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Applied psychoanalysis has had a rocky history, not unlike psychoanalysis itself. Vilified over the years by such distinguished and not necessarily anti-Freudian scholars as Meyer Schapiro and Leo Steinberg, it has often
struggled to reach the nonpsychoanalytic world. It is interdisciplinary in theory but intradisciplinary in practice. Perhaps Albert Lubin’s (1972) psychobiography of Vincent van Gogh, Stranger on the Earth, is the only work of applied psychoanalysis that has had any kind of widespread popularity since Freud’s Leonardo da Vinci and a Memory of His Childhood. Into this fraught realm enters Paola Golinelli with her Psychoanalytic Reflections on Writing, Cinema and the Arts: Facing Beauty and Loss. Elegantly written and deeply informed about film and literature as well as psychoanalytic theory, it should raise the bar on psychoanalytic writing about art.
As her subtitle indicates, Golinelli believes that there is a close relationship between the experience of beauty and loss. Beauty for Golinelli is rooted in the infant’s joyful contact with the mother’s breast, body, and smile. And she finds validation for this not in Freud or Melanie Klein, but in Homer, who said that beauty is “the breast which makes us forget our anguish” (p. 17). But these ecstatic interchanges between mother and infant are always temporary and lead to loss. So beauty and loss are inextricably linked in the “aesthetic conflict” (p 14). Drawing on Bion and Meltzer, she writes,
Meltzer (1988) derived from Bion the concept of “aesthetic conflict” reflecting the infant’s conflict between attraction towards the dazzling beauty of the breast and the maternal face and the panic and terror of what is hidden in its inner reality: the premonition of abandonment, of the absence of the object, of the anguish arising from the difficulty to tolerate frustration and the destructive rage that follows. (p. 14)
These ideas were profoundly influenced by Freud’s (1915) short essay “On Transience.” In