Engineer's Daughter

faux pas

"It's my turn to have the bed!"  Anonymous photographer, date unknown.

incognito

From The Tashrih-i Mansuri, (The Anatomy of Mansur of Shiraz), Persia, 18th/19th c.

coze

TOP: a bill from Kwong On Lung & Co in British Columbia for items which include opium.
BOTTOM: Come join me!  French postcard of an opium smoker.

billet-doux

At War With My Skin

"Last night's dreams.  I am skiing on a white slope, beneath a white sky.  I look down at my feet and they are also white, and my skis are engulfed by the powder.  I am exhilarated.  Then the dream transfers me to an interior, a ski hut where the white walls merge into the domed ceiling indistinguishably.  There is an Eskimo maiden, muscular, brown, naked.  I am dressed like a doctor, but more stiffly, in large white cards.  I awaken, immensely ashamed.
"In the negative print of this dream I am sitting on a white bowl and my excrement overflows, unstoppably, unwipably, engulfing my feet, my thighs in patches I try to scrape.  I awaken and am relieved to be in bed, between clean sheets.  Then I look at my arms in the half-light of dawn and an ineluctable horror sweeps over me.  This is real.  This skin is me, I can't get out."

John Updike, from The Journal of a Leper, in Self-Consciousness, USA, 1975

logomachy

Color blindness test charts, from Dr. H. Podesta, Wallchart, 1910

suasion

Pablo Picasso, The Absinthe Drinker, 1901

sere

Auguste Rodin, Naked woman, lying down under rain with her garment up to her waist, France, c.1900

redound

"The subject was a man who is today quite indifferent to the genitals and other attractions of women, but who can be plunged into irresistible sexual excitement only by a foot of a particular form wearing a shoe.  He can recall an event from his sixth year which was decisive for the fixation of his libido.  He was sitting on a stool beside the governess who was to give him lessons in English.  The governess, who was an elderly, dried-up, plain-looking spinster, with pale blue eyes and a snub nose, had something wrong with her foot that day, and on that account kept it, wearing a velvet slipper, stretched out on a cushion.  Her leg itself was most decently concealed.  A thin, scraggy foot, like the one he had then seen belonging to his governess, thereupon became (after a timid attempt at normal sexual activity at puberty) his only sexual object; and the man was irresistibly attracted if a foot of this kind was associated with other features besides which recalled the type of the English governess.  This fixation of his libido, however, made him, not into a neurotic, but into a pervert - what we call a foot fetishist.  You see, then, that although an excessive, and moreover premature, fixation of the libido is indispensible for the causation of neuroses, the area of its effects extends far beyond the field of the neuroses.  This determinant, too, is as little decisive in itself as is the frustration which we have already talked about."
From Freud's paper on Fetishism, 1927

Freud's couch in his consulting room in London, where he lived from 1938-39

liege

Rembrandt, Jupiter and Antiope, Holland, 1659

thewless

Don't touch!  Pictures from Electricity is Dangerous, Germany, 1933