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Almost a decade ago, I was invited to a large dinner celebrating the future of psychoanalysis in the new millennium. It was held in the faculty club of a small East Coast university. In between courses, a waiter approached and asked if he could speak to me. I was grateful for a respite from shop talk with colleagues, most of which was anything but celebratory.
A man in his sixties, he looked as if he might have waited on tables there most of his life. “I've always admired psychoanalysis,” he said. “But there's just one thing.”
“What's that?” I asked, surprised to be having this particular conversation.
“The name,” he said. “Psychoanalysis. It assumes too much.” And he walked away as abruptly as he had arrived, leaving his profundity hanging in the air.
While his millennial comment was a judgment on our field as a whole—a correct one, in my view—never have our assumptions been more apparent in their grandiosity than when we have turned our attention to the arts. And if the name psychoanalysis is a problem, what about applied psychoanalysis? Historically and without embarrassment, we have practiced precisely what the phrase says: the “application” of psychoanalytic theory to works of art and to the culture at large. Could we ever be more justifiably accused of assuming too much?
In assessing an article on applied analysis, an editor—or at least this editor—feels himself to have something of an unwritten covenant or fiduciary relationship with the object of study. A work of literature, a painting, or a piece of music—not to mention its deceased author, artist, or composer—has no power to protest (or