage, 2004); Marquard Smith and Joanne Morra (eds), Parallax 6/3 (2000), The Re-Interpretation of Dreams. 6. Sigmund Freud, ‘From the History of an Infantile Neurosis’ (1914–19), in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. XVII, ed. James Strachey and Anna Freud, trans. Joan Riviere (London: Vintage, 2001), pp. 3–124. For the Wolf Man’s recollections of his treatment with Freud, see Muriel Gardiner (ed.), The Wolf-Man and Sigmund Freud (London: Karnac Books, 1989). 7. For an analysis of Pankejeff’s drawings and their relationship to homosexuality, art history and psychoanalysis, see Whitney Davis, Drawing the Dream of the Wolves: Homosexuality, Interpretation, and Freud’s ‘Wolf Man’ (Bloomington IN: Indiana University Press, 1995). 8. Rick Poynor, ‘The Woman Who Took on The Wolf Man’, Eye 83 (2012), www.eye­ magazine.com/opinion/article/the-woman-who-took-on-the-wolf-man (accessed July 2013). 9. Sława Harasymowicz, Wolf Man (London: Freud Museum, 2012), n.pag. 10. John Goto, Dreams of Jelly Roll (London: Freud Museum), p. 5. 11. See Sharon Kivland, Freud on Holiday, Volume I: Freud Dreams of Rome (York: Information as Material, 2005), and Freud on Holiday, Volume II: A Disturbance of Memory (York: Information as Material, 2007). 12. Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, p. 621.

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four 1. Anna Freud, Home Movies, 1930–39. 2. Sigmund Freud, Moses and Monotheism: Three Essays (1939 [1934–38]), in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. XXIII, ed. James Strachey and Anna Freud, trans. Joan Riviere (London: Vintage, 2001), pp. 3–140 (p. 77). 3. Theodor Adorno, ‘Commitment’, in Notes on Literature, vol. 2, ed. Rolf Tiedemann, trans. Shierry Weber Nicholsen (New York: Columbia University Press, 1974), pp. 76–94 (pp. 87–8). 4. On the Home Movies, see Amelie Hastie, ‘Breathing in the Archives’, Camera Obscura 22/1 64 (2007), pp. 180–85; Ann Pelligrini, ‘The Dogs of War and the Dogs at Home: Thresholds of Loss’, American Imago 66/2 (Summer 2009), pp. 231–51. 5. On Anna Freud’s mourning of her father’s death and the losses of aunts and other important members of her family and friends, see Elisabeth Young-Bruehl, ‘On Losing and Being Lost’, in Anna Freud: A Biography (Ann Arbour MI: Sheridon Books, 2008), pp. 276–314. On Anna Freud and ‘survivor guilt’, see John J. Hartman, ‘Anna Freud and the Holocaust: Mourning and Survival Guilt’, International Journal of Psychoanalysis 95 (2014), pp. 1183–210. Hartman also presents the most recent information about the deaths of Freud’s sisters. 6. Cathy Caruth, ‘Trauma and Experience: Introduction’, in Cathy Caruth (ed.), Trauma: Explorations in Memory (Baltimore MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995), pp. 3–12 (pp. 8–9). See also Cathy Caruth, Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History (Baltimore MD and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996). 7. See Saul Friedlander, ‘Trauma, Transference and “Working through” in Writing the History of the Shoah’, History and Memory 4/1 (Spring/Summer 1992), pp. 39–59; Dominick La Capra, ‘Revisiting the Historians’ Debate: Mourning and Genocide’, in History and Memory After Auschwitz (Ithaca NY and London: Cornell University Press, 1998), pp. 43–72; Dominick La Capra ‘Acting-Out and Working-Through’, Representing the Holocaust: History, Theory, Trauma (Ithaca NY and London: Cornell University Press, 1994), pp. 205–24; Dominick La Capra, ‘Interview for Yad Vashem (June 9, 1998)’, in Writing History, Writing Trauma (Baltimore MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014), pp. 141–80. See also the original Freud texts: ‘Mourning and Melancholia’ (1915–17) and ‘Remembering, Repeating and Working-Through’ (1914), in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. XII, ed. James Strachey and Anna Freud, trans. Joan Riviere (London: Vintage, 2001), pp. 145–56. 8. Marianne Hirsch, ‘The Generation of Postmemory’, Poetics Today 29/1 (Spring 2008), pp. 103–28 (p. 106). 9. Marianne Hirsch, ‘Surviving Images: Holocaust Photographs and the Work of Postmemory’, Yale Journal of Criticism 14/1 (2001), pp. 5–37 (p. 22). 10. Eva Hoffman, After Such Knowledge: Memory, History and the Legacy of the Holocaust (Cambridge MA: Public Affairs, 2004). 11. Theodor W. Adorno, ‘Cultural Criticism and Society’ (1949), in Prisms, ed. and trans. Samuel and Shierry Weber (Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 1983), pp. 17–34 (p. 34). 12. See Ernst Van Alphen, ‘History’s Other: Oppositional Thought and Its Discontents’, in Caught by History: Holocaust Effects in Contemporary Art, Literature, and Theory (Stanford CA: Stanford University Press, 1997), pp. 16–37. 13. Adorno, ‘Commitment’, pp. 76–94 (pp. 87–8). 14. On haunting, see Avery F. Gordon, Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 1997). 15. Several other exhibitions have been held at the Freud Museum London that also dealt with trauma in important ways and have been expertly analysed. Although I have not been able to include them in this book, I would like to mention them here: Paul Coldwell, Freud’s Coat (1996), and Temporarily Accessioned: Freud’s Coat Revisited (2017); Penny Siopis, Three Essays on Shame (2005); Various artists, Paranoia (2007); Bracha Ettinger, Resonance/Overlay/Interweave: In the Freudian Space of Memory and Migration (2009);

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Judy Goldhill, Lauderdale Mansions, Ha’atzmaut (2010); Barbara Loftus, Sigismund’s Watch: A Tiny Catastrophe (2011); Miroslaw Balka: DIE TRAUMDEUTUNG 75,32m AMSL (2014); Various artists, Why War? (2014); Bettina von Zwehl, Invitation to Frequent the Shadows (2016). 16. See Griselda Pollock, After-affects | After-images: Trauma and Aesthetic Transformation in the Virtual Feminist Museum (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2013); Jill Bennett, Empathic Vision: Affect, Trauma, and Contemporary Art (Stanford CA: Stanford University Press, 2005). 17. Hoffman, After Such Knowledge. 18. See also Joanne Morra, ‘Contemporary Art Inside the Freud Museum: Working-through Transit Documents, Postmemory, and the Holocaust’, Journal of History of Modern Art 26 (2009), pp. 249–73. 19. Sigmund Freud, ‘Mourning and Melancholia’ (1915–17), in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. XIV, ed. James Strachey and Anna Freud, trans. Joan Riviere (London: Vintage, 2001), pp. 237–58 (p. 245). 20. La Capra, ‘Revisiting the Historians’ Debate’; La Capra, ‘Acting-Out and WorkingThrough’. 21. Ralph Freeman, in Ralph Freeman: Foundations and Fragments (St Ives: Tate Gallery St Ives, 1997), p. 11. 22. David Cohen, ‘Foundations and Fragments’, in Foundations and Fragments (St Ives: Tate Gallery St Ives, 1997), pp. 5–11 (p. 5). 23. Freud, ‘Mourning and Melancholia’, pp. 237–58 (p. 245). 24. James E. Young, At Memory’s Edge: After-images of the Holocaust in Contemporary Art and Architecture (New Haven CT and London: Yale University Press, 2000), p. 6. 25. Hirsch ‘Surviving Images’, p. 222. 26. Cohen, ‘Foundations and Fragments’, p. 5. 27. Ralph Freeman, Foundations and Fragments, exhibition catalogue (London: Freud Museum, 2002), n.pag. 28. Edward Timms, Foundations and Fragments, exhibition catalogue (London: Freud Museum, 2002), n.pag. For more on the use of the letter in contemporary art, see Joanne Morra, ‘Daughter’s Tongue: The Intimate Distance of Translation’, Journal of Visual Culture 6/1 (2007), pp. 91–108. 29. For the literary and art historian Ernst van Alphen, in a discussion of the French artist Christian Boltanski’s work, the multiplication of images, the move from the general to the particular and back, and the affect created in the viewer through the presence of absence and the absence of presence, are an artwork’s ‘Holocaust-effect’. For van Alphen, ‘[t]his reenactment is an effect, not a representation; it does something instead of showing it.’ Van Alphen, Caught by History, p. 106. I would suggest that Freeman’s work also provides its viewer with the Holocaust-effect. The need to multiply objects and images in his work effects our understanding of the necessity of accounting for the unaccountable. 30. Sigmund Freud, ‘From the History of an Infantile Neurosis’ (1918 [1914]), in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. XVII, trans. James Strachey, in collaboration with Anna Freud (London: Vintage, Hogarth Press and Institute of Psycho-Analysis, 2001 [1955]), pp. 3–124. 31. Tamar Garb, ‘Reisemalheurs’, in Vivienne Koorland, Reismalheurs (Travel Woes) (London: Freud Museum, 2007), pp. 3–22 (p. 5). 32. Sigmund Freud in a letter to Wilhelm Fliess dated 6 December 1896, quoted in Haydée Faimberg, ‘Après-coup’, International Journal of Psychoanalysis 86 (2005), pp. 1–13 (p. 1). 33. The German term Nachträglichkeit has been translated into English via French as ‘afterwardsness’ in the work of the French psychoanalyst Jean Laplanche. I use this translation because it remains close to the German word and its temporality, and it retains the awkward conjunction of the German neologism. See Jean Laplanche, ‘Notes on Afterwardsness’, in Jean Laplanche: Seduction, Translation and the Drives, ed. John Fletcher and Martin Stanton, trans. Martin Stanton (London: ICA, 1992), pp. 217–24.

