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This collection of essays concerns the history and potential application of psychoanalytic thinking to the interpretation of visual art. The author, and art historian as well as practicing analyst, discusses primarily European painting and sculpture—Renaissance through Modern art. Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, Caravaggio, Artemisia
Gentileschi, Rembrandt, Henry Moore, Brancusi, and Picasso receive special attention.
Professor Adams takes her theoretical orientation primarily from the formulations of classical analysis, beginning with a discussion of controversies aroused by Freud's study of Leonardo. In chapters on “Art and the Oedipus complex,” “Dreams, delusions, and art,” and “Psychoanalytic readings of primal scene iconography,” selected works of art serve to illustrate and exemplify particular themes in psychoanalytic theory. In addition to Freud, Winnicott's conception of the transitional object and Lacan's ideas about the riverting power of the “gaze” are introduced and used for purposes of interpretation.
The author enumerates four main categories of psychoanalytic interpretation as applied to visual art: symbolism, sublimation, creativity, and psychobiography. The first of these is equivalent to iconography in the sense of the assignment of meanings to images or their elements. The annuciation in Christian art, for example, has been identified by psychoanalytic thinkers as a primal scene image in which the Virgin Mary is impregnated by God. Ernest Jones published a paper to this effect entitled “The Madonna's conception through the ear.” Adams traces visual metaphors of impregnation in works by Van Eyck, Piero della Francesca, and Titian. The power of these images, she claims, is their fulfillment of unconscious incestuous impulses on the part of the beholder.
Professor Adams recognizes sublimation as one of the most elusive concepts in classical analysis, pointing out that Freud never arrived at a satisfactory theoretical formulation of it. In her chapte