Book presentation with Jeanne Wolff Bernstein (in German)
Thursday, April 24, 19 h
Library of Psychoanalysis at the Sigmund Freud Museum
Registration required: To attend, please register below.
A Psychoanalytic View of the Works of Édouard Manet
This book by psychoanalyst Jeanne Wolff Bernstein examines the works of the French painter Édouard Manet from an innovative perspective. For her analysis of the relationships between artist, painting and viewer, she draws on Freud's essay Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious (1905). It explains how the teller of a joke calls upon the audience to complete it through an absent but imagined third person.
Wolff Bernstein argues that in much the same way, Manet incorporates the unconscious processes of his spectators to complete the scenes portrayed on his canvases. Drawing upon Jacques Lacan’s theory about the gaze and the mirror stage, she suggests that viewers typically project aspects of themselves and their own desires into the painting. Also, Manet regularly unsettles the viewers’ identificatory longings, subverting their passive gaze by luring them into scenes of ambiguity. This in turn makes them aware of their own voyeuristic position.
The author develops a psychoanalytic pictorial analysis of Manet’s oeuvre which emphasizes his painterly genealogy rather than his personal past. In this way, three distinct perspectives are combined: the personal, the historical and the viewers’ own identificatory processes, leading to a new understanding of Manet’s work.
Jeanne Wolff Bernstein is a psychoanalyst, living and working in Vienna. She is a member, training analyst, and vice-president of the Board at the Wiener Arbeitskreis für Psychoanalyse, WAP. She is the head of the Advisory Board of the Sigmund Freud Privatstiftung where she had also been the Fulbright-Freud Visiting Lecturer of Psychoanalysis in 2008. Prior to moving to Vienna, Jeanne Wolff Bernstein was the past president and supervising and personal analyst at PINC (Psychoanalytic Institute of Northern California). She is still on the faculty at PINC and at the NYU Postdoctoral Program and teaches at WAP. She has published numerous articles on the interfaces between psychoanalysis, the visual arts and film.
