The title of Ellen Handler Spitz's latest book, Museums of the Mind, refers to that imaginary place where “images from the past are preserved in an inner cache or treasure trove from which none of us, artist or otherwise, can escape” (p. 6). It is an intrapsychic museum which, with the help of psychoanalysis, we can revisit but never completely know. Visits to this museum are neither free nor entirely pleasurable, for, as Spitz remarks, “[r]eluctantly, we are made to behold, in varying degrees of ruin or curatorial repair, the pictured traces of our earliest relations—all we once loved, hated, feared, tried to destroy or give up” (p. 6). And yet visits to this museum can provide artist and viewer alike with increased freedom and pleasure, allowing both to come to terms with experiences and feelings that all too often remain hidden from view.

The first half of Museums of the Mind—and, for me, the more valuable part of the book—is a discussion of the early 20th-century