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Psychoanalysis has usually turned its attention to the artist, but, happily, realizing that the artist is far from the whole story of art, Werner Muensterberger turns his attention to the collector. If, as Duchamp (Cabanne, 1971) said, “the artist exists only if he is known,” then having his work collected is one way of being known. The work of art, Duchamp argued, is “a product of two poles…the pole of the one who makes the work, and the pole of the one who looks at it.” The collector—along with the critic and curator—represents the latter pole, which, as Duchamp insisted, “has as much importance” as the former pole (p. 70). Indeed, in a famous 1946 lecture, he held that the pole of reception, as it has come to be called, is even more creative than the pole of production. This is an ultra-modern if not postmodern point of view: art is relative to a participant observer rather than immanent in an object (as was traditionally thought), and the result of a certain kind of epistemological and emotional collusive creativity.
Whether what is collected is conventionally understood to be art, the same principle holds, at least in the collector's mind: he is convinced that, in Muensterberger's words, his “affective attachment to the object” (p. 137) gives it ontological credibility. In general, the more obsessional the attachment the more meaningful and valuable the object, in a kind of Midas touch effect. It finally becomes knowable as a so-called significant other—altogether special and “different” and fundamental. (It has been argued that “art” is simply an ex post facto honorific term applied to certain objects institutionalized in a certain “exhibitionistic” way. They can, with a change in so-called taste, become non-art.) Muensterberger's book is an eloquent, careful examination of the character of such collusive attachment from a psychoanalytic point of view.