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34. Cathy Caruth, Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History (Baltimore MD and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996) p. 4. 35. Vivienne Koorland,‘A Conversation’, Vivienne Koorland, Reisemalheurs (Travel Woes) (London: Freud Museum, 2007), pp. 39–50, p. 49. 36. Ibid., pp. 46–7). 37. See Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. Daniel HellerRoazen (Meridian: Crossing Aesthetics, 1998). 38. Koorland speaks of her dislike of waste, and relates it to what she calls her ‘refugee status’: ‘A Conversation’, p. 41. 39. Tamar Garb, in Vivienne Koorland, Reisemalheurs (Travel Woes), video from the Freud Museum. See also Astrid Schmetterling, ‘Exhibition Review: Vivienne Koorland: Reismalheurs (Travel Woes), Textile 6/1 (2008), pp. 88–97. 40. Koorland, in Vivienne Koorland, Reisemalheurs (Travel Woes), video from the Freud Museum. 41. Adrian Rifkin, in Vivienne Koorland, Reisemalheurs (Travel Woes), video from the Freud Museum. 42. Koorland, ‘A Conversation’, pp. 39–40. 43. Salman Akhtar, Psychoanalytic Listening: Methods, Limits, and Innovations (London: Karnac Books, 2013). 44. www.yorku.ca/BodyMissing. 45. Also in 1994 the book by Lynn H. Nichols, The Rape of Europa: The Fate of Europe’s Treasures in the Third Reich and the Second World War (New York: Vintage, 1994), was published. 46. A limited edition six-postcard suite, one for each wall mural, was published by the Goethe-Institut, Toronto. 47. Because the interpretations of Body Missing are never concerned with just one aspect of it, themes that I separate in the summary below, I think it best to include all of the most relevant texts in one footnote: Dora Apel, ‘The Reinvention of Memory’, in Memory Effects: The Holocaust and the Art of Secondary Witnessing (New Brunswick NJ and London: Rutgers University Press, 2002), pp. 72–91; Ulla Arnell and Tom Sandqvist, Vera Frenkel: …from the Transit Bar, Body Missing, exhibition catalogue (Stockholm: Riksutställiningar, 1997); Catherine Bédard, ‘Body Missing: Score for the Deceased Body’, Journal du Centre d’art contemporain de Basse-Normandie, 2001, pp. 6–15; Erica Davies and Vera Frenkel, Body Missing, exhibition catalogue (London: Freud Museum, 2003); John Di Stephano, ‘Moving Images of Home’, Art Journal 61/4 (2002), pp. 38–51; Catherine Elwes, ‘The Singular Voice(s) of Vera Frenke’ (review of Sigrid Schade (ed.), Vera Frenkel [2013]), MIRAJ 4/1–2 (2015), pp. 248–58; Robert Enright, ‘Boundary Blurrer: An Interview with Vera Frenkel’, Border Crossings 26/2 (2007), pp. 42–55; Gottfried Fliedl, Vera Frenkel’s Body Missing’, Sigmund Freud Museum Vienna Magazine 2 (Spring 2000), pp. 30–31; Vera Frenkel, Dot Tuer and Clive Robertson, ‘The Story Is Always Partial: A Conversation with Vera Frenkel’, Art Journal 77/4 (Winter 1998), pp. 2–15; David Jays, ‘Body Missing: Ghosts of the Nazi Past Haunt Freud’s House’, Financial Times, 21 March 2003, p. 19; Elizabeth Legge, ‘“A Better Place”: Bureaucratic Poetics in Vera Frenkel’s Body Missing and The Institute’, Journal of Canadian Art 29 (2008), pp. 90–115; Lydia Marinelli, ‘“Body Missing” at Berggasse 19’, trans. Joy Titheridge, American Imago 66/2 (Summer 2009), pp. 161–7; Griselda Pollock, ‘Fictions of Fact: Memory in Transit in Vera Frenkel’s Video Installation Works Transit Bar (1992) and Body Missing (1994)’, After-affects/After-images: Trauma and Aesthetic Transformation in the Virtual Feminist Museum (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2013), pp. 223–72; Sigrid Schade, Body Missing, exhibition catalogue (Linz: Offenes Kulturhaus, Centre for Gegenwartskunst, 1994); Sigrid Schade, Vera Frenkel: Body Missing, exhibition catalogue (Bremen: Gesellschaft für Aktuelle Kunst and Stockholm: Riksutställningar, 1996); Sigrid Schade (ed.), Vera Frenkel (Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz Verlag, 2013); Dot Tuer, ‘Threads of Memory and Exile: Examining the Art of Storytelling in the Work of Vera Frenkel’, in Images Festival of Independent Film and Video, exhibition catalogue (Toronto: Northern Visions, 1997), pp. 1–5.

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48. Pollock, After-affects, p. 248. 49. Sigmund Freud in a letter to Raymond de Saussure, quoted in Lydia Marinelli, ‘“Body Missing”’, pp. 19–20. 50. Irit Rogoff, ‘Moving On: Migration and the Intertextuality of Trauma’, in Frenkel… from the Transit Bar (Toronto and Ottawa: Power Plant and the National Gallery of Canada, 1994), pp. 26–59.

five 1. Sigmund Freud, ‘Fräulein Elisabeth Von R.’, Josef Breuer and Sigmund Freud, Studies on Hysteria, in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. II, trans. James Strachey et al. (London: Vintage Books, 2001), pp. 135–82 (p. 160). 2. Adam Phillips, ‘The Telling of Selves’, in On Flirtation (London: Faber & Faber, 1994), pp. 65–78 (p. 66). 3. Reference is to the entry in Freud’s diary dated Sunday, 14 November 1937. The Diary of Sigmund Freud, 1929–1939: A Chronicle of Events in the Last Decade, trans. with annotations and Introduction by Michael Molnar (London: Hogarth Press, 1992), p. 224. 4. In the Freud family’s Home Movies, which run on a continuous loop in both Freud Museums (Vienna and London), there is footage taken by Marie Bonaparte of Freud in his study, as well as footage presumably taken by her daughter Eugénie, of her mother sitting in Freud’s waiting room anxiously waiting for her session with the analyst to begin. 5. I would like to thank Rita Aspen from the Freud Museum London for factual information relating to this photograph. 6. With this argument I am referring to Paul de Man, ‘Autobiography as De-facement’, Modern Language Notes 94/5 (December 1979). The literature that I have engaged with on autobiography is vast; therefore I refer only to specific texts where necessary. For an overview of the various discourses and approaches that constitute the field of auto­ biography, see Linda Anderson, Autobiography (London: Routledge, 2011 [2001]). 7. Sarah Lucas and James Putnam, ‘Beyond the Pleasure Principle’: Sarah Lucas at the Freud Museum, exhibition catalogue (London: Freud Museum, 2000), n.pag. 8. Claire Bishop, ‘Sarah Lucas’, art-text 70 (August–October, 2000), pp. 78–9 (p. 79). 9. Quoted in Lisa McDonald, curatorial assistant, artonview 59 (Spring 2009), http://nga. gov.au/Exhibitions/softsculpture/Default.cfm?IRN=189001&MnulD=GallD=7&View ID=2 (accessed 10 January 2014). 10. Lucas goes on to narrate how her random reading eventually brought her to the work of Andrea Dworkin and observes ‘it was a bit like, I imagine, it must have been for people at one time reading Karl Marx. In some ways, it was quite destructive, I remember going through a bad patch with my boyfriend because it had an effect on our sexual relations, making me self-conscious and angry. Or maybe it was something going on in the relationship and it was just a handy bit of ammunition to read Dworkin.’ Lynn Barber, ‘Sarah Lucas’, Life: Observer Magazine, 30 January 2000, pp. 9–16 (pp. 16, 14). 11. Adrian Searle, ‘Do These Pictures Make You Think of Sex?’, Guardian, 28 March 2000; www.theguardian.com/culture/2000/mar/28/artsfeatures1. 12. Raichel Le Goff, ‘Sarah Lucas at the Freud Museum London’, http://raichel.org/articlesRai chel/20thCentury&contemp/SarahLucas.html (accessed 21 November 2013). 13. Barber, ‘Sarah Lucas’, p. 16. 14. Briony Fer, ‘The Somnambulist’s Story: Installation and the Tableau’, Oxford Art Journal 24/2 (2001), pp. 77–92 (p. 91). 15. Joanna S. Walker, ‘Studio: Alice Anderson’s Childhood Rituals’, in Alice Anderson: Childhood Rituals (ondon: Bookstorming, 2011), pp. 57–60 (p. 57). 16. Merve Unsal, ‘Alice Anderson’, XOXO The Magazine, Turkey, 2013, n.pag. 17. Jacques Derrida, ‘Circumfession’, in Jacques Derrida and Geoffrey Bennington, trans. G. Bennington (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1999), p. 25. 18. Maud Jacquin, ‘15 Minute Interview‘, in Alice Anderson’s Time Reversal (London: Riflemaker, 2010), pp. 26–49.

