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July 10, 2019 – Review
“The Enigma of the Hour: 100 Years of Psychoanalytic Thought”
Lorena Muñoz-Alonso
Psychoanalytical theory might have fallen out of favor in the visual arts, but the fields still share a number of core concerns. Both create conditions in which the unconscious can materialize through processes of language, translation, metaphor, and interpretation. With these common terrains as a starting point, Dana Birksted-Breen, editor-in-chief of the International Journal of Psychoanalysis (IJP), commemorates the journal’s centenary in an exhibition at London’s Freud Museum which comprises two overlapping threads. One maps the origins of the publication in a thoroughly researched cabinet display containing letters, photographs, paintings, and archaeological artifacts, including Egyptian sphinxes and Etruscan mirrors from Sigmund Freud’s collection. The research pays close attention to the role that women—most notably Joan Riviere, Marjorie Brierley, Anna Freud, and Alix Strachey—played in the development of the IJP. The materials also evidence a fascinating link to the Bloomsbury Group via two of its one-time editors: James Starchey, who with wife Alix translated Freud into English, and and his successor Adrian Stephen, Virginia Woolf and Vanessa Bell’s younger brother. Both psychoanalysts are present via letters and issues of the journal and by two stunning portraits painted by Duncan Grant.
The exhibition’s second thread is curated by Simon Moretti and Goshka …