Art and Psychoanalysis by Laurie Schneider Adams New York:  Icon Editions/HarperCollins, 1993,  xiv + 366 pp., $20.00 paper.

In the first sentence of the preface to her book Laurie Schneider Adams declares that she intends “to present an overview of the interdisciplinary potential of art and psychoanalysis, and to demonstrate that each field can enrich and enlarge the other” (p. xiii). I think she succeeds in showing how psychoanalysis enriches and enlarges the understanding of art, but not how art enriches and enlarges the understanding of psychoanalysis. This is why her book will probably be of more interest to art historians than psychoanalysts, especially to art historians who are reluctant to take a psychoanalytic approach, but curious about it. Adams's book is the best way to get their feet wet without plunging in too deeply. She explains psychoanalytic concepts—mostly Freudian—clearly if platitudinously, and applies them in a common sense way to familiar art. I think that much is lost about both psychoanalysis and art in her presentation—at their best neither are really all that commonsensical—but, for the typical art historian, it is much better than nothing.

To my mind Adams is at her intellectual and stylistic best—her writing becomes vivid, her psychoanalysis seamlessly integrates with the art issues—in her last chapter, on the conflict between Ruskin and Whistler. As is well known, in 1877 Ruskin suggested that the Coutts gallery in London should not have shown the paintings of Whistler. One reason was because “the ill-educated conceit of the artist…nearly approached the aspect of willful imposture.” The remark seems ad hominen, but it is a lead in to the final critical damnation: the artist had the gall to “ask two hundred guineas for flinging a pot of paint in the public's face” (p. 324). Whistler, outraged, sued for libel, and won, receiving a farthing in damages, which, no doubt, was all that Ruskin thought the painting was worth. (I think Ruskin was completely within his