Letter from the Editor

Freud compared psychoanalysis with a journey in a railway carriage, equating emerging free associations with the reveries that naturally come while gazing out the window at the passing landscape. He wrote this in 1913, but the psychological experience of being in motion and in a protected space, observing inside and outside simultaneously, also describes our modern-day experience.

The ritual of the family Sunday drive, traveling together at a relaxed pace with no particular destination, offers a similar psychological journey. I can remember the comfort and safety of riding in the car at night, being driven and looked after by one of my parents, half interested in the shadowy views flashing by, enjoying the easy movement of ideas passing back and forth in the darkness.

While I was experiencing my family car as a safe and psychologically evocative physical space, Andy Warhol was putting together his Death and Disaster series — silk-screened images, sourced from newspapers and police photo archives, of mangled cars and mangled bodies connected together unnaturally. Not the usual Warholian commentary on mass-produced objects or symbols of consumer affluence, these images bring to mind the gritty voyeurism of the photographer Weegee, who, decades earlier, photographed murder victims for tabloid publications, sometimes just moments after the event. Warhol's pieces are oddly serene and still, with the kicked-up dust and hushed silence of a collision only just come to rest. The image reads more like an unfolding event than a static snapshot. As my initial shock of the destruction in front of me begins to dissipate, the aftermath of chaos, mayhem, pity, and fear emerges.

One photo stands out — a dead medical attendant, lying prone, half in and half out of his wrecked ambulance. It witnesses the death of the rescuer, the possibility that no one is there to respond to our distress. We are pushed across a psychic threshold when the illusion that things are under our control gets r