On the Arts

More than a year ago, Giselle Galdi called me to talk about an idea for the American Journal of Psychoanalysis. “I'm thinking of expanding the Film Review section,” she said, “to include other media.” “Oh,” I responded, “to be more of an ‘arts’ section?” “Indeed,” she said. “Would you be interested to be the section editor?” “Would it need to be reviews only?” I asked. “No,” she answered, “you would be able to shape the section as its editor.” There was a pause. The phone line crackled a little as three associations pressed into my awareness:

The first was to the artist Allen Ruppersberg. “The individual search for the secret of life and death,” he wrote in a general comment upon his work (, p. 110). “That is the inspiration and the key…I use my art to transform my life, I use my life to make my art (p. 113).”

The second was to my friend and writing-partner, Gershon J. Molad, in Israel. “‘Paintings on my clinic walls,’” he once had written to me, telling of a paper he had in mind. “In search of the out-of-focus ‘white-area’—the analyst's autobiography and the dialogue between analysts (July 3, 1999).”

The third was to Geraldine Hughes, playwright and actor. “‘Belfast Blues,’ a new play by Geraldine Hughes [at the Black Dahlia Theatre in Los Angeles in a run intended for January 25 through February 23, 2003, extended several times until the end of April, and slated to headline the Belfast Theatre Festival in August 2003] is a tapestry of stories told from Hughes' perspective as a little girl coming of age in the war-torn Belfast of the 1980s. Passionate, riveting, often humorous, these stories bear insightful witness to the many faces of ‘trying to live a normal life’ amidst the violence born of the longstanding grudge between Catholics and Protestants (Irish News, 2003, p. 1).”

At the time of the call, my Belfast-born husband and I had just been to see this one-person performance, in which Geraldine Hughes played all the (clearly delineated, rapidly shifting