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Inspired in part by attempts of Merleau-Ponty (1948) to grapple with the way in which art reveals truth, in this article I shall follow and extend John Ciardi's translation of Dante's lines by suggesting that works of art, through their images, give shape to inner experience. Furthermore, I shall claim that visual images, including the hallucinatory (in the present context, those called up by a literary text), serve, by combining maximum intensity with economy and latent ambiguity, a powerful and unique organizing function for psychoanalytic work.
For over three decades, Rudolf Arnheim (1966, 1969, 1974, 1986), the eminent psychologist of art, has developed his thesis that