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In this new book the psychoanalyst Gregorio Kohon makes a very personal contribution to the literature on art and psychoanalysis. Kohon is circumspect in his ambition and from the beginning establishes the scope and aims, making it clear that the book does not apply psychoanalytic theories to explain art, literature or culture. His modest claim in venturing into the world of aesthetics is to demonstrate how the uncanny in art and literature disrupts and unsettles the viewer or reader. Clearly deeply affected by works of art from different countries and diverse traditions, Kohon gives a very personal selection, described and substantiated by his deep knowledge of art, literature and psychoanalytic theory.
It is the experience of the spectator that interests Kohon and the emotional disruption or estrangement, which is sometimes provoked by a work of art. His concern is in ‘the aesthetic’ in Freud's terms; that is works that disturb or disrupt the familiar and reveal that rent in the fabric of the Heimlich (the homely) of which Freud (1919) wrote so eloquently. The object threatens ‘the natural distinctions by which we normally live. A crucial dimension of uncertainty appears to be demanded by the aesthetic object’ (p. 2). The author selected the art works and so it is his aesthetic preferences that shape the book; it is his gaze, coloured by his life experiences, that is the connecting thread. He is the guide and the reader learns how this man, a psychoanalyst with his own history, encounters the chosen art works.
The book is illustrated in black and white with drawings and photographs of paintings, sculptures and monuments that are the central focus of each chapter. The juxtapositions of the chosen artists and writers are unpredictable and sometimes they are rather unlikely chapter companions, and yet the thread of disruption of the familiar, what Jungians might call ‘the shadow’, links them. Each chapter begins with an artist or writer or both, and as the book progres