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This book contains some wonderfully erudite and scholarly papers on some French Impressionist painters as well as some of their precursors and successors. In this way the collection of papers is thematically unified. Anyone already interested in, or anyone looking to have an interest awakened in, some of the painters and paintings of this period will be well rewarded by a study of this work. The editor has brought together a group of distinguished scholars, many of whom have devoted a lifetime of research to one or other of these painters and their works.
However this collection of essays offers an additional interest in its implicit and explicit sub-plot on a problem of method in applied psychoanalysis. I have chosen the term 'sub-plot' because the issue lends a certain drama to the book as a whole. The sub-plot emerges spontaneously rather than by deliberate editorial design. This fact gives it an authentic, in the sense of an unintended, expression.
All of the studies in the collection are the result of their authors' empathic and extensive knowledge of the lives of these artists and their art. Most of them are equally expressions of their authors' openness to a psychoanalytic understanding of the artist and his art. However the authors are not themselves, for the most part, deeply read in psychoanalysis let alone trained clinical practitioners. Consequently the papers, again for the most part, set out interpretive possibilities to a greater extent than they present thoroughly worked out psychoanalytic explanations. This observation is not a criticism. It is a tribute to the scholarly circumspection of the contributors. It is simply an observation that underlines one of the perennial problems of applied psychoanalysis. The psychoanalyst reading these papers will be able to test his mettle by using the indications latent or articulated in them to venture his own interpretations. This incompleteness is appropriate and it can be both intriguing and enric