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19. See Walker, ‘Studio’, p. 60. 20. See, for instance, Melanie Klein, ‘Infantile Anxiety Situations Reflected in a Work of Art and in the Creative Impulse’ (1929), in Love, Guilt and Reparation and Other Works 1921– 1945 (London: Vintage, 1975), pp. 210–18; ‘Mourning and its Relation to Manic-Depressive States (1940), in Love, Guilt and Reparation, pp. 344–69; ‘The Oedipus Complex in the Light of Early Anxieties’ (1945), in Love, Guilt and Reparation, pp. 370–419. See Alice Jones, ‘Alice Anderson: Tressed for success’, Independent, 5 April 2011; Griselda Pollock, ‘Lines of Pain: Webs of Connections’, in Alice Anderson: Childhood Rituals, pp. 8–38 (p. 10), who also steers away from a Kleinian reading of Anderson’s work. 21. Anderson in Walker, ‘Studio’, p. 58. 22. Jason Farago, ‘Alice au pays d’Anderson’, Art Press Magazine 344 (2008), pp. 52–7 (p. 57). 23. Jessica Benjamin, Like Subjects, Love Objects: Essays on Recognition and Sexual Difference (New Haven CT and London: Yale University Press, 1995). 24. Mieke Bal and Michelle Williams Gamaker’s installation Sissi in Analysis from the 2012 exhibition Saying It comprehensively deals with these issues. I discuss this show in Chapter 1. See also Saying It (London: Occasional Papers, 2012); Joanne Morra, ‘Daughter’s Tongue: The Intimate Distance of Translation’, in Journal of Visual Culture 6/1 (April 2007), Acts of Translation, ed. Mieke Bal and Joanne Morra, pp. 91–108. 25. Sigmund Freud, ‘Femininity’ (1933 [1932]), in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. XXII, trans. James Strachey et al. (London: Vintage Books, 2001), pp. 112–35 (p. 132); Liliane Weissberg, ‘Ariadne’s Thread’, MLN 125/3 (April 2010), pp. 661–81 (pp. 678–80). 26. Elisabeth Young-Bruehl, Anna Freud: A Biography (Ann Arbour MI: Sheridon Books, 2008), p. 193. Later in life, Anna Freud told her friend and colleague Manna Friedman that ‘When I was a little girl and had a new [knitting] project, I had to start it at once … I have not lost that enthusiasm. … I am still the same.’ Bruehl notes how when ‘Freud … tried to moderate what he called her “passionate excesses,” … his entreaties resulted only in a conversion: [Anna] took up weaving.’ Ibid., p. 45. 27. Sophie Freud, My Three Mothers and Other Passions (New York and London: New York University Press, 1991), p. 80. 28. Arthur S. Couch, ‘Anna Freud’s Psychoanalytic Technique: A Defence of Classical Analysis’, www.thecjc.org/pdf/couch.pdf, p. 8 (accessed 15 January 2013). Couch also relays a story told to him by Erik Erikson, another of Anna Freud’s patients in Vienna: while Erikson’s wife was pregnant he was spending many sessions talking about his worries about her pregnancy and what having a baby meant to him. ‘Being very involved with this topic and wanting his analyst’s full attention and concern, Erikson expressed his irritation to her that she was not speaking about it, but Anna Freud just kept knitting with increasing intensity while remaining silent. He complained repeatedly that she wasn’t paying enough attention to this serious issue. Anna Freud maintained ordinary analytic work during this period, but when Erikson came into his session and announced that his new baby son had been born, Anna Freud gave him a blanket she had been knitting all along for his baby’ (pp. 18–19). 29. Anna Freud, ‘Notes on Aggression’ (1949 [1948]), in Selected Writings by Anna Freud, ed. with introduction by Richard Elkins and Ruth Freeman (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1998), pp. 37–48 (p. 47). On the institutionalization of psychoanalytic training, see Suzanne Stewart-Steinberg, Impious Fidelity: Anna Freud, Psychoanalysis, Politics (Ithaca NY and London: Cornell University Press, 2011); Jacqueline Rose, On Not Being Able to Sleep: Psychoanalysis and the Modern World (Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003). 30. Anna Freud’s interpretation is an extension of Sigmund Freud’s analysis of the fort–da game in Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920), in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. XVIII, trans. James Strachey et al. (London: Vintage Books, 2001), pp. 3–66. 31. Louise Bourgeois (LB-0012, 1972) quoted in Mignon Nixon, ‘L’, in The Return of the

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Repressed, ed. Philip Larratt-Smith, exhibition catalogue (London: Violette Editions, 2012), pp. 85–98 (p. 95). 32. Discussions were had between employees and the curator over what the Museum could physically hold in terms of size of works able to enter its doorways, and the weight of works that the floors could support. 33. Louise Bourgeois, pencil note on 8 x 5 white paper, 1957 (LB-0129), in Freud Museum exhibition. 34. Louise Bourgeois, c. 1965, pencil on ruled paper, LB-0019. 35. See Nixon, ‘L’. 36. A comment made by Jerry Gorovoy to Meg Harris Williams in 2010. See Meg Harris Williams, ‘The Child, the Container, and the Claustrum: The Artistic Vocation of Louise Bourgeois’, in Larratt-Smith (ed.), The Return of the Repressed, pp. 31–44 (p. 43 n95). 37. Phillip Larratt-Smith, ‘Introduction: Sculpture as Symptom’, in ibid., pp. 7–14 (p. 8). 38. Elisabeth Bronfen, ‘Contending with the Father: Louise Bourgeois and her Aesthetics of Reparation’, in Larratt-Smith (ed.), The Return of the Repressed, pp. 101–12 (p. 101). 39. Donald Kuspit, ‘Symbolizing Loss and Conflict: Psychoanalytic Process in Louise Bourgeois’s Art’, in ibid., pp. 129–50 (p. 130). 40. The most relevant texts by Klein are: Melanie Klein, Love, Guilt and Reparation and Other Works 1921–1945 (London: Vintage, 1995); Envy and Gratitude and Other Works 1946–1963 (London: Vintage, 1997); and The Selected Melanie Klein, ed. Juliet Mitchell (New York: The Free Press, 1986). 41. Juliet Mitchell, ‘The Sublime Jealousy of Louise Bourgeois’, in Larratt-Smith (ed.), The Return of the Repressed, pp. 47–67 (p. 47). 42. Ibid., pp. 47–8. 43. Ibid., pp. 50–51. 44. Nixon, ‘L’, pp. 87, 88. 45. My first encounter with the show was informed by my previous knowledge of Bourgeois’ work, particularly the various exhibitions of her work I had visited and the interpretation of Bourgeois’ practice by Mieke Bal, Louise Bourgeois’ Spider: The Architecture of Art-Writing (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), and Mignon Nixon, Fantastic Reality: Louise Bourgeois and a Story of Modern Art (Cambridge MA and London: MIT Press, 2005). 46. Louise Bourgeois, black ink and pencil on 18th street stationery, 1951, LB-0216, in Freud Museum exhibition. 47. An alternative and yet related analysis of this process is Jennifer Fisher’s idea of the ‘sensorial affect of objects’. See Jennifer Fisher, ‘Speeches of Display: The Museum Audioguides of Sophie Calle, Andrea Fraser and Janet Cardiff’, Parachute 94 (April–June 1999), pp. 24–31. 48. As with many of his ideas, Freud’s understanding of transference altered as time passed and his clinical experience grew. At times Freud was unable to account for these shifts in his theories of transference, which produced inconsistent case histories. 49. Sigmund Freud, ‘Remembering, Repeating and Working-Through’ (1914), in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. XII, trans. Joan Riviere, (London: Vintage, Hogarth Press, 2001), pp. 145–56. 50. Susanne Kuchler, ‘The Art of Ethnography: The Case of Sophie Calle’, in Alex Coles (ed.), Site-Specificity: The Ethnographic Turn (London: Black Dog, n.d.), pp. 94–110 (p. 95). 51. For a reading of the show in terms of gender and psychoanalysis, see Judith Rugg, ‘Sophie Calle’s Appointment at the Freud Museum: Intervention or Irony’, in Malcolm Miles (ed.), New Practices, New Pedagogies: A Reader (London: Routledge, 2005), pp. 63–74. 52. Sigmund Freud, ‘Recommendations to Physicians Practising Psycho-Analysis’ (1912), in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. XII, trans. James Strachey et al. (London: Vintage, 2001), pp. 109–20 (p. 115). See also Tania Guha, ‘Sophie Calle’, Time Out, 17 March 1999, n.pag.; Sven Spieker, ‘The Archive at Play’, The Big Archive: Art From Bureaucracy (Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 2008), pp. 173–190

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(pp. 87ff.) My interest is in transference and counter-transference as processes within the consulting room. 53. Robert Storr, ‘Sophie Calle: The Woman Who Wasn’t There’, Art Press 335 (2007), n.pag. 54. Ralph Rugoff, ‘The Culture of Strangers’, Financial Times, 27 February 1999, n.pag. 55. For an analysis of psychoanalysis, autobiography and fiction in very different contexts, see Dorrit Cohn, ‘Freud’s Case Histories and the Question of Fictionality’, in The Distinction of Fiction (Baltimore MD and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999); Thomas Ogden, ‘On Psychoanalytic Writing’, International Journal of Psychoanalysis 86 (2005), pp. 15–29; Adrienne Harris ‘The Analyst as (Auto)biographer’, American Imago 55/2 (1998), pp. 255–75; Zoe Mendelson, Psychologies and Spaces of Accumulation: The Hoard as Collagist Methodology (and Other Stories), Ph.D. thesis, Central Saint Martins, London, 2014. 56. See Marina van Zuylen ‘Voyeuristic Monomania’, in Monomania: The Flight From Everyday Life in Literature and Art (Ithaca NY: Cornell University Press, 2005), pp. 180–92. 57. See Patrick Frey, ‘Tombstones, Inscriptions, Photographs, Captions: The Hyperfiction of Life and Death’, Parkett 36 (1993), pp. 105–13. 58. Rosa Saverino, ‘Autobiography, Photography, and Intertextuality: Rewriting Autobiography in Sophie Calle’s Double Game’, in Leslie Boldt, Corrado Federic and Eresto Virgulti (eds), Rewriting Texts: Remaking Images: Interdisciplinary Perspectives (New York: Peter Lange, 2010), pp. 269–82 (p. 276). 59. Luc Sante, ‘Sophie Calle’s Uncertainty Principle’, Parkett 36 (1993), pp. 74–8 (p. 78). 60. Bice Curiger, ‘In Conversation with Sophie Calle’ (1993), in Sophie Calle: The Reader (London: Whitechapel Gallery, 2009), pp. 49–58 (p. 55). 61. Rugoff, ‘The Culture of Strangers’, n.pag.

