Dialektik des Monstrums : Aby Warburg and the symptom paradigm

This text explores the fundamental relationship between Aby Warburg’s ‘psychology of expression’ and the nineteenth‐century psychology of unconsciousness. It traces the important distinctions and links between Warburg’s key concepts for thinking about images. Nachleben and the Pathosformel and nineteenth‐century models for thinking about the symptom (Charcot and Freud). Through an examination of the formal, visual and temporal structures of the symptom, and such psychoanalytic concepts as repression, the return of the repressed, displacement, conflict and compromise, the Freudian symptom emerges as a critical paradigm for understanding Warburg’s history of images as a psychopathology.