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In today's dark times, The Soft Power of Culture: Art, Transitional Space, Death and Play is a vital reminder of the value and essential role of culture in human history. It may come as a surprise that the author of this wonderful book is a psychoanalyst. Dr. Jonathan Sklar is a British psychiatrist and an Independent training and supervising analyst of the British Psychoanalytical Society. For the reader who dares enter this atypical space, an intellectual and emotional adventure awaits as Sklar delves into the world's famous artists and shares the unconscious labyrinths of his own and his patients' minds.
The Prologue (pp. xii-xxiii) is a tribute to Simon Schama, the art historian who invented the phrase “art against tyranny”—
the soft power of culture—poetically charged words, images, music, all of which can, in some circumstances, exert a force beyond the workday stuff of politics. Culture can do this because it can connect with human habits, needs and intuitions in ways that expose the inhuman hollowness of official propaganda. (Schama, 2022, quoted by Sklar, p. xiii)
This quote has all the more meaning today, as many countries face the threat of an extreme right-wing takeover of government.
In the first chapter entitled “Stranger, visitor, metaphor” (pp. 1–18), Sklar invites the reader to be a “flâneur”—walking into unfamiliar spaces, to discover surroundings by surprise, without previous judgment, allowing unexpected emotions to emerge. This approach is also important for the psychoanalytic space if the analyst is ready to hear what the patient has to say without theoretical preconceptions. Then Sklar discusses the functions of metaphor “in language as a critical means of carrying the weight of the unconscious, which can transfer, as in transference, understanding and knowledge of that part of the mind” (p. 1).
The chapter begins with the word “Xenos” (p. 1) meaning stranger, guest, host. The author's cultural association is with “Hieronymus Bosch's 15th-century p