six 1. Sigmund Freud, ‘Civilization and its Discontents’ (1929/30), in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. XXI, ed. James Strachey and Anna Freud, trans. James Strachey (London: Vintage, 2001), pp. 59–148 (p. 70). 2. John Forrester, ‘Collector, Naturalist, Surrealist’, in Dispatches from the Freud Wars (Cambridge MA and London: Harvard University Press, 1997), pp. 107–36, (p. 132). 3. Edmund Engelman, ‘A Memoir’, in Edmund Engelman, Inge Scholz-Strasser and Lonnie R. Johnson, Sigmund Freud: Vienna IX. Berggasse 19 (Vienna: Verlag Christian Brandstätter, 1998 [1976]), pp. 89–103 (p. 89). See also Arnold Werner, ‘Edmund Engelman: Photographer of Sigmund Freud’s Home and Offices’, International Journal of Psychoanalysis 83 (2002), pp. 445–51. 4. Arnold Werner has counted the number of photographs taken by Engelman from the contact sheets. Werner, ‘Edmund Engelman’, p. 447. 5. Lydia Marinelli and Georg Traska, ‘Besuch Einer Wohnung. Zur Architectktur des Sigmund Freud-Museums’, in Architektur des Sigmund Freud-Museums (Vienna: Sigmund Freud-Museum, 2002), n.pag. 6. For a detailed analysis of Freud’s last months in Vienna, see Sigmund Freud’s diary entries, in The Diary of Sigmund Freud, 1929–1939: A Chronicle of Events in the Last Decade, ed., trans. and intro. Michale Molnar (London: Hogarth Press, 1992), pp. 227–54; Celia Bertin, Marie Bonaparte: A Life (London: Quartet Books, 1983), passim; Elisabeth YoungBruehl, Anna Freud: A Biography (Ann Arbor MI: Sheridan Books, 2008); David Cohen, The Escape of Sigmund Freud (London: JR Books, 2009); John J. Hartman, ‘Anna Freud and the Holocaust: Mourning and Survival Guilt’, International Journal of Psychoanalysis 95 (2014), pp. 1183–210. 7. Scholz-Strasser, ‘Berggasse 19: Introduction’, pp. 7–22, (p. 8). See also Max Schur, Freud: Living and Dying (London: Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psycho-Analysis, 1972). 8. Sigmund Freud, quoted in Scholz-Strasser, ‘Berggasse 19: Introduction’, p. 8. See also Bruno Bettelheim, ‘Berggasse 19’, in Recollections and Reflections (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1989 [1956]); and Bruno Bettelheim, ‘Freud’s Vienna’, in Recollections and Reflections, pp. 3–17.

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9. Engelman, ‘A Memoir’, p. 89. 10. Ibid., p. 93. 11. Ibid., p. 95. 12. Ibid., p. 96. 13. Ibid. 14. Ibid. 15. Ibid., p. 97. See also Werner, ‘Edmund Engelman’, p. 449. 16. Engelman, ‘A Memoir’, p. 98. 17. Werner, ‘Edmund Engelman’, p. 447. 18. Diana Fuss with Joel Sanders, ‘Freud’s Ear: Berggasse 19 Vienna Austria’, in Diana Fuss, The Sense of an Interior: Four Writers and the Rooms That Shaped Them (London and New York: Routledge, 2004), pp. 71–106 (p. 78); Bettelheim, ‘Berggasse 19’, pp. 18–23. 19. Marinelli and Traska, ‘Besuch Einer Wohnung’, n.pag. 20. Harald Leupold-Löwenthal, ‘Foreword’, in Sigmund Freud Museum Wien IX. Berggasse 19 (Vienna: Verlag Christian Brandstätter, 1994/95), p. 7. 21. Marinelli and Traska, ‘Besuch Einer Wohnung’, n.pag. 22. For a comparative analysis of the ethnographic and art museum, see Mieke Bal, ‘The Discourse of the Museum’, in Reesa Greenberg, Bruce W. Ferguson and Sandy Nairne (eds), Thinking About Exhibitions (London: Thames & Hudson, 1996), pp. 201–20; on the document, see Vivian Rehberg, ‘The Documentary Impulse’, www.jong-holland. nl/4–2005/rehberg.htm; on the souvenir and its relationship to history and memory, see Susan Steward, On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection (Durham NC and London: Duke University Press, 1993). 23. Inge Scholz-Strasser, ‘Berggasse 19’, in Sigmund Freud Museum Wien IX. Berggasse 19 (Vienna: Verlag Christian Brandstätter, 1994/95), pp. 9–19 (p. 9). 24. There is a long history of artists pointing to, and using, the radically empty gallery as a means of denoting the constitution of the work of art and the gallery as an ideological, social, economic and cultural construction. See, for instance, Yves Klein’s The Specialization of Sensibility in the Raw Material State into Stabilized Pictorial Sensibility, otherwise known as Le Vide/The Void, Galerie Iris Clert, Paris, 1958; Art & Language’s The Air-Conditioning Show, 1966–1972, Visual Arts Gallery, New York, 1972; Robert Barry’s Closed Gallery Piece, 1969–1970, Amsterdam, Turin and Los Angeles, 1969–70, and his Some places to which we can come, and for a while ‘be free to think about what we are going to do’ (Marcuse), first presentation Galleria Sperone, Turin, 1970, 1970–in progress; Robert Irwin’s Experimental Situation, Ace Gallery, Los Angeles, 1970; Michael Asher’s October 7–October 10, 1974, Anna Leonowens Gallery, Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, Halifax NS, 1974; Laurie Parsons’s Untitled, Lorence-Monk Gallery, New York, 1990; Bethan Huws’s Haus Esters Piece, Museum Haus Esters, Krefeld, 1993; Maria Eichhorn’s Money at the Kunsthalle Bern, Kunsthalle, Bern, 2001; Ilya and Emilia Kabakov’s The Empty Museum, Sculpture Center, New York, 2004; Roman Ondák’s More Silent Than Ever, gb agency, Paris, 2006. See also the exhibition Voids: A Retrospective, ed. John Armleder, Mathieu Copeland, Laurent Le Bon, Gustav Metzger, Mai-Thu Perret, Clive Philipot and Philippe Pirotte (Paris: Centre Pompidou, 2009), and reviewed by Vivian Rehberg, ‘Voids, A Retrospective’, Frieze 123 (May 2009), n.pag.; and Ralph Rugoff, Invisible: Art About the Unseen, 1957–2012 (London: Hayward Gallery, 2012). The Sigmund Freud Museum Vienna has not taken the new media-immersive approach that has been proposed for other empty museums; see, for example, Luis Hernández, Javier Talbo, Rubén López and Rocio López, ‘The Experience of the Empty Museum: Displaying Cultural Contents on an Immersive, Walkable VR Room’, Computer Graphics International, 2004, pp. 436–43. 25. Leupold-Löwenthal, ‘Foreword’, p. 7. 26. See Beatriz Colomina, ‘The Split Wall: Domestic Voyeurism’, in Beatriz Colomina (ed.), Sexuality and Space (Princeton NJ: Princeton Architectural Press, 1992), pp. 72–128; and her ‘Space House: The Psyche of Building’, in Iain Borden and Jane Rendell (eds), Intersections: Architectural Histories and Critical Theories (London: Routledge, 2000), pp. 55–69.

note s  289

See also Brandon La Belle, ‘Sharing Architecture: Space, Time and the Aesthetics of Pressure’, Journal of Visual Culture 10/2 (August 2011), pp. 177–88; J.P. Thibaud, ‘The Three Dynamics of Urban Audiences’, in B. La Belle and C. Martinho (eds), Site of Sound: Of Architecture and the Ear, vol. II (Berlin: Errant Bodies Press, 2011). 27. On the power/knowledge nexus that functions within all museums, and its impact on the spectator, see for instance Tony Bennett, ‘The Exhibitionary Complex’, in Reesa Greenberg, Bruce W. Ferguson and Sandy Nairne (eds), Thinking About Exhibitions (London: Thames & Hudson, 1996), pp. 81–112. 28. Of course there is a type of empty museum that is common: one that does not have a permanent collection or display, but prefers to show temporary exhibitions. This type of museum is different to the Sigmund Freud Museum Vienna and to the conceptual museum for which I am arguing, in that the former always has an exhibition on display – albeit a temporary one – when visitors attend; whereas the latter seems to be open when empty, and that emptiness is its exhibition. For analysis of the role of objects within the museum, and the empty museum, see for instance Steven Conn, Do Museums Still Need Objects? (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010); Sandra Dudley, Museum Materialities: Objects, Engagements, Interpretations (London: Routledge, 2010); Masaaki Morishita, The Empty Museum: Western Cultures and the Artistic Field in Modern Japan (Farnham: Ashgate, 2010). 29. Ingrid Scholz-Strasser, former director of Sigmund Freud Museum Vienna, in conversation, 25 June 2010. 30. Lydia Marinelli, ‘“Body Missing” at Berggasse 19’, trans. Joy Titheridge, American Imago 66/2 (Summer 2009), pp. 161–7 (p. 161). 31. Ibid., p. 163. 32. Ibid., pp. 163–4. 33. Ibid., p. 164. 34. Ibid., p. 163. 35. Ibid., pp. 164–5. 36. See, for instance, Daniel Libeskind and Bernard Schneider, Jewish Museum Berlin: Between the Lines, trans. John Gabriel (Munich, New York and London: Prestel, 1999); Calum Storrie, ‘After the Wall; Studio Libeskind’, in The Delirious Museum: A Journey From the Louvre to Las Vegas (London: I.B.Tauris, 2006), pp. 168–84; Museum of Genocide Victims Vilnius, www.muziejai.lt/vilnius/genocido_auku_muziejus.en.htm. There are, of course, similarities here between museums and memorials that also interrogate the notion of representability and are not a form of memorialization as positive reassurance. There are many of these; see, for instance, Peter Eisenmann’s Holocaust memorial in Berlin (2005), Rachel Whiteread’s Vienna Judenplatz Memorial to the Austrian Jews, otherwise known as the Nameless Library (2000), and Walter Gropius’s Märzgefallenen Memorial, Weimar (1922). However, the memorial is a different type of monument to the museum, and my interest here is specifically in the museum, and the outlining of a notion of the conceptual museum. 37. Marinelli, ‘Body Missing’, pp. 165–6. 38. Pierre Nora, ‘Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Mémoire’, Representations 26 (Spring 1989), pp. 7–24 (p. 9). 39. The Sigmund Freud Museum Vienna underwent a set of extraordinary transformations between 1984 and 2003 under the director Inge Scholz-Strasser. These included significant changes to the Museum’s architectural design; the acquisition of estates; the funding, organization and ownership of the Museum; its philosophical, conceptual and epistemological remit; and, last, but not least, its relationship to contemporary art. See Marinelli and Tarask, ‘Besuch Einer Wohnung’, n.pag.; Scholz-Strasser, ‘Berggasse 19’. 40. Perhaps this will change under Monika Pesslar, the current director of the Sigmund Freud Museum Vienna. 41. Scholz-Strasser, ‘Contemporary Art at Berggasse 19’, p. 4. 42. For a detailed analysis of the similarities and differences between conceptual art and

