“An Intimation of Mourning”: Freud and Walter Benjamin on Images of Childhood

Abstract

Abstract: Images of childhood have a pivotal place in the writings of both Sigmund Freud and Walter Benjamin. The present paper offers a discussion on the subject of childhood memories that embody a return to infantile experience both in content and in form, mainly in the form of visual images. Freud’s visual image ( visuelles Bild ) and Walter Benjamin’s Denkbild (thought-image) present a dialectic between a condensed experience of the past and the inevitable transformation of experience into language. Childhood memories are not necessarily retrieved as realistic events but rather embody the potential to create new experiences in the present of remembrance, which are merely referred to the past. These notions are examined through a psychoanalytic reading of Benjamin’s Berlin Childhood around 1900 (2002 [1938]). This memoir is constructed through a singular collection of Denkbilder that presents the experience of being a child in the city of Berlin around 1900. It expresses a lamentation by the author and on behalf of his Jewish generation for the abyss in which they found themselves in the face of the rise of the Nazi regime. The present reading will focus on three main themes: replacements for the original in modern society, images of childhood as prefigurations of later developments, and translations from images to words as vital transformations, especially in times of turmoil.