In ‘Réflexions sur les représentations iconographiques de l’alienne au XIXe siècle’, Bénédict Augustin Morel and Claude Quetel attribute the declining importance of photography at the end of the nineteenth century to the rise of psychoanalysis and the attendant shift from the eye to the ear:

Although by the 1920s, the trope of cinema as an analogy for mental life had become commonplace, Freud rejected cinema as antithetical to psychoanalysis: the unconscious, he insisted, does not offer itself to be seen, and cinema, despite its seeming similarity to dream, fails to acknowledge the tremendous amount of condensation accomplished in the transformation of dream-thoughts into dream-content: ‘The dream is meagre, paltry and laconic in comparison with the range and copiousness of the dream-thoughts. … The degree of condensation is ‒ strictly speaking ‒ indeterminable.’ Despite his hostility to cinema, however, in The Interpretation of Dreams (1900) Freud made frequent use of optical images as analogues for the operations of the psyche, pointing up the parallel histories of cinema and psychoanalysis.

In Discourse Networks 1800/1900, Friedrich Kittler reads Freud's ban on images as marking the return of language in the image-dominated discourse network of 1900: ‘The fact that psychoanalysis, given the options of cinematic dream and the tachistoscope, chose the symbolic method, is indicative of its place in the system of sciences in 1900’ (278).