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Psychoanalysis is a listening profession. We psychoanalysts make meaning of our patients' words by using our ears and aural pathways to the brain. A number of years ago, I wrote about the use of alternative pathways for understanding our patients: “Responses to visual representations can be at times more visceral and immediate than they are to auditory communications. Visual sensations tend to be experienced more directly, and thus can short-circuit the kinds of intellectualizations and denial to which words lend themselves” (Lieberman 2000, p. 223).
We can train our eyes to better understand others (and ourselves as well) by looking at art and in that process give our ears, and the part of the brain to which they transmit, a temporary rest. Experiencing and understanding the content of art, how it was created, what went on in the minds and developmental histories of the artists, and tuning into what the artworks evoke in us (an analogue of the countertransference) cannot help but inform our clinical work, as well as enriching us personally. As Miller notes in the paper that follows, “familiar analytic ideas seem revitalized when they reveal themselves in art, [and] our understanding of them deepens” (p. 111).
Freud's seminal writings on Leonardo and Michelangelo have inspired analysts too numerous to list here to apply their psychoanalytic knowledge to art. Ellen Handler Spitz (1982) has identified three typical approaches to the psychoanalytic understanding of art:
pathography: understanding the neurosis of the artist as reflected in the artwork (an approach exemplified by Freud)—Freudian
interpreting the artwork as text itself and as representative of the relatively autonomous functioning of the ego (exemplified by Kris)—ego psychological
understanding the effect of the artwork on the viewer (an aesthetic approach exemplified by Winnicott)—Kleinian