The relationship between psychoanalysis in its early years (say, up to 1930) and art was a rather uneasy and one-sided one: art — and in this context my focus is on paintings and drawings — assumed something like a ‘patient’ role, in that whatever evidence or insight it provided was obtained through its being subjected to a kind of cross-examination in the light of what has been characterized as a ‘hermeneutics of suspicion’ (Ricoeur, 1970, pp. 32-6), rather than through a more direct form of communication. For Freud, the artist is essentially a neurotic just like any other, even if he is mysteriously granted a certain ‘flexibility of repression’ and despite the inexplicable gift that enables him to make his fantasies acceptable to others. Freud does, of course, pay fulsome lip-service to the fact that artists and writers (more often the latter) had intuitively anticipated many of the psychological findings that psychoanalysis aimed to put on a more scientific footing; but, given Freud's