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In The Art of the Subject, Ireland offers a serious theoretical integration of object-relational and Lacanian psychoanalysis. She takes up the contradiction in these two approaches and paradoxically weaves a unique and textured vantage point from which to think about psychoanalysis. Through vivid clinical examples in which we can feel the effects of Winnicott, Bion, and Lacan, she invites us into her successful bridging of these two disparate theories. We find Ireland naturally swimming in the places where language and body meet, and we are the better for it.
Ireland offers up many elaborate images and metaphors that coalesce at a certain point into a richly populated theoretical landscape. When these images come together, the experience for the reader is something like the sensation of a 3-D image emerging on a page after relaxing the eyes; if we try too hard to focus on any one part of the page, these three dimensions will remain elusive. The entry into three dimensions corresponds to the spaciousness that can be arrived at internally when there is both a nurturing dyad and a strong presence of thirdness; this is precisely what is found in Ireland's innovative integration of Winnicott and Lacan.
The scope of the book is wide, covering topics ranging from infant observation, psychoanalytic training and creativity, gender identifications, and the use of art-making in adult psychoanalysis and supervision. Clinical examples from her private practice and from infant observation convincingly illustrate the power of waiting, of inaction, of struggling to symbolize primitive emotional states. In particular, through her stories about infant observation in which the obvious and sensible thing would be to help and comfort the mother and baby, we live through the discipline of the observer who must refrain from acting and come out the other side with more “negative capability” (Keats, /1973). Ireland says: