On Dangerous Ground

Diane O'Donoghue is Director of the Program for Public Humanities and Senior Fellow for the Humanities at the Jonathan M. Tisch College for Civic Life, at Tufts University, USA. She is also Visiting Professor for Public Humanities at Brown University, and a scholar member of and on the faculty at the Boston Psychoanalytic Society and Institute. There she has been a Silberger Scholar and is a recipient of their Felix and Helene Deutsch Prize. Her work on Freud’s early formulations of psychoanalysis also has been awarded the CORST Prize from the American Psychoanalytic Association.

• List of IllustrationsAcknowledgementsIntroductionChapter One: The Lost Language of StonesChapter Two: Phantasmal FragmentsChapter Three: Libido Awakened: In Transit and EnframedChapter Four: The Painting of Everyday LifeChapter Five: Paper Dreams: Illustrated Books and the Magic of the ManifestConclusion: Objects’ LessonsAfterwordBibliographyIndex

Diane O’Donoghue's On Dangerous Ground: Freud’s Visual Cultures of the Unconscious is an original contribution to the study of psychoanalysis and our visual world. The wide range of images from Freud's world shows us how wide and deep his visual world impacted on his writing and thinking. Focussing on Freud's emphasis on visualization as a core element of the unconscious, O’Donoghue's work actually illustrates how each and every one of us incorporates our visual context, real or virtual, into the articulation of our desires. We are in complex ways what we see and thus how we dream and how we imagine ourselves. A strong, readable and compelling book!