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When I return to picture books from my childhood, I find that the illustrations have an intense and distinctive power, an “aliveness” that I attribute to the fact that these books were read to me before I was able to read myself. When I return to those illustrations now, I experience some of that magical (alchemical), pre-literate plenitude that characterized my early experience. I listened intently to my mother—to the grain of her voice in its materiality and specificity—as I focussed raptly on the illustrations. I offer this as an abbreviated and personalized way to begin thinking about the psycho-aesthetic impact of comics or “the marriage,” as Vera Camden and Valentino Zullo write, of word and image. In the beginning was the sensorially rich materio-semiotic experience of relationality! Given the intensity of my relationship to image/text and to my own self-formation (as I recall and re-experience it), it was a real pleasure to read and visually engage with the materials for this issue of American Imago: Comics on the Couch: Psychoanalysis and Graphic Medicine.
My overview of the volume will begin with “The Uses of Comics in the Psychoanalytic Process” (Suzy Becker with Vera Camden and Valentino Zullo), a playful and pedagogically valuable reminder that “Freud didn't only privilege the poetic—he paid attention to popular works, including comics” (p. 4). Becker's comic conveys a great deal of information, both historical and conceptual, by asking us to re-encounter the fundamental relationship between psychoanalysis and literature. Upending once again the move beyond models of simple application (applying psychoanalysis to literature as a kind of master discourse), this essay usefully reinforces Shoshana Felman's field-defining intervention: