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Reiche's book diverges sharply from the mainstream of psychoanalytic art interpretation. He first takes issue with psychopathography—as it was first developed in Freud's Leonardo essay (1910)—which was primarily based on establishing the congruence between the work as a symptom and the author's psychic structure. This method of approach had, in fact, already been criticised by art historians—thoroughly and with some accurate arguments—particularly in the dispute over Freud's Leonardo essay. Next, Reiche criticises the systematic utilisation of the observer's countertransference for psychoanalytic art interpretation: ‘The great attraction of this method for all friends of psychoanalysis is at the same time its Achilles' heel: whatever emotional response I have to the work is placed at the centre and announced as countertransference’ (p. 30). This, he argues, opens the way to wild interpretations and essentially serves to confirm long-established hypotheses. Conventionalised psychoanalytic knowledge is fed into