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The “Strange Fruit” to which I refer is not the haunting Billie Holiday song, but rather an Australian mime and acrobatic group who sit atop very high and flexible poles, arranging and rearranging themselves according to shifting narratives. The name comes to mind in the context of The Academic Face of Psychoanalysis, a volume of essays edited by Louise Braddock (Bye-Fellow, University of Cambridge) and Michael Lacewing (Lecturer in Philosophy, University of London), because of the image on the book's cover, the sixteenth-century painting Summer by Giuseppe Arcimboldo. This painting depicts a man whose face is constructed as a composite of leaves and pieces of fruit: a squash of a nose, cherries for lips, cornstalk hair, and so on. The effect is comic, rather darkly so. The face of The Academic Face, we might say, has a peculiar coherence that calls coherence itself into question.
There is a striking irony here in relation to one of the editors' stated program. For Braddock, the orienting fact of the book is the multiplicity of ways in which psychoanalysis has been taken up in the academy, its “dispersed state” (1). As studied by academics, psychoanalysis has many narratives, is many things to many people. The Academic Face of Psychoanalysis is a volume in reception studies of a sort. It provides a sample of the variety of ways in which scholars engage psychoanalysis in the contemporary academy. But for Braddock, this psychoanalytic diaspora, if you will, is problematic. The aim of the book, in her mind, is unifying. Can psychoanalysis be retrieved as a “coherent object of study” (1)? Can all the different perspectives on psychoanalysis