Visual Art and Art Criticism: The Role of Psychoanalysis

So much has been written about the psychoanalytic interpretation—call it re-cognition—of visual art, so many psychoanalytic insights about artist, art work, and art audience have become incorporated in art discourse, if often as unwitting assumptions, that it seems redundant to review the various modes of psychoanalytic understanding of art. Such a review would entail an account of the growing sophistication, sensitivity, and self-reflection of psychoanalysis itself, for the sensibility and subtlety psychoanalysis brings to art depend to a large extent on its own nuanced response to its concepts. To lift these concepts out of clinical context and bring them to bear on such a complex, varied subject as art is an intellectually dangerous adventure. Among artists, it has often been suspect to the point of arousing nihilistic skepticism—a no doubt defensive, self-preservative response, perhaps necessary to creativity in the circumstances, if at the same time a reductio ad absurdum of resistance, not to mention its anti-intellectualism.

The psychoanalysis of art—of any cultural phenomenon—can be carried out in a responsible manner only with the ironic, self-conscious, self-questioning ego that is the optimum result of self-analysis. Such a self-analytic ego, secure in its self-doubt, is necessarily aware of psychoanalysis's own critical, conflict-ridden, varied, even pluralistic history—what is increasingly regarded as its postmodernist character, in which each theory is regarded as a signifier with no comprehensive power of signification and so as a perpetually heuristic gambit in a Sisyphean situation with respect to the psychological truth. Such a self-critical ego is all the more necessary for a psychoanalyst of art, for the notion of a