Image and Insight: Essays in Psychoanalysis and the Arts. Ellen Handler Spitz. New York:  Columbia University Press, 1991,  273 pp.

Ellen Handler Spitz has brought together a number of engaging essays, full of psychoanalytic insight into many images. My favorite is “An Insubstantial Pageant Faded,” dealing with graffiti art, in all its transient, vernacular eloquence. The theoretical value of Spitz's book is that it reminds us that the work of art is a field of play rather than a system of thought. As she says, “The work of art … comes into being at the intersection of the reflex arc of (sexual/scoptophilic) satisfaction; attenuated experience marked by frustration, delay, and disguise; and the values, expectations, and beliefs imposed by a culture” (p. 14). Spitz's tripartite division of the work of art parallels Lacan's distinction between the real, imaginary, and symbolic, as she acknowledges. These realms are not dissimilar to Peter Gay's (1976) worlds of privacy, craft, and culture. Cultural ideologies and artistic traditions defend against — frustrate or delay — the artist's private wishes in the very act of mediating them, just as the imaginary and symbolic postpone real desire — in the work of art indefinitely — by repressively naming it.