From Cabinet to Couch: Freud's Clinical Use of Sculpture

Abstract

This article aims to address and remedy the fact that Freud's clinical use of sculpture has received little sustained attention. After a brief review of the collection, Melanie Klein's clinical use of dolls is discussed as an initial basis for comparison. It then makes a detailed examination of primary evidence found in the published writings and private correspondence of the writer and analysand H.D. (Hilda Doolittle). H.D.'s analysis indicates that Freud used sculpture as an analogue for the ‘foreign body’ of psychical trauma, treating it as a representation of a representation, or Vorstellungrepräsentanz. The sculptures also served Freud's archaeological metaphor for the ‘otherness’ of the unconscious in ways that architectural fragments did not. The author then considers H.D.'s hallucination of Athena Nike and Freud's use of his own damaged sculpture of Athena to raise therapeutic questions about her phallic relation to the signifier in the treatment of her writer's block. This case study is further compared to Klein and to Jung in order to differentiate the use of objects in the clinical setting and to mark some of the limits Freud encountered in H.D.'s second analytic session. The author concludes that purely textual examinations of Freud may have greatly underestimated his clinical use of sculpture in recuperating lost memories as fundamental indices of desire.