Comics on the Couch: Introduction

Psychoanalyst Didier Anzieu said that psychoanalysis gave him a new “geography,” a “map to guide through the internal continent” (1991, p. 26, as cited in Segal, 2018, p. xxii). Anzieu echoes Freud's metaphor of the “dark continent” (1926, p. 212) to chart the unknown terrain of his inner life. In a prolegomenon to his work on what he called the “skin ego,” Anzieu presciently proclaimed that as the twentieth century was nearing its end, now more than ever “psychoanalysis has a greater need of people who think in images than of scholars, scholiasts, abstract or formalistic thinkers” (1995, p. 6). Comics, of course, “think” in images. As Alison Bechdel remarks, “Cartoons are like maps to me” (2007). But maps of what? Comics critic Hillary Chute interprets this metaphor explicitly: “Because of its spatial conventions, comics is able to map a life, not only figuratively but literally. It can diagram a life on a page” (2011, p. 109).

Comics and psychoanalysis, each in their own way, map internal continents and contexts of human life. Both modes of mapping human experience in the world share a form: with comics there is a union of the visual and the verbal, with psychoanalysis a union of dream and interpretation, also uniting image and word. This special issue of American Imago puts comics “on the couch,” restless as this denizen may be. The contributors to this special issue each in their own way explore how the ideas that inform and inspire psychoanalysis also frame comics, while revealing how comics expands upon the discoveries and designs which imbue psychoanalysis. Yet it

In Memoriam

We dedicate “Comics on the Couch” to the late Professor Christopher Darling of the Department of Visual Communication Design at Kent State University. His love of comics, psychoanalysis, and the uses of both to further social justice were integral to the conception of this issue. In an alternate universe, Christopher has an essay in this issue.