“The Present in the Past and the Past in the Present:
Édouard Manet: The Lure of Past and the Gaze"
Jeanne Wolff Bernstein, PhD, FIPA
Jeanne Wolff Bernstein will present her psychoanalytic pictorial analysis of the works of French painter Édouard Manet from three viewpoints—personal, historical, and identificatory. Illustrated with several of Manet’s paintings, she develops these perspectives as they appear in her recent book, The Lure of the Gaze and the Past, a Psychoanalytical Study of the Works of Édouard Manet (2025). Linking the limited biographical data available about Manet with his painterly representations, Wolff Bernstein offers unexpected inferences about his life. She interprets Manet’s numerous references to Old Masters’ paintings as evocations of his painterly—rather than personal—past and uses Freud’s concept of Nachträglichkeit to uncover the veiled relationships between Manet’s contemporary painted figures and his citations of past imagery.
Wolff Bernstein will also show how Manet expressed a pointed critique of his political and social milieu by placing the present in the past, and the past in the present. In doing so he reinterpreted traditional works in light of contemporary social and artistic upheavals, using the past both as a cover and a powerful explanatory force. Manet fundamentally transformed the relationship among the spectator, the painting, and the object depicted in the painting. To further understand how the spectator is caught in the gaze of the depicted object, Wolff Bernstein draws on Freud’s (1905) essay, “Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious,” which analyzes the triadic relationship within which the joke-teller invites his listener to complete the joke through a third person. In a similar manner, Manet engages the viewer’s unconscious processes to 'complete' the scenes on his canvases. Unlike many of his contemporaries and artistic predecessors, who either invited the viewer into the painted scene or held them at a distance, Manet subverts the viewer’s desire for identification. He facilitates the spectator's awareness of their own voyeuristic processes through his intricate play of simultaneously luring them into and out of his painted scenes.
Learning Objectives
After attending this scientific meeting, participants will be able:
- To deepen their understanding of different psychoanalytic approaches to viewing an artwork.
- To explore the dynamics of Nachträglichkeit when applied to the arts.
- To be familiar with Freud’s (1905) “Jokes and their Relations to the Unconscious” and its application to the arts.
About the Presenter
Jeanne Wolff Bernstein, PhD, FIPA is a psychoanalyst living and working in Vienna, Austria. She is a member and training analyst at the The Wiener Arbeitskreis für Psychoanalyse (WAP) where she is also a member and Vice- President of the Board. She heads the Scientific Advisory Council of the Vienna Sigmund Freud Museum where she was the Fulbright Freud Visiting Scholar in Psychoanalysis in 2008. Prior to moving to Vienna, Wolff Bernstein was a past president and supervising and personal analyst at the Psychoanalytic Institute of Northern California (PINC). She is on the faculty at PINC, at the NYU Postdoctoral Program, New York and teaches at WAP.
She has published numerous articles on Lacan and the interfaces between psychoanalysis, the visual arts and film. A selection of her most recent publications includes: the chapter on Jacques Lacan in The Textbook of Psychoanalysis (2012/2024); “Living between two languages: A Bi-Focal Perspective,” in: Immigration in Psychoanalysis (2016); her book, The Lure of the Gaze and the Past, A Psychoanalytic Exploration of Édouard Manet’s Work, published in January 2025, Alexander Verlag; co-editor with Daniela Finzi Of Thoughts for the Time on Groups and Masses, A Sigmund Freud Museum Symposium (2025); and co-editor with Helga Klug and Daniella Kammerer of Neu Denken und Handeln, Der Einfluss gesellschaftlicher Umbrüche auf die Psychoanalyse: (The Influence of Societal Upheavals upon Psychoanalysis) (2025) Psychosozial-Verlag, Gießen.
About the Moderator
Nancy C. Winters, MD, FIPA, is a psychoanalyst living and working in Portland, Oregon. She is a training and supervising analyst at the Oregon Psychoanalytic Institute and the Northwestern Psychoanalytic Society and Institute and a Clinical Professor at the Oregon Health & Science University, where she was Professor and Residency Director in Child/Adolescent Psychiatry. She is on the Editorial Boards of the International Journal of Psychoanalysis and The Psychoanalytic Quarterly. Co-editor of “Body as Psychoanalytic Object: Clinical Applications from Winnicott to Bion and Beyond” (2022), recent publications include “Autoimmunity and its Expression in the Analytic Situation: Contemporary Reflections on Our Inherent Self-Destructiveness” (IJP, 2022), “A Home to the Lie: The Contemporary (Per)Version of Truth (AJP, 2023),” and “Transformations in O Online: Group Process in the Virtual Realm” (PQ, 2024). Recent presented papers include “The Liar and the Truth-Teller: An Analytic Dialogue (Lisbon, 2025), and “Schubert’s Final Piano Sonata in B Flat Major as a Metaphor for Analytic Termination: (Seattle, 2025).
