Photography and the Optical Unconscious
Shawn Michelle Smith is Professor of Visual and Critical Studies at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and the author of At the Edge of Sight: Photography and the Unseen and Photography on the Color Line: W. E. B. Du Bois, Race, and Visual Culture, both also published by Duke University Press.
Sharon Sliwinski is Associate Professor of Information and Media Studies at the University of Western Ontario and author of Mandela's Dark Years: A Political Theory of Dreaming and Human Rights in Camera.
Shawn Michelle Smith is Professor of Visual and Critical Studies at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and the author of At the Edge of Sight: Photography and the Unseen and Photography on the Color Line: W. E. B. Du Bois, Race, and Visual Culture, both also published by Duke University Press.
Sharon Sliwinski is Associate Professor of Information and Media Studies at the University of Western Ontario and author of Mandela's Dark Years: A Political Theory of Dreaming and Human Rights in Camera.
“To Adopt”: Freud, Photography, and the Optical Unconscious
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Published:May 2017
This chapter examines one exemplary instance of the optical unconscious that lies latent in Freud’s interpretation of the “R is my uncle dream” as recounted in his Interpretation of Dreams. Drawing on the work of Freud, Benjamin, Gilman, Schmitt, and others, Fardy discusses how the dream and its analysis raise a set of important questions on the nature of photography, the unconscious, and their intersections, as well as a wish to see and resist the specular construction of the figure of the Jew in fin de siècle Europe.
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