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This book occupies a position on the boundary between psychoanalysis and aesthetics. Murielle Gagnebin pays tribute to the alliance that arises between the authenticity of a work or an experience and the fake when the fake paradoxically becomes the indicator of a particular authenticity. Through its evocative power and its capacity for ‘metaphorico-metonymic entrancement’, a work of art enables the artifice of the invisible, which gives a work its true depth, to be apprehended in the light of the visible.
With regard to the fake, the analytic enquiry raises the question of its limitations: with its diacritic value under question, the fake, relinquishing its simple ‘thematic’ quality, even ‘exposing the silver threads of its cajolery’, presents itself as a ‘protocol’ and shatters a firmly established nosography. It then emerges as a ‘structure’ that is manifest and then unconscious. Still under psychoanalytic scrutiny, ‘the fake that has become a mission, an implementation, the guiding principle of a possible revelation of authenticity’ then appears as the expression of an experience linked with tragedy and suffering.
Gagnebin puts forward two original methods of interpretation.
The first is based on the model of the constitution of the neurotic symptom. This involves identifying the unconscious wish in the work through its drive impulses, its resistances and the disguised return of the repressed. The work of art is a battlefield in which desires, denied pleasures and tortuous resurgences of the drive all confront each other. However, this mode of interpretation is a radical departure from the clinical understanding of the neurotic symptom in the sense that art is in perpetual motion. The work is presented here as the site of a psychic conflict; but it is the harmony of psychic elements exuded by the work that lends the second methodology proposed by Gagnebin its coherence.
The method that she terms ‘quaternary metapsychological modelling of the creation’ links Aristotle