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.
What separates psychoanalysis from other forms of therapy is its refusal to collapse time and meaning into a simple, initial brief
moment of recognition about the patient's personality. The analyst strives to perceive the shifting meanings and complexities that emerge, over time, in the experience of the relationship between herself and the patient. The difference between psychoanalysis and treatments comfortable with the narrowness of managed care runs parallel to the contrast Jed Perl made in a recent essay about opposing perceptions of art. Perl's critique of the instantaneous revelation of significance, otherwise known as the “big bang” response to art, is pertinent to a review of Herbert Strean's book because of the commonalties in how they both perceive their subject. For example, Perl (1998) notes:
People have the idea that to look at art in a sophisticated and up-to-date way means that you do not look at it very long or very hard. There are late modern and post-modern variations on this cursory approach. … the result is an almost universal feeling that art ought to be taken in quickly, instantaneously; that a painting or sculpture should hit you with a bang. After which, of course, you can talk or theorize about it forever.
Let's be absolutely clear about what kind of visual experience has been, if not yet lost, then marginalized. What people are no longer prepared for is seeing as an experience that takes place in time. They have ceased to believe that a painting or sculpture is a structure with a meaning that unfolds as we look. This endangered experience is not a matter of imagining a narrative; it involves, rather, the more fundamental activity of relating part to part. We need to see particular elements, and see that they add up in ways that become more complex—and sometimes simpler—as we look and look some more. (p. 31)
The subject of Strean's art is the intractable patient. Strean describes intractable patients as people who are resistant, negative, and