A Psychoanalyst's Gift: Lillian Malcove as Collector

Like Freud, many psychoanalysts have collected art and antiquities, taking much personal pleasure in their collections. As Kuspit noted in 1991, much has been written about the psychoanalytic interpretation of visual art—“insights about artists, art work, and art audience have been incorporated in art discourse” (pp. 1)—most of which is passionate, partisan and political. In fact, the relationship between art and psychoanalysis has a long history; Ernst Kris (1952), among others, was a pioneer in combining expertise in both areas. There is, however, a paucity of discourse on the psychodynamics of collecting, and the analyst as collector has not appeared in the psychoanalytic literature. Even Freud, aside from a few comments, did not open his own passionate hobby of collecting to systematic and detailed analysis. What has been written by analysts has been learned clinically from patients and focuses primarily on the pathological aspects of collecting.

Subkowski (2006), nevertheless, outlined criteria for a collection and a collector. His criteria included: the selection of objects with subjective value in a definable area(s) and an attempt at completion; the collector is affectively, passionately involved in the collection, has an interest in relevant background literature, and behaves consistently over time. Subkowski then considered the psychodynamics of collecting. Recognizing that there are no clear boundaries, he related modes of collecting to various structural levels and states of regression. He asserted that integrated or non-pathological forms of collecting result from the depressive position and attempt to repair the lost and