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How is practicing psychoanalysis like being an artist? In Dancing with the Unconscious: The Art of Psychoanalysis and the Psychoanalysis of Art, Danielle Knafo elaborates this connection with thoughtful care and insight. For inspiration she calls on her own childhood immigration from French Morocco to Pennsylvania Dutch Country in the US, which required that she creatively bridge the world of “couscous and b'stilla” and “funnel cakes and shoo-fly pie” (p. xvii). For Knafo, psychoanalysis takes the form of dance because it seeks movement, action, and release—the dissemination of unconscious energies. It also engages stillness and interludes of incubation. But beginning with Breuer and Freud's study of women's bodies that were physically stuck, sometimes literally, psychoanalytic healing animates places in the flesh that was cut-off from embodiment.
The first half of the book discusses the artistic components of clinical practice beginning with three forms of unconscious expression: free association (an integral function of Surrealism), transference-countertransference, and dream making. Knafo updates the concept of “regression,” which she argues is too often misunderstood, and highlights its various purposes “in the service of art” as well as the ego (p. 23).
Data is gathered from extensive personal interviews that the author conducted with artists and her own clinical research. Knafo describes Kasia, a second-generation Holocaust survivor who used the consulting room as a “concentration camp,” screaming through sessions, and with her Knafo felt more the vibration than heard her patient's words (p. 86). At home, Kasia, a photographer, hung her pictures with the image side turned to the wall. In arduous therapeutic journey, anger gradually became agency and her analysand gained freedom through “imaginatively created embodied images” (p. 87).
Knafo suggests that a collective catastrophe, such as the Holocaust, need to be represented, however partially, even if the aesthet