ABSTRACT
The invention of X-ray photography had an illustrious reception in Vienna by medical doctors, graphic artists, and writers. The visual possibility of “seeing through” resonated with Freudian psychoanalysis, allowing individuals to visualize in their own minds what was formerly hidden or dynamically repressed, thus expanding the psychological imagination. The writer who characterized the X-ray most poignantly, with all of its mixed implications of modernity and morbidity, was Thomas Mann. X-ray technology is at the center of The Magic Mountain, Mann’s gigantic, strangely modern, psychological novel.
