“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:

1. To deepen their understanding of different psychoanalytic approaches to viewing an artwork.
2. To explore the dynamics of Nachträglichkeit when applied to the arts.
3. To be familiar with Freud’s (1905) “Jokes and their Relations to the Unconscious” and its application to the arts.