29 0  inside the freud museums

conceptual architecture, see the classic text by Peter Eisenman, ‘Notes on Conceptual Architecture; Toward a Definition’ (1971), Peter Eisneman Inside Out: Selected Writings 1963–1988 (New Haven CT and London: Yale University Press, 2004), pp. 10–27. 43. See Joseph Kosuth, ‘A Preliminary Map for Zero & Not’ (1986), Art After Philosophy and After: Collected Writings, 1966–1990, ed. Gabriele Guercio (Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 1993), pp. 221–2. 44. Jan Avgikos, ‘Gift of the Artist: Berggasse 19’, Artscribe International, January–February 1990, p. 88. 45. Inge Scholz-Strasser, in conversation, 25 June 2010. 46. Pakesch owned and operated a contemporary art gallery in Vienna from 1981 to 1993. During that time he exhibited artworks by several of the artists who were enlisted to donate a work to the Sigmund Freud Museum Vienna, including: Baldessari, Kabakov, West and, later, Zobernig. Pakesch worked with Holzer during his directorship at the Vienna Festival. 47. Ingrid Scholz-Strasser, in conversation, 25 June 2010. 48. Joseph Kosuth, ‘Text for the Sigmund Freud Museum’, in The Sigmund Freud Museum Contemporary Art Collection (Vienna: Sigmund Freud Privatstiftung, 1998), p. 13. 49. Ingrid Scholz-Strasser, in conversation, 25 June 2010. 50. Inge Scholz-Strasser, ‘7xANA by Susan Hefuna’, in Mapping Vienna: Susan Hefuna, exhibition catalogue, Ed Galerie Grita Insam, Vienna, 2009, pp. 30–33 (p. 31). 51. ‘A Load from the Inside – Reviewed’, text by Jasna Jakšić, 2011, www.freud-museum.at/ cms/index.php/a-view-from-outside.109.html. 52. From Clegg and Guttmann, ‘Sha’at’nez or The Displacement Annex’, www.freud-museum.at/e/inhalt/museumausstellungenC&G.htm. 53. Nicole Scheyerer, ‘Clegg and Guttmann at Georg Kargl, Vienna, Austria’, trans. Nicholas Grindell, Frieze 93 (September 2005), www.frieze.com/issue/review/clegg_guttmann. 54. Scholz-Strasser, ‘7xANA by Susan Hefuna’, p. 32. 55. See Forrester, ‘Collector, Naturalist, Surrealist’, pp. 107–36; Bettelheim, ‘Berggasse 19’. 56. Sigmund Freud, ‘Screen Memories’ (1899), in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. III, ed. James Strachey and Anna Freud, trans. James Strachey (London: Vintage, 2001), pp. 301–22 (p. 322). 57. Adam Phillips, ‘Freud and the Uses of Forgetting’, in On Flirtation (London: Faber & Faber, 1994), pp. 22–38 (pp. 24–5). 58. Sigmund Freud, ‘Remembering, Repeating and Working-Through’ (1914), in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. XII, ed. James Strachey and Anna Freud, trans. Joan Riviere (London: Vintage, 2001), pp. 145–56. 59. On the relationship between memory and architectural space, see the classic texts: Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, trans. Maria Jolas (Boston MA: Beacon Press, 1969 [1958]); and Henri Lefebvre, The Social Production of Space, trans. Donald NicholsonSmith (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991). 60. Phillips, ‘Freud and the Uses of Forgetting’, p. 34.

note s  291

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 MacLeod, Suzanne. Reshaping Museum Space: Architecture, Design, Exhibitions (London: Routledge, 2005). Marinelli, Lydia (ed.). Die Couch: Vom Denken im Liegen (Munich: Prestel, 2006). ——— ‘“Body Missing” at Berggasse 19’, trans. Joy Titheridge, American Imago 66/2 (Summer 2009), pp. 161–7. 
 ——— and Andreas Mayer. Dreaming by the Book: A History of Freud’s ‘The Interpretation of Dreams’ and the History of the Psychoanalytic Movement, trans. Susan Fairfield (New York: Other Press, 2003). ——— and Andreas Mayer (eds). Forgetting Freud? For a New Historiography of Psychoanalysis, Science in Context 19/1 (2006). 
 ——— and Dieter Bogner. ‘My old and dirty gods’: From Sigmund Freud’s Collection (Vienna: Sigmund Freud-Museum, 1998). ——— and Georg Traska (eds). Architektur des Sigmund Freud-Museums (Vienna: Sigmund Freud-Museum, 2002). 
 Mendelson, Zoe. Psychologies and Spaces of Accumulation: The Hoard as Collagist Methodology (and Other Stories), Ph.D. thesis, Central Saint Martins, London, 2014. Message, Kylie. New Museums and the Making of Culture (Oxford: Berg, 2007). Molnar, Michael. ‘Antiquities Terminable and Interminable’, unpublished MS, n.pag. 
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(2009), pp. 249–73. 
 
 ——— and Marquard Smith (eds) The Re-Interpretation of Dreams, Parallax 6/3 (2000). Nissim Momigliano, Luciana. Continuity and Change in Psychoanalysis: Letters From Milan (London: Karnac Books, 1992). Nixon, Mignon. Fantastic Reality: Louise Bourgeois and a Story of Modern Art (Cambridge MA and London: MIT Press, 2005).

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——— ‘On the Couch’, October 113 (Summer 2005), pp. 39–76. 
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(Spring 1989), pp. 7–24. 
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 Putnam, James. Art and Artifact: The Museum as Medium (London: Thames & Hudson, 2001). Robins, 
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29 8  inside the freud museums

illustrations & credits

Exterior of Sigmund Freud Museum Vienna Courtesy of the Sigmund Freud Museum Vienna View into Consulting Room, Sigmund Freud Museum Vienna Photograph: Florian Lierzer. © Sigmund Freud Museum Vienna Freud’s Study, Sigmund Freud Museum Vienna Photograph: Florian Lierzer. © Sigmund Freud Museum Vienna Exterior of the Freud Museum London Courtesy of Freud Museum London Freud’s Study at the Freud Museum London Photograph: Ardon Bar Hama. Courtesy of Freud Museum London Freud’s Study at the Freud Museum London Photograph: Ardon Bar Hama. Courtesy of Freud Museum London Bookshelves in Freud’s study at the Freud Museum London Photograph: Ardon Bar Hama. Courtesy of Freud Museum London Freud’s consulting room at Berggasse 19, 1938 Photograph: Edmund Engelman. Courtesy of Freud Museum London Anne Deguelle, Composite 5, in Anna Freud Room, Sigmund’s Rug, 2011 © anne deguelle. Courtesy of the artist Anne Deguelle, Documents–Sigmund’s Rug, displayed on the dining room table of the Freud Museum London, 2011 © anne deguelle. Courtesy of the artist Santiago Borja, Divan, free-floating attention piece at the Freud Museum London, 2010 Photograph: Daniel Sambraus. Courtesy of the artist Ellen Gallagher, Watery Ecstatic, 2005, Ichthyosaurus The Freud Museum, London, 28 July–30 November 2005. Photograph: Mike Bruce. Courtesy of the artist Ellen Gallagher, Odalisque, 2005, Ichthyosaurus The Freud Museum, London, 28 July–30 November 2005. Photograph: Mike Bruce. Courtesy of the artist Nick Cunard, Head Space: Photographs of Therapeutic Environments Freud Museum London, 2004. Nick Cunard/NCSM Media. Courtesy of the artist Nick Cunard, Head Space: Photographs of Therapeutic Environments Freud Museum London, 2004. Nick Cunard/NCSM Media. Courtesy of the artist Nick Cunard, Head Space: Photographs of Therapeutic Environments Freud Museum London, 2004. Photograph: Laurie Slade, Nick Cunard/NCSM Media. Courtesy of the artist

3 4 5 6 7 31 32 41 44 45 48 49 51 57 58 60

Mieke Bal & Michelle Williams Gamaker, Sissi in Analysis (2012), Saying It Freud Museum London, 2012. Photograph: Paul Kubalek, photo.kubalek.at. Courtesy of the artists Mieke Bal & Michelle Williams Gamaker, Sissi in Analysis (2012), Saying It Freud Museum London, 2012. Photograph: Paul Kubalek, photo.kubalek.at. Courtesy of the artists Mieke Bal & Michelle Williams Gamaker, Sissi in Analysis (2012), Saying It Freud Museum London, 2012. Photograph: Paul Kubalek, photo.kubalek.at. Courtesy of the artists Mieke Bal & Michelle Williams Gamaker, Transference (2012), Saying It Freud Museum London, 2012. Photograph: Paul Kubalek, photo.kubalek.at. Courtesy of the artists Mieke Bal & Michelle Williams Gamaker, Sissi Outside (2012), Saying It Freud Museum London, 2012. Photograph: Paul Kubalek, photo.kubalek.at. Courtesy of the artists Freud’s consulting room at Berggasse 19, 1938 Photograph: Edmund Engelman. Courtesy of Freud Museum London Freud’s Study at the Freud Museum London Photograph: Karolina Urbaniak. Courtesy of Freud Museum London Freud’s Study at the Freud Museum London Photograph: Ardon Bar Hama. Courtesy of Freud Museum London Portrait of Sigmund Freud at his desk by Max Pollak, 1914 Courtesy of Freud Museum London Installation view, Andy Hope 1930 at the Freud Freud Museum London, 2010. Photograph: Mike Bruce. Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth  © Andy Hope 1930 Stuart Brisley, The Collection of Ordure, 2002 Freud Museum London. Courtesy Hales Gallery, London. Photograph and © Stuart Brisley Susan Hiller, At the Freud Museum Freud Museum London, 1994. Courtesy of the artist Susan Hiller, Nama-ma/Mother, detail of At the Freud Museum Freud Museum London, 1994. Courtesy of the artist William Cobbing, Excavation (2007), Gradiva Project Freud Museum London, 2008. Courtesy of the artist Freud’s consulting room at Berggasse 19, 1938 Photograph: Edmund Engelman. Courtesy of Freud Museum London William Cobbing, Gradiva (2008), Gradiva Project Freud Museum London, 2008. Courtesy of the artist Freud’s study at Berggasse 19, 1938 Photograph: Edmund Engelman. Courtesy of Freud Museum London Bronze figure of Athena Courtesy of Freud Museum London Freud’s desk at the Freud Museum London Photograph: Karolina Urbaniak. Courtesy of Freud Museum London Cover of Richard Appignanesi and Sława Harasymowicz’s graphic novel The Wolf Man SelfMadeHero, 2012. Courtesy of the artist and SelfMadeHero Sława Harasymowicz, The Wolf Man SelfMadeHero, 2012, p. 66. Courtesy of the artist and SelfMadeHero Sława Harasymowicz, The Wolf Man, installation shot Freud Museum London, 2012. Courtesy of the artist Sława Harasymowicz, The Wolf Man, installation shot Freud Museum London, 2012. Courtesy of the artist

