To browse Academia. For quite some time now I have been interested in the potential relationship between the affective psychic processes that take place within the consulting room, for instance, transference, counter-transference, working-through and acting out, and what we experience in the art studio, the writer's study and the gallery, as we make artwork, write or curate exhibitions. Without reducing the singularity and differences between these practices and the specificities related to the different practices, I have wondered about the correlation between them and what each could offer the other.
In this talk I'm going to consider a very particular instance of an exhibition held at the Freud Museum London in and a photograph held in the Museum's archive. This example is from a book I have recently completed entitled Inside the Freud Museums: History, Memory and Site-Responsive Art, and in that way it has been pulled out of its context, but, I hope that it add to the ideas in today's symposium and prompt further discussion.
Slide Being with Freud Sometime in November , 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. In addition to this rather remarkable portrait of looking and representing, there is an intensity captured between the filmmaker and the sitter, as each holds the gaze of the other. 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. It conveys Bonaparte's desire to be a part of the world of her. History of Photography, Volume 35, Number 3, August, , The International Journal of Indian Psychology, Zeytin eds.
