Introduction

Within the current literature on Austrian modernism, the artistic body in Vienna has principally been subjugated to a Freudian psychoanalytic understanding of narcissism, sexual eroticism, depravity, and death. This is somewhat surprising given that fin-de-siècle Viennese artists did not openly acknowledge Sigmund Freud's theories as an inspiration for their images of "pathological" figures. This chapter reveals how the modern body in fin-de-siècle Vienna was one that directly confronted and incorporated what can be called "hystero-theatrical gestures" as a means of bringing material form to a body fashioned through the inner and outer vision of the artist, playwright, or physician. In her earlier study, "The Pathological Body: Modernist Strategising in Egon Schiele's Self-Portraiture", Gemma Blackshaw similarly argued that the young expressionist was capable of fulfilling an avant-gardist maneuver involving the aesthetics of pathological bodies that Klimt painted into Philosophy and Medicine. Finally, the chapter presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book.