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With Volume 1 of Psychoanalytic Perspectives on Art, Mary Gedo and her fellow contributors introduce a major annual of applied psychoanalysis. This handsomely designed and illustrated journal contains work by art historians informed by psychoanalysis, by psychoanalysts interested in art history and, most interestingly, comments on some of the articles or, in the case of a lengthy book review, an author's rejoinder to that review. The psychoanalyst reader will find himself informed, challenged, and entertained.
Mary Gedo's preface announces the journal's function as the exploration of 'the meaning of the work—its style as well as its iconography—as a reflection of the creator's internal world'; and Ellen Handler Spitz's opening essay 'A Critique of Pathography: Freud's Original Psychoanalytic Approach to Art'—a modified chapter of her Art and Psyche(1985) —elaborates this point of view. 'Pathography' has been used in several senses. Spitz uses it here to refer to the whole sweep of the artist's inner life as constructed from biographical sources as well as from studies of his work and examines arguments about whether it is legitimate to infer an artist's inner life from his productions and, most centrally, whether such an approach is legitimate as art criticism.
By placing Freud's own art studies in the tradition of Romantic criticism with its emphasis on the artist's intention, Spitz locates her own discussion in terms of the more general debate about Romantic criticism; e.g. the arguments that the artist's intention may not be knowable or pertinent to our response to a work of art. She uses Beardsley and Wimsatt as familiar spokesmen for the unavailability of the artist's intention, most vividly represented in their metaphor of the work of art as a pudding in which all the lumps must be stirred out, and to whose enjoyment the knowledge of the chef's humour, etc. is irrelevant. She stresses that this point of view must be taken into account by the psychoanalyti