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‘Monomaniac of gambling’, from the Louvre, one of a series of five portraits by Gericault, probably painted in the early 1820s, provides the cover image of Robert Snell's new book, a scholarly account of the artistic, social, medical and philosophical discourses through which the twentieth century subject of psychotherapy emerges and is established. The painting draws the observer immediately through the artist's rendering of the eyes and his lighting of the face and head. The quality of this image is particularly noteworthy, since all the other images are black and white, and of indifferent quality. The cover design itself is worth lingering over in that its juxtaposition of text and image anticipates some of the areas the author is attempting to bring together in his study. The text of the title partially obscures this one colour image; in doing so, it directs attention to the upper part of the sitter's face and its profound, clear-eyed melancholy, while indirectly challenging the author's close attention to this image and to the group of images he discusses so sensitively throughout. Given Snell's art historical credentials, the placing of the title across the mouth and lower face may be intended to further emphasize the sitter's anonymity and the obscure histories of all five of Gericault's subjects; a feature Snell notes as part of the artist's decision to portray their normality, their ordinariness.
For me, however, before even opening Robert Snell's fascinating book, the juxtaposition of image and word and the former's apparent subordination to the latter, registers an aspect of this book's overall shape, that is, the array of subjects being investigated is so dense and so compellingly addressed that the paintings themselves can sometimes seem at risk of disappearing. This would be to do Snell an injustice, however, because a close attention to these images and their complex history is certainly there. It does perhaps signal an occasional need to search for