georges didi huberman, confronti... - lensbased.net

164 Confronting Imagesphenomena under study. 58 There was something, of course, in thisambitious double qualification, of a thinker trying to rid himself ofthe classic historiography, and of the conceptual and ‘‘psychological’’grip of Wölfflin’s work. But there was also more there, precisely inthe sense that this double exigency, formulated in 1915, left an emptyspace, a space of theoretical desire that the notion of the ‘‘symbolicform’’ refined by Ernst Cassirer some ten years earlier would finallyfill.It is all the same troubling to note that it was precisely in 1915 thatFreud, through the very term metapsychology, finished advocating forthe ultimate theoretical dimension of the practice invented by himfifteen years earlier: psychoanalysis. 59 The formulation had come along way, for as early as March 1898 Freud had asked Fliess if hefound it suitable as a designation for the interpretive path he was thenelaborating. 60 It is easy to think that in 1915 Panofsky could easily havemissed a theoretical field taking shape far from the University proper,and thus far from the specific domain of the history of art. But thepsychoanalytic field was well constituted by then, and had spread farbeyond the clinical framework of psychopathology; as is indicated bythe very title of the Freudian periodical Imago, created in 1912—a titlecapable, one imagines at least, of attracting the attention of an arthistorian working in the German language.But the crux of the problem lies elsewhere. It resides in the factthat Panofsky, on the one hand, inherited his conceptual field fromthe neo-Kantian philosophy of the faculties, and, beyond that, fromthe notion—absolutely central in Cassirer—of function. Whereas, onthe other hand, Freud elaborated an approach to the unconsciousfrom the angle of something that said neither ‘‘faculty of the soul’’nor ‘‘function’’ in the synthetic sense, but that would be expressed interms of work: the dream-work, unconscious formations and distortions...To the end, Panofsky would have envisaged his own ‘‘metapsychology’’of symbolic forms as the uncovering of a function thathe was not afraid to call metaphysical because Kant, before him, hadprecisely set himself the task of grounding metaphysics as a ‘‘science.’’To the end, he regarded psychoanalysis—sumptuously absent fromthe book on melancholy, for example 61 —as the equivalent of what