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64 65 66 68 69 78 79 80 83 84 88 92 98 103 108 109 112 113 117 128 129 131 132

John Goto, Buck House, from Dreams of Jelly Roll series (2010–12) Freud Museum London, 2011. Courtesy of the artist John Goto, Morton in Moscow from Dreams of Jelly Roll series (2010–12) Freud Museum London, 2011. Courtesy of the artist John Goto, Berlin Olympics from Dreams of Jelly Roll series (2010-12) Freud Museum London, 2011. Courtesy of the artist Sharon Kivland, Freud Dreams of Rome Freud Museum London, 2007–8. Courtesy of the artist Sharon Kivland, Via del Polacchi, from Freud Dreams of Rome Freud Museum London, 2007–8. Courtesy of the artist Sharon Kivland, Piazza della Primavera, from Freud Dreams of Rome Freud Museum London, 2007–8. Courtesy of the artist Ralph Freeman, Reisepaß (1997), Foundations and Fragments Freud Museum London, 1998. Courtesy of the artist Ralph Freeman, Empty Books II (2002), Foundations and Fragments Freud Museum London, 2002. Courtesy of the artist Ralph Freeman, Memorial II (1999), Foundations and Fragments Freud Museum London (2002). Courtesy of the artist Vivienne Koorland, War Drawing Eva: Seder II (1992), Reisemalheurs Freud Museum London, 2011. Courtesy of the artist Vivienne Koorland, The Kapo Tallies His Human Losses for the Day (2006), Reisemalheurs Freud Museum London, 2011. Courtesy of the artist Vivienne Koorland, Riding Alone for 10,000 Miles (1995–2007), Reisemalheurs Freud Museum London, 2011. Courtesy of the artist Vera Frenkel, Body Missing (detail) Station 1: Reconciliation with the Dead (1994) Freud Museum London, 2003. Courtesy of the artist and Freud Museum London Vera Frenkel, Body Missing (detail) Station 2: Recalling the Benign World of Things (1994) Freud Museum London, 2003. Courtesy of the artist and Freud Museum London Marie Bonaparte and Sigmund Freud, 1937, at Berggasse 19, Vienna Courtesy of Freud Museum London Exhibition invitation for The Pleasure Principle, Sarah Lucas, 2000 Courtesy of Freud Museum London Sarah Lucas, Prière de Toucher (2000), installation view, Beyond the Pleasure Principle r-type print, 91.44 µ 60.96 cm, Freud Museum London, 9 March–12 April 2000. © Sarah Lucas, courtesy Sadie Coles HQ, London Une leçon clinique du Dr Charcot à la Salpêtrière, E. Pirodon after André Brouillet, 1887 Courtesy of Freud Museum London Sarah Lucas, The Pleasure Principle (2000) installation view, Beyond the Pleasure Principle table, six chairs, bra, vest, parts, fluorescent lights, unique. Freud Museum London, 9 March–12 April 2000. © Sarah Lucas, courtesy Sadie Coles HQ, London Sarah Lucas, Beyond the Pleasure Principle (2000) installation view futon mattress, cardboard coffin, garment rail, neon tube, light bulbs, bucket, wire, 145 µ 193 µ 216 cm, unique, Freud Museum, London, 9 March–2 April 2000. © Sarah Lucas, courtesy Sadie Coles HQ, London Alice Anderson, Web (2009), Childhood Rituals Freud Museum London, 2011. Courtesy of the artist Alice Anderson, Mother Figure (2001), Childhood Rituals Freud Museum London, 2011. Courtesy of the artist Alice Anderson, Confinement Room (2011), Daughter Figure (2000), Childhood Rituals Freud Museum London, 2011. Courtesy of the artist

134 135 136 138 139 139 154 157 159 164 165 168 174 175 182 186 190 191 193 194

198 199 200

note s  301

Louise Bourgeois, Untitled (2010), with small works and writings in the vitrines Louise Bourgeois: The Return of the Repressed, Freud Museum London, 2012. Photograph: Ollie Harrop, © The Easton Foundation/Licensed by DACS, UK 2017 Framed archival documents by Louise Bourgeois from the Louise Bourgeois Archive Louise Bourgeois: The Return of the Repressed, Freud Museum London, 2012. Photograph: Ollie Harrop, © The Easton Foundation/Licensed by DACS, UK 2017 Sophie Calle, The Wedding Dress, 1999 Photograph courtesy Freud Museum London and Paula Cooper Gallery, New York Sophie Calle, The Rival, 1999 Photograph courtesy Freud Museum London and Paula Cooper Gallery, New York Sophie Calle at the Freud Museum London Photograph courtesy Freud Museum London and Paula Cooper Gallery, New York Exterior of Berggasse 19, 1938 Photograph: Edmund Engelman. Courtesy of Freud Museum London Freud’s consulting room at Berggasse 19, 1938 Photograph: Edmund Engelman. Courtesy of Freud Museum London Freud’s study at Berggasse 19, 1938 Photograph: Edmund Engelman. Courtesy of Freud Museum London View from Freud’s study into his consulting room, Sigmund Freud Museum Vienna Photograph: Florian Lierzer. © Sigmund Freud Museum Vienna Freud’s study, Sigmund Freud Museum Vienna Photograph: Florian Lierzer. © Sigmund Freud Museum Vienna Franz West, Liège (1989) with Joseph Kosuth, Zero & Not (1989) Sigmund Freud Museum Vienna, 1989. Photograph © Margherita Spiluttini. Ilya Kabakov, The Man Who Flew into His Picture (198789), with Joseph Kosuth, Zero & Not (1989) Sigmund Freud Museum Vienna, 1989. Photograph © Margherita Spiluttini. Joseph Kosuth, A View to Memory Sigmund Freud Museum Vienna, 2002. Photograph © Gerald Zugmann/ www.zugmann.com

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206 208 217 218 220 230 231 233 236 238 247 248 253

Index

Page numbers in italics refer to figures acting out 17–18, 205, 207, 211–14, 216 Adorno, Theodor 10, 147–8, 166 afterwardsness 18, 161, 162–3, 165–6, 169, 170 Aichhorn, August 54, 79 ambivalence 147, 149, 155–6, 178–9, 196 Anderson, Alice 196–7, 202–3 Childhood Rituals (2011) 197 Confinement Room (2011) 199, 200 Daughter Figure (2000) 199–201, 200, 203 Mother Figure (2001) 198–9, 199, 203 Web (2009) 197–8, 198 antiquities collected by SF acquisition of 94–5 contents of 73–4, 85–6, 100–101 display of 30–31, 31–2, 79–80, 82–3, 83, 87–8, 95 moved to London 78–9 personal use of 111–12, 116–18, 117 SF reflections on 39, 79–81 use of in psychoanalysis 74, 75, 76, 90, 112–13, 112, 113, 114–16 Anzieu, Didier 118 Appignanesi, Richard and Sława Harasymowicz The Wolf Man (2012) 127–30, 128–9 archaeology and psychoanalysis 73–7, 95–7, 104–6, 110, 120 art theft policies of Third Reich 171–2, 173–4, 175 Athene 113, 113, 116 autobiographical fictions 183–4, 188–9, 195–7, 207, 216, 223–5 Avgikos, Jan 250 Bal, Mieke 83 Bal, Mieke, and Michelle Williams Gamaker DaughterMother (2012) 63, 66–7

Sissi in Analysis (2012) 63–6, 64–6, 67, 70 Sissi Outside (2012) 69, 70 Transference (2012) 67, 68 Barber, Lynn 191 beginnings 64–5 Benjamin, Jessica 201 Benjamin, Walter 77 Berggasse 19, Vienna consulting room 41, 78, 108, 231, 232–3 couch 41, 108 exterior 230 Gradiva relief 107–8 photographs of 54–5, 229–34 SF at 5–6 study 112, 182, 232–3, 233 see also Sigmund Freud Museum Vienna Bergstein, Mary 77 Beyond the Pleasure Principle (Freud, 1920) 195 Bird, Jon 102 Bishop, Claire 189 Bonaparte, Marie, Princess 78, 181–3, 182 books, in artworks 156–8, 157, 250, 255 Borja, Santiago Divan: Free-Floating Attention Piece (2010) 47–8, 48 Bourgeois, Louise 83, 204–5, 210–14, 215 The Return of The Repressed (2012) 205–6, 206, 207–10, 208, 214–15 boxes, in artworks 93–4, 97–9, 98 Branwell, Jennifer 56 Brisley, Stuart Beyond Reason: Ordure (2003) 90 The Collection of Ordure (2002) 88–9, 88, 90–91, 100, 101 broken objects and unconscious conflicts 111 Bronfen, Elisabeth 211

