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Phantasmagoria 1167 from outside—as if there were, at the very heart of subjectivity itself, something foreign and fantastic, a spiritual presence from elsewhere, a spectre-show of unaccountable origin By the time of Freud, the rhetorical pattern had resolved, as it were, into a cultural pathology: everyone felt "haunted." That is to say, the mind itself now seemed a kind of supernatural space, filled with intrusive spectral presences—incursions from past or future, ready to terrify, pursue, or disable the harried subject Freud struggled with the paradoxes of spectralization, largely by attempting to define a cognitive practice—psychoanalysis—which would exorcize these "ghostly presences" once and for all But as I will argue in the next chapter, his project was compromised by the classic rationalist paradox Even as he attempted to demystify the uncanny forces of the psyche, he could not help reinventing in the very theory of the unconscious itself an essentially daemonic conception of thought Despite heroic efforts, Freud never fully escaped the pervasive cryptosupernaturalism of early nineteenth-century psychology.60 Rather than contend further, however, with such ultimately elusive matters, let me conclude with a suitably ambiguous emblem of my theme This is a socalled spirit photograph from the 1860s taken by Edouard Buguet, showing the diaphanous form of a young woman floating obliquely over the head of a young man deep in contemplation Or is she "inside" his head? The image is truly phantasmagorical—and not only in the sense that the camera, like a magic lantern, has realized the phantom-woman in a curiously literal way From one perspective this carefully staged double exposure (if that is what it is) is a kind of self-reflexive commentary on the uncanny nature of photography, the ultimate ghost-producing technology of the nineteenth century But the image is phantasmagorical in another sense, in that it is also a representation of reverie itself—a fantastically exalted picture of what one "sees" when one thinks It strikes us as comical, perhaps, because it makes the spectral drama of psychic life almost too obvious; it borders on kitsch Yet, in this very theatricality, it also evokes something unmistakably familiar— something both inside and outside, real and unreal, the luminous figure of thought itself
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