The Sexiness of Marilyn Minter's Oeuvre and its Relationship to Laplanche's Theorizing

Marilyn Minter, a gifted painter and photographer, now has a show at the Brooklyn Museum curated by Bill Arning and Elissa Auther and called Pretty/Dirty.1 Her work is unusual. In its raw, primitive way she manages to demonstrate her preoccupation with perverse sexuality. Of course perverse sexuality can be consciously on display, as in Minter's artistry, however, Laplanche (1970, 1987, 1992, 2011, 2015), whose theory I want to link to Minter's work, maintained that perversion exists in all of us in the form of our unconscious infantile sexuality. Minter's overt display captures our more typical unconscious fantasies, that is, fantasies that are usually unavailable or barely discerned. They are felt and express the raw, rudimentary images from our early lives. Her creative achievements allow her to transform her unconscious desires and fears into explicit presentations. It is what Freud and Laplanche have both called sublimations, and what Kris (1952) labeled as regression in the service of the ego. Minter demonstrates artistically what she experiences viscerally and imagistically as she emerged from her troubled, pathological background, which is characterized by considerable trauma in her earlier life and which will be documented later in this paper. She creatively transformed her dysfunctional early life and wove her experiences into works of art.

Laplanche offered no clinical examples to demonstrate how his theory is observed or can be derived from therapeutics. This paper is an attempt to capture some of his ideas as represented in the artistic work of a talented painter with a disruptive history. I have chosen to discuss Laplanche's ideas in relation to Minter's work for a couple of reasons. First, he underscores the importance of sexuality in its earliest form, namely infantile sexuality. He has brought Freud's psychosexuality back and I hope it may again become a focal interest for psychoanalysts. Second, early parental seduction, the experience Freud initial