Brouillet, André Une Leçon Clinique du Dr. Charcot à la Salpêtrière 191, 192 Calle, Sophie Appointment (1999) 216–24, 217–18 carpets 42–3, 46–8 Caruth, Cathy 145, 163 case histories of SF 124–6, 184, 221–2 catalogues, museum 239 chairs, in artworks 60, 186, 186–7 Chan, Suzanna 50 chess pieces, in artworks 113–14 childhood memories 125, 196–7, 203, 204 Civilization and Its Discontents (Freud, 1930) 105 Clegg, Michael, and Yair Martin Guttmann Sha’at’nez or The Displacement Annex (2004) 255, 256 Text in Context (1997) 250 Clegg, Oliver Everywhere I go I find a poet has been there before me (Freud Chess Set) (2008) 114, 116 Night Move (2008) 112 coat of SF 219–20, 220 Cobbing, William Excavation (2007) 102–4, 103, 106 Gradiva Project (2008) 102, 108–10, 109 Cohen, David 152–3 collages documents in 150, 153, 155–6 drawings in 130 mixed-media 161 photographs in 42–4, 44–5, 50–51, 51 concentration camps 143, 163 conceptual art exhibitions 237–9 conceptual museums 8, 228, 235, 244, 256–60 consulting rooms Berggasse 19, Vienna 41, 78, 108, 231, 232–3 Freud Museum London 7, 31–2, 34–5, 53–4, 71, 72, 79–80, 183–4 photographs of 53–9, 57–8, 60, 61 Sigmund Freud Museum Vienna 4, 5, 54, 236–7, 236, 238 couches 40–46, 53, 55–6, 247, 249 Berggasse 19, Vienna 41, 78, 108, 231 Freud Museum London 7, 31, 40–42, 46, 48–9, 66, 79, 103, 190, 217 counter-transference 69 Cunard, Nick Head Space: Photographs of Psychotherapeutic Environments (2004) 53, 56–8, 57–8, 59, 60, 61 curatorial strategies 64, 85, 95, 130, 175 Curiger, Bice 223 Davies, Erica 175

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Davis, Whitney 97 Davoine, Françoise 63, 68–9 deferred action (afterwardsness) 18, 161, 162–3, 165–6, 169, 170 Deguelle, Anne Delusions and Dreams in Jensen’s ‘Gradiva’ (Freud, 1907) 105, 106–7 Sigmund’s Rug (2011) 42–4, 44–5, 46–7 Derrida, Jacques 197 dispositif (ideology) of museums 12–13 Freud Museum London 34–5, 37, 39, 71 Sigmund Freud Museum Vienna 234–5 documents, in artworks 43, 45, 153–5, 154, 205–10, 208, 214 see also letters and envelopes, in artworks Donati, Enrico 189, 191 Doolittle, Hilda (H.D.) 42, 58–9, 74, 95, 101–2, 112–16, 118 drawings 49, 50, 127–32, 128–9 dream-work 126, 129, 130 dreams 121–3, 125–7, 133–40, 134–6, 138–9 Duchamp, Marcel 189, 191 empty gallery exhibitions 238 Engelman, Edmund 54–5, 226–7, 229–34, 253–4 Eugénie, Princess of Greece and Denmark 181–2 excrement 88, 89–91 father figures 219–20 female figures 198–201, 199, 203 femininity 52, 196, 204 Fer, Briony 195 fibres, in artworks 197–8, 198–200, 202–3 Fichtl, Paula 117 figures, in artworks 192, 198–201, 199–200, 203, 219–20 forgetting 257–8 Forrester, John 74, 81–2, 89–90, 96, 227 Foucault, Michel 12, 34, 52, 250, 266 Freeman, Ralph Empty Books II (2002) 156, 157, 158 Foundations and Fragments (1998 and 2002) 149, 150–51, 151–2, 156 Gedenkblatt (2002) 158 Identity (1999) 153, 155 Memorial II (1999) 158, 159 Missing Books I (2002) 158 Reisepaß (1997) 153, 154 To An Island Far Away (1997) 155 Frenkel, Vera Body Missing (2003) 149, 171–8, 174 …from the Transit Bar (1992) 171, 177 Freud, Anna and childhood memories 203 and Freud Museum London 36, 38, 39 held by Nazis 228–9 narration of home movies 142–3, 148

passion for knitting and weaving 202, 204 psychotherapy practice 5–6, 7 and Sigmund Freud Museum Vienna 235, 236–7 and trauma 143–4 Freud, Ernst 37 Freud, Jakob 77, 80–81, 85 Freud, Martha 38 Freud, Mitzi 143, 144 Freud, Moritz 46 Freud, Sigmund antiquities collected by see antiquities collected by SF antiquities and own life 39, 79–80 archaeology as metaphor in work of 74–5, 95–7, 101–2, 104–6, 120 books collected by 31, 158, 237 case histories of 124–6, 184, 221–2 and chess 114–15 coat of 219–20, 220 and dreams 121–3, 125–7 and excrement 89 languages of 177 in London 6–7, 37, 79 on mourning and melancholia 151 photographs of 181–3, 182, 186, 187 posture of patients 40–41, 45 on psychoanalysis, interminability of 103–4 psychoanalytic technique 62–3, 68, 114 and religion 85–7 and screen memories 125–6, 132, 256–7 self-analysis 81, 89, 104, 120, 122–3 siblings, deaths of 143 on space 11 and transference 62–3, 71, 207, 216, 219 and transference-love 107 on trauma 144–5 on travel 121–2 in Vienna 5–6, 54, 228–9 voice of 176 on weaving 202 writings of in artworks 246–8, 247–8, 254 Freud Museum London 29–72 antiquities collected by SF see antiquities collected by SF art displayed in 160–61 art exhibitions 17, 33 carpets 46–7 consulting room and study 7, 31–2, 34–5, 53–4, 71, 72, 79–80, 183–4 the couch and chair 7, 31, 40–42, 46, 48–9, 66, 71–2, 79, 103, 190, 217 description of 6, 29–32, 35–6 desk 78, 95, 117 dispositif (ideology) of 34–5, 37, 39, 71 focus of 36–7 foundation of 7, 39

as hagiographic museum 8, 70–71, 243 historical accretions in 33, 38–9, 71 art work s Andy Hope 1930 at the Freud (Hofer/ Hope, 2010) 83–5, 84, 100, 101 Appointment (Calle, 1999) 216–24, 217–18 At the Freud Museum (Hiller, 1994) 92–5, 92, 97–9, 98, 100, 101 Berlin Olympics (Goto, 2011) 136, 137 Beyond the Pleasure Principle show (Lucas, 2000) 185–8, 186–7 Beyond the Pleasure Principle work (Lucas, 2000) 194, 195 Body Missing (Frenkel, 2003) 171–8, 174 Buck House (Goto, 2011) 134–5, 134 Childhood Rituals (Anderson, 2011) 197 The Collection of Ordure (Brisley, 2002) 88–9, 88, 90–91, 100, 101 Confinement Room (Anderson, 2011) 199, 200 Daughter Figure (Anderson, 2000) 199–201, 200, 203 DaughterMother (Bal and Gamaker, 2012) 63, 66–7 Divan: Free-Floating Attention Piece (Borja, 2010) 47–8, 48 Dreams of Jelly Roll (Goto, 2011) 123–4, 133, 136, 141 Empty Books II (Freeman, 2002) 156, 157, 158 Everywhere I go I find a poet has been there before me (Freud Chess Set) (Clegg, 2008) 114, 116 Excavation (Cobbing, 2007) 102–4, 103, 106 Foundations and Fragments (Freeman, 1998 and 2002) 149, 150–51, 151–2, 154, 157 Freud Dreams of Rome (Kivland, 2007–8) 138–40, 138–9, 141 Gedenkblatt (Freeman, 2002) 158 Gradiva Project (Cobbing, 2008) 102, 108–10, 109 Gulag Tree (Koorland, 2000) 161–2 Head Space: Photographs of Psychotherapeutic Environments (Cunard, 2004) 53, 56–8, 57–8, 59, 60, 61 Identity (Freeman, 1999) 153, 155 The Kapo Tallies His Human Losses for the Day (Koorland, 2006) 165, 166 The Magic of the Couch (Guderian, 2004) 53, 55–6 Memorial II (Freeman, 1999) 158, 159 Missing Books I (Freeman, 2002) 158 Morton in Moscow (Goto, 2011) 135, 136–7, 141 Mother Figure (Anderson, 2001) 198–9, 199, 203

inde x  305

Night Move (Clegg, 2008) 112 Odalisque (Gallagher, 2005) 50–52, 51 The Pleasure Principle (Lucas, 2000) 192–4, 193 Prière de Toucher (Lucas, 2000) 189, 190, 192 Reisepaß (Freeman, 1997) 153, 154 The Return of the Repressed (Bourgeois, 2012) 205–6, 206, 207–10, 208, 214–15 Riding Alone for 10,000 Miles (Koorland, 1995–2007) 167–9, 168 Saying It (Morra, 2012) 18–19, 63–70, 64–6, 68–9 Sigmund’s Rug (Deguelle, 2011) 42–4, 44–5, 46–7 Sissi in Analysis (Bal and Gamaker, 2012) 63–6, 64–6, 67, 70 Sissi Outside (Bal and Gamaker, 2012) 69, 70 Transference (Bal and Gamaker, 2012) 67, 68 War Drawing Eva: Seder II (Koorland, 1991) 163–5, 164 Watery Ecstatic (Gallagher, 2005) 49–50, 49, 52 Web (Anderson, 2009) 197–8, 198 Wolf Man (Harasymowicz, 2012) 123, 124, 127, 130–33, 131–2, 140–41 see also Maresfield Gardens, Hampstead Friedlander, Saul 145, 152 Fuss, Diana 233 Gallagher, Ellen Odalisque (2005) 50–52, 51 Watery Ecstatic (2005) 49–50, 49, 52 Garb, Tamar 161, 162 Goldhill, Simon 30, 35–6, 39 Goto, John Berlin Olympics (2011) 136, 137 Buck House (2011) 134–5, 134 Dreams of Jelly Roll (2011) 123–4, 133, 136, 141 Morton in Moscow (2011) 135, 136–7, 141 Gradiva 106–8, 108, 110 graphic novels 127–32, 128–9 Guderian, Claudia The Magic of the Couch (2004) 53, 55–6 Guilbert, Yvette 43 Hacker, Frederick J. 235 Harasymowicz, Sława Wolf Man (2012) 123, 124, 127–33, 128–9, 131–2, 140–41 Heller, Hugo 82 Hiller, Susan At the Freud Museum (1994) 92–5, 92, 97–9, 98, 100, 101 From the Freud Museum (1991–97) 99

