You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
Inspired by his visit to an exhibition of Cézanne’s portraits at the National Portrait Gallery in London, Robert Snell has combined his passions and his expertise as art historian and analytic psychotherapist to create a remarkable book. Cézanne and the Post-Bionian Field: An Exploration and a Meditation is “an exploration and meditation” that places Cézanne’s visual concepts in a contrapuntal dialogue with Bion’s oneiric models and Nino Ferro’s field theory. The result is a beautifully illustrated and deeply informative volume that works well on many levels—art historical and cultural commentary, introduction to Bion and Ferro’s field theory, and applied psychoanalytic comparative investigation—as it invites readers to accompany the author in this extraordinary encounter between art and psychoanalysis. Here, art “‘serve[s] to interpret psychoanalysis,’ in a collaborative meeting that can open up new meanings in both arenas…[as] multiple voices claim a hearing: those of artists, art historians, psychoanalysts, philosophers, some contemporaries of Cézanne and…that of the painter himself” (p. xiv).
It is Snell’s contention that:
Cézanne was discovering and exploring—in the very act of painting itself—precisely the phenomena of human experience that post-Bionian field theory seeks to draw upon: our mutual and in the end “aesthetic,” that is, potentially and profoundly pleasure-giving, participation with the world and each other. [p. xiv]
For Cézanne, as for Bion, Ferro, Civitarese, and others,1 our being constitutes a world and temporal space of perpetual expansion. Snell argues that while Monet and the Impressionists essentially embraced a Cartesian view of a world-out-there waiting to be apprehended by a sensitive eye, Cézanne, like Freud, places the viewer in the picture, where he is no longer a totally objective, albeit interested, observer.