I puzzled with the new book, Painting, Psychoanalysis, and Spirituality—Contemporary Artists and their Critics by Stephen James Newton, Ph.D. for a very long time, trying to understand what the author was about. The nearest idea I came to understand is that he is studying art from twelve centuries ago to the present by the schema of psychoanalysis as conceived by Freud in his pivotal writing, The Interpretation of Dreams.

Newton begins with a formal description of the materials used by the artist and displayed in a painting and goes on to describe the creative process in analytic terms, saying that Freud did not understand the formal aspects of art. And