30 6  inside the freud museums

Hirsch, Marianne 146, 155 history and memory 2–3, 24–8, 246, 248, 256, 264 Hitler, Adolf 171–2 Hofer, Andreas see Andy Hope 1930 Hoffman, Eva 146, 150 Holocaust and artistic representations 147–8, 155, 158 home movies, Freud family 142–4, 148 and SF family 143–4 survivors and afterwardsness 163 Hope 1930, Andy Andy Hope 1930 at the Freud (2010) 83–5, 84, 100, 101 Hustvedt, Siri 124 idolatry 71 insertion 17–18, 83, 85 Interpretation of Dreams, The (Freud, 1899) 81, 89, 104–5, 122–3, 126, 127, 140 intersubjectivity 201 intrasubjectivity 201 Jakšić, Jasna 254–5 Jones, Ernest 111 Judaism 86, 87 Jury, Sarah 124, 131 juxtaposition 17–18, 42–3, 83, 89, 130, 132 Kabakov, Ilya The Man Who Flew into His Picture (1987–89) 248, 249–50 Khanna, Ranjana 52 Kivland, Sharon Freud Dreams of Rome (2007–8) 138–40, 138–9, 141 Klein, Melanie 211 knitting and weaving 202 Koorland, Vivienne 163, 166, 167, 170 Gulag Tree (2000) 161–2 The Kapo Tallies His Human Losses for the Day (2006) 165, 166 Reisemalheurs (Travel Woes) (2007) 149 Riding Alone for 10,000 Miles (1995‑2007) 167–9, 168 War Drawing Eva: Seder II (1991) 163–5, 164 Kosuth, Joseph 245, 250, 256 A View to Memory (2002–03) 253, 253 Zero & Not (1989) 246–8, 247–8 Kunstraub (art theft) 171–2, 173–4, 175 Kuspit, Donald 74 La Capra, Dominick 145, 151, 152 Lacan, Jacques 242 languages of SF 177 Laplanche, Jean 72 Larratt-Smith, Philip 205 Le Goff, Raichel 193

letters and envelopes, in artworks 157, 158–9, 218, 220 see also documents, in artworks Leupold-Löwenthal, Harald 235, 236, 238–9 Lobner, Hans 239 Lowenfeld, Henry 211 Lozano, Catalina 47, 48 Lucas, Sarah 188, 191–2 Beyond the Pleasure Principle show (2000) 185–8, 186–7 Beyond the Pleasure Principle work (2000) 194, 195 The Old Couple (1991) 193 The Pleasure Principle (2000) 192–4, 193 Prière de Toucher (2000) 189, 190, 192 manhole covers 108–9, 109 map paintings 168–9, 168 Maresfield Gardens, Hampstead 6–7, 37–8, 78–80 see also Freud Museum London Marinelli, Lydia 176, 227, 241–4 The Couch: Thinking in Repose (2006) 44–5 material impulse in psychoanalysis 73–4, 75, 76–7 mattresses, in artworks 194, 195 mediation and afterwardsness 165–6 Meitner, Eva 164–5 memory see childhood memories; history and memory; postmemory; screen memories metaphorical impulse in psychoanalysis 74–5, 76, 77, 95–7, 101–2 Mitchell, Juliet 211–13 mixed-media drawings 49, 50 Molnar, Michael 40, 82, 118 Morra, Joanne Saying It (2012) 18–19, 63–70, 64–6, 68–9 Morton, Jelly Roll 133–4 mother figures 198–201, 199, 203 mourning and melancholia 151–2, 156, 157, 160 multimedia installations 171 museum catalogues 239 narratives, in artworks 217–18, 220, 221–3 negative transference 116, 207, 214, 219 Nixon, Mignon 213–14 Nora, Pierre 244 objects within museums 7–8, 10, 16–17 Osiris 118–19 ‘other’ 48, 69 paintings 163–70, 164–5, 167 Pakesch, Peter 245, 250, 252 Pankejeff, Sergei (Wolf Man) 74, 124–6, 161,

162 personality museums 3–14 dispositif (ideology) of 12–13, 34–5, 37, 39, 71, 234–5 Freud museums 7–8, 242–3, 263–4 function of 8–11, 75, 88–91 history of 4–5 as mausoleum 39–40, 262–3 site-responsive art in 13–16, 19, 28, 264–5, 267 phenomenological impulse in psychoanalysis 74–5, 76, 111–18 Phillips, Adam 71, 86–7, 100, 225, 257–8, 259–60 photographs of Berggasse 19 54–5, 229–34 of chairs 186, 186–7 in collages 42–4, 44–5, 50–51, 51 of consulting rooms 53–9, 57–8, 60, 61 of dreams 133–40, 134–6, 138–9 of SF 181–3, 182, 186, 187 of weddings 218, 221 Pollack, Max Portrait of Sigmund Freud at his desk (1914) 82, 83 Pollock, Griselda 175 positive transference 116, 183, 219–20, 221 post-Freudian analysis 63, 68, 145 postmemory artworks 148–9, 155, 179–80 definition 146–7 experiences 150, 152 Poulain, Yves 47 Poynor, Rick 128 psychoanalysis and ambivalence 147 and archaeology 73–7, 95–7, 104–6, 110, 120 and art 2, 19–20 and culture 72, 266 and excrement 91 history and memory of 27–8 interminability of 103–4 and race and gender 49–53 settings of 62 techniques of 62–3, 114 and the voice 171 Psychopathology of Everyday Life (Freud, 1901) 254 psychotic patients 62–3, 68 Putnam, James 48, 83, 112, 188, 216 Raščić, Lala A Load from the Inside – Reviewed (2011) 254, 256 religion and SF 85–7 Rifkin, Adrian 169 rituals of childhood 196–7 Rogoff, Irit 177–8 Rugoff, Ralph 222, 224

inde x  307

rugs 42–3, 46–8 Sachs, Hanns 86, 118 Sanders, Joel 233 Saverino, Rosa 223 Scholz-Strasser, Ingrid 240–41, 245, 250, 252, 256 screen memories 125–6, 132, 248, 256–8 Searle, Adrian 192–3 self-analysis of SF 81, 89, 104, 120, 122–3 sex act observed by child 125–6, 130 in artworks 192–6, 193–4, 220 and SF’s couch 45–6, 48–9 shadows, in artworks 131 Sigmund Freud Museum Vienna catalogue 239–40 as conceptual museum 8, 228, 235, 244, 256–60 consulting room and study 4, 5, 54, 236–7, 236, 238 Contemporary Art Collection 17, 245–6, 250–51, 256 emptiness of 8, 227–8, 238, 240–41, 243 exterior 3 foundation of 6, 234–5 responses to 241–2 as site of trauma 243–4 temporary exhibitions 251–3 art work s AHA! (Steinbach, 1997) 250, 251 The Couch: Thinking in Repose (Marinelli, 2006) 44–5 Liège (West, 1989) 247, 249 A Load from the Inside – Reviewed (Raščič, 2011) 254 The Man Who Flew into His Picture (Kabakov, 1987–89) 248, 249–50 Sha’at’nez or The Displacement Annex (Clegg and Guttmann, 2004) 255 Text in Context (Clegg and Guttmann, 1997) 250 Untitled (Zobernig, 1997) 250–51 A View from Outside 251–2, 256 A View to Memory (Kosuth, 2002–03) 253–4, 253 Zero & Not (Kosuth, 1989) 246–8, 247–8 see also Berggasse 19, Vienna site-responsive art 1–2, 13–19, 28, 264–5, 267 site-specific art 15 space and psyche 11 Spector, Jack J. 100–101 Spitz, Ellen Handler 116–17 Steinbach, Haim AHA! (1997) 250, 251

308  inside the freud museums

Storr, Robert 222 Studies in Hysteria (Freud and Breuer, 1893) 104 threads, in artworks 197–8, 198, 202–3 Timms, Edward 159 toys, in artworks 83–4, 84 transference of Hilda Doolittle 116 of Maria Bonaparte 183 negative 116, 207, 214, 219 and the patient 67, 69 positive 116, 183, 219–20, 221 SF on 62–3, 71, 207, 216, 219 transference-love 107 Traska, Georg 227 trauma and afterwardsness 163 and mourning and melancholia 151 and postmemory art 150, 152–3, 155, 179–80 and psychoanalysis 144–9 transgenerational 22–3, 68–9 travelling 121–3, 133–4 typewriters, in artworks 218, 218 unconscious 111, 123 video installations 63–8, 64–6, 68–9, 70, 102–3, 103 voices in artworks 171, 173–4, 177–8 Vuorela, Marjo 63, 68 Walker, Joanna S. 197 Wall, Siobhan 59, 61 Ward, Ivan 118, 119 Warner, Marina 30, 46, 47 weaving and knitting 202 webs, in artworks 197–8, 198, 202–3 wedding dresses, in artworks 217, 217, 220 West, Franz Liège (1989) 247, 249 Winnicott, D.W. 62 Winternitz, Eva 164–5 Wolf Man (Sergei Pankejeff) 74, 124–6, 161, 162 Wood, Jon 95, 118 working through 145–6, 152, 157, 160, 212–13, 258 writings of SF, in artworks 246–8, 247–8, 254 Young, James E. 155 Young-Bruehl, Elisabeth 202 Zobernig, Heimo Untitled (1997) 250–51