Book Announcement by Jeanne Wolff Bernstein (Austria)

Bernstein, J.W. (2025). The lure of the gaze and the past: A psychoanalytic view of the works of Édouard Manet. Alexander Verlag Berlin.

In The Lure of the Gaze and the Past: A Psychoanalytic View of the Works of Édouard Manet, Jeanne Wolff Bernstein develops a psychoanalytic pictorial analysis in examining the works of the French painter. Rather than speculate about Manet’s biography, Wolff Bernstein links only historically available data of the artist’s life to his paintings. Manet’s numerous references to the history of painting are explained as re-interpretations of the historical works and as interpretations of his painterly genealogy. With this method it becomes clear how Manet expresses the contradictions inherent in his era and subtly criticizes his social milieu.

For her analysis of the relationships between artist, painting, and viewer, Wolff Bernstein draws on Freud’s essay Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious  (1905), which explains how the teller of a joke calls upon the audience to complete it through an absent but imagined third person. She argues that in much the same way, Manet incorporates the unconscious processes of his spectators to complete the scenes portrayed on his canvases.

Drawing on Lacan’s theory about the gaze and the mirror stage, Wolff Bernstein suggests that viewers typically project aspects of themselves and their own desires into the painting. Further, Manet regularly unsettles the viewers’ identificatory longings, subverting their passive gaze by luring them into scenes of ambiguity. This in turn makes them aware of their own voyeuristic position.

Investigating three perspectives on Manet’s work – the personal, the historical, and the viewer’s own identificatory processes – Wolff Bernstein opens up a new psychoanalytic approach to the study of painting.

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Jeanne Wolff Bernstein, Ph.D. is a psychoanalyst, living and working in Vienna. She is a member, training analyst, and Vice President of the Board at the Wiener Arbeitskreis für Psychoanalyse (WAP). She is the head of the Advisory Board of the Sigmund Freud Privatstiftung, where she was the Fulbright-Freud Visiting Lecturer of Psychoanalysis in 2008.Prior to moving to Vienna, she was Past President and supervising and personal analyst at PINC. She teaches at PINC, NYU Postdoctoral Program, and at WAP. She has published articles on the interfaces between psychoanalysis, the visual arts, and film.

Jeanne Wolff Bernstein, Ph.D.
Vienna, Austria
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