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Desy Safán-Gerard is a psychoanalyst and a painter and her book is replete with colour plates of her paintings, which illustrate her approach to working creatively. The images also help the
reader to get a deep sense of who the author is and how she approaches a problem. The text is equally revealing and undefended. Safán-Gerard shares personal experiences, thoughts and feelings in a remarkably open way. As a psychoanalyst and artist, I wondered which part of my two lives this book would speak to. It turns out that it was the artist that she spoke to most eloquently. This is in part because making art is an attempt to communicate silently, and it is unusual to read such a skilful verbalization of that unspoken process. Reading Chaos and Control, I identified with my artist self and thought about the challenges and failures in my own work.
There were elements of the text, however, which returned me to my analyst self. Safán-Gerard makes use of an eclectic mix of theory in her analytic work and in her understanding of the creative process. She is centred around a Klein/Bion model but is in no way rejecting of Freudian and relational tools for understanding creativity. I confess to some difficulty with Kleinian thinking. The “this means that” aspect makes for fascinating speculation and for a mystery novel thrill, but strikes me as reifying in a way that is contrary to the wordlessness of visual art. Safán-Gerard’s existential approach to Bion’s “O” seems to me a more useful way to integrate art and psychoanalysis. I find her use of Kleinian interpretations to interrupt the continuity of her imaginative integration. Others may well have a different experience.
One theme she takes up concerns the independence of the artwork from the artist. She cites Marion Milner’s focus on the artist’s dialogue with the external world via the artwork. Though she doesn’t specifically cite the concept of the Third, Safán-Gerard sees artistic creation in those terms. Once begun, the art