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Towards the end of her life, Marilyn Monroe told an interviewer: ‘You're always running into people's unconscious.’1 As an experienced psychoanalytic case, Marilyn was being knowing and innocent, both at once, which was her style. That other great icon of the twentieth century, Albert Einstein, was adept at adopting the same stance in what I think we are safe in regarding as a rhetorical question: ‘Why is it that nobody understands me and everybody likes me?’ he asked a New York Times reporter in 1944 - a witticism that Abraham Pais uses as an epigraph for his last book on Einstein, Einstein Lived Here (Pais 1994, p. vi). (The book's title is itself a joke in this style, since the phrase comes from a cartoon from the Washington Post a few days after Einstein's death, depicting a planet seen from space with a label bearing the phrase pinned to it.) These sayings are emblematic of the ways in which Marilyn and Albert contributed much to the development of their individual mythical and iconic statuses, in ways that are both indubitable and very hard to pin down: they were, one might say, ‘unwittingly complicit’ with the great waves of public adoration and interest in them. As Erik Erikson remarked of Einstein: ‘This man learned to look into cameras as if he were meeting the eyes of the future beholders of his image’ (Erikson 1982, p. 157).
Everyone is at all times always running into all other people's unconscious. Marilyn did not mean that she was special in this regard; what she perhaps meant was that other people were constantly showing her their unconsciouses because of who they thought she was. This is what it means to be an icon. Or perhaps she felt she had a gift for blundering in on them, and that this might be the explanation for how she acquired her iconic status. That other icon, Albert Einstein, was repeatedly surprised by this constant trait of his everyday life. For Sigmund Freud, it was his bread and butter; in