The Dream of the Salamander. An Interpretation of the Latent Content in a Painting by Ingemar Pettersson. With an Appraisal of an Experiment in the Psychology of Art Using the Technique of Guided Affective Imagery: By Maj-Brit Wadell. Göteberg, Sweden: ARIS (Institute of Art History, University of Lund), 1984. 128 pp.

In this unusual little book a Swedish art historian has combined academic training with a long-standing interest in depth psychology to undertake what I believe to be a unique venture. Since Freud's initial effort in 1910 to apply psychoanalytic understanding to Leonardo's life and work, a number of art historians and psychoanalysts have attempted similar studies. Few have worked with living artists, however, and none have used the methodology employed by the author of this study.

Professor Wadell has subjected a single painting by a little known Swedish artist, together with some studies done before and after it, to a detailed analysis in an attempt to arrive at a psychological interpretation of this work. The painting, whose full title is The Dream of the Salamander or an Attempt at Self-Contemplation, had already provoked an earlier study by Wadell, in which her students and colleagues were asked to interpret the work under the two conditions of normal consciousness and a semi-conscious state she calls catathymic. The evocation of this semihypnotic state was produced