Sigmunf Freud From Looking to Listening

Jean Clair’s exhibitions testify to the foresight of his thinking and to an erudition he shares generously. The one dedicated to Freud at the Musée d’Art et d’Historire du Judaïsme (MAHJ) until 10 February is accompanied by a detailed catalogue that includes an anthology of writings on the relationship between psychoanalysis and art. Conceived to celebrate the MAHJ’s 20th anniversary, this exhibition doesn’t focus on the intertwined relationships between the arts and sciences that have previously interested Jean Clair,(1) but on Freud the man and on psychoanalysis, the person of Freud who—although he asserted that psychoanalysis could not be a ‘Jewish science’ (no more than it could be Christian or pagan)—was interested in the religion in general, from his speculation on the murder of the father by his sons in Totem and Taboo (1912), then in

The Future of an Illusion (1927), to Jewish monotheism, particularly in Moses and

Monotheism (1939), the writing of which occupied him at the end of his life. Born into a Moravian family of Jewish background, Freud was raised in this tradition, but his rationalism as a scientist distanced him from it. Freud’s relationship to Judaism is at once clear and obscure. And psychoanalysis, which he invented, is at once a science that emerged at the turn of the century and a cultural form that has profoundly disrupted both art and literature. The exhibition’s goal is to show how Freud, after studying with Jean-Martin Charcot at Salpêtrière Hospital in Paris, broke away from positivist science where observation took precedence, and instead privileged listening, speech and language. Like a Deus ab

sconditus, Freud disappears behind his (generally female) patient, abandoning the gaze that scrutinizes and deciphers symptoms visible on the body or face, to listen to words that must be interpreted. On entering the exhibition, we discover the mischievous art with which Jean Clair, with the help of his collaborators Laura Boss and Philippe Comar, has enjoyed mixing obsolete scientific papers, curious cultural documents (such as spiritualist photographs), and artworksboth unknown and familiar.The machines on display, created to electrocute the ill, descendants of the famous ‘baquet’, the magnetizer, of Franz Anton Mesmer (1734–1815), could have featured in an exhibition on ‘bachelor machines’ in homage to Michel Carrouges. Access to the entire reconstructed mental universe is through images and scientific objects. But can the neurological drawings of the young Freud, or the highly decorative images of the biologist Ernst Haekel be viewed in any way other than from a scientific perspective?

FIGURES OF EROS

André Brouillet’s painting A Clinical Lesson

at the Salpêtrière (1887)—where a highsociety audience watches as Blanche Wittmann falls into the arms of Charcot’s assistant Paul Richer—is accompanied by Richer’s drawings showing women suffering from hysterical convulsions. These can be considered in two ways: testimonies of a scientific observation aiming to create a precise clinical picture, they also echo erotic postures, halfway between sculpture and dance, which just ask to be aestheticized. They are supplemented by photographic documentation that would later seduce the Surrealists,(2) who introduced Freud to France. They were inspired by his method of free association and his themes. Max Ernst’s collages evoke the work of dreaming. But isn’t it naïve to claim to reach the unconscious in this way? ‘You can’t artificially reconstruct the unconscious with images,’ notes Jean Clair. For Freud the image creates error, a screen that hides and diverts meaning, hence the treachery of images, to borrow from Magritte. Gustave Courbet’s now-famous portrait of a woman seen from below, once owned by Jacques Lacan, exhibited here with the cover drawn by André Masson, was a private erotic vision, well before the theory of the repression the libido’s scopic impulses. Freud’s emphasis on sexuality is best placed within the artistic framework evoked by the works of a number of Viennese painters, primarily Egon Schiele.These paintings, contemporaneous with Freud, are evocative of a sexuality that is not hedonistic, where pleasure remains repressed by neurosis and haunted by the death drive,

Ernst Haeckel. « Kunstformen der Natur ».

(Formes artistiques de la nature, pl.98). 1899.

Art Forms in Nature

COLLECTOR AND ANTIQUITY

For Freud his antiques cabinet was both a private manifestation of an obsessive fetishism (he had more than three thousand pieces) and a symbol of his work: like the archaeologist, who can serve as a model, the psychoanalyst seeks the hidden presence of a story to be developed, digging up buried objects

to interpret them and confer meaning. Both Freud and Charcot shared this passion, as well as the inquisitive spirit of their time: ancient Egyptian, Greek and Roman objects circulated freely; to Freud they evoked the various mythologies that animated peoples whose languages, myths and beliefs had disappeared … unless we hypothesize an analogy between archaic animist thinking and that of the child. The essential question is then: What still survives from our past, collective and individual? Freud’s antiques cabinet, whose objects are still together, is representative of the overloaded aesthetics of late 19th-century interiors: the Berggasse apartment was ‘a tomb decorated with trinkets’, filled with the ornaments that Adolf Loos denounced.(4) At the end of the exhibition we move from Freud the man and psychoanalyst to Moses the Man and monotheism. At the end of his life, Freud devoted three essays to Moses, first published in the journal Imago and then combined. In the last room, the exhibition pays tribute to this testamentary thought, where we discover in our turn the initial shock that Freud experienced in front of Michelangelo’s sculpture of Moses in the San Pietro in Vincoli church in Rome, thanks to a life-size casting from 1835. Michelangelo portrayed a Moses, just about to break the Tables of Law, disappointed and angry to see his people return to idols … but who, in a sublime effort, manages to contain and overcome his rage. The masterful installation of the last room contrasts one of the heights of representative Christian art (Michelangelo’s Moses is the tomb of a pope) with the sublime aesthetics of Mark Rothko’s painting ( Red

with Black, 1964). The powerful, massive marble form against the intensity of a coloured vibration, a historical representation against the unrepresentable—whose colours however, evoke, according to Jean Clair, the hues of the Temple curtain. The exhibition design is conceived as a journey from the tumult of images to a meditation on Mosaic silence, which grips the viewer as a metaphysical, even mystical, impulse. In this contrast, religion, like the art that is linked to it, is seized in its fullness, beyond words and explanations. For, as Freud said, his irresistible attraction to Judaism ‘comes from obscure emotional forces that are all the more powerful because they cannot be explained by words’.(5) The exhibition erects a monument to psychoanalysis which, according Jean Clair, has now become more hermeneutic than therapeutic, but whose role in interpretation for works of arts, literary and visual (based on the model of dream interpretation) is still relevant.

Translation: Bronwyn Mahoney (1) Amongst Jean Clair’s exhibitions, we can mention

Vienna 1880-1938, l’Apocalypse joyeuse, Centre Pompidou, Paris, 1986; L’Âme au corps, Grand Palais, Paris, 1993 (with Jean-Pierre Changeux), Mélancolie. Génie

et folie en Occident, Grand Palais, Paris, 2007. (2) ‘La Révolution Surréaliste salue le cinquantenaire de l’hystérie’, La Révolution Surréaliste, no. 11, 1928; Salvador Dalí presented ‘Le phénomène de l’extase’,

Le Minotaure, nos 3/4, 1933. (3) Michel de Certeau’s formula in Histoire et psych

analyse, entre science et fiction (Folio histoire, 2016), p. 126. (4) Adolf Loos, Ornament and Crime, 1908. (5) Freud, Correspondence No. 221, p. 398. Letter to the B’nai B’nith lodge in Vienna. Max Halberstadt. « Portrait de Sigmund Freud ». 12 février 1932. Photographie. (© Londres, Freud Museum)

Ernst Mach. « Autoportrait du moi ». (« L’analyse des sensations - Le rapport du physique au psychique »). 1886.

Self-Portrait, Known as “View from the Left Eye”