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Gilbert Rose's short, intense—highly concentrated, intricately circular-book is a major, and I think convincing, attempt to show parallels
between art and psychoanalysis, and finally to integrate them, however indirectly. It is not just another psychoanalysis of art, but an argument for the reciprocity and convergence of these disciplines. The book is the third and final volume in an extended exploration of their relationship. As Rose writes, “The Power of Form focused on the correspondence between aesthetic form and psychic process, construing each as involving an interplay between two different ways of organizing data: wide focus, holistic imagination and sharp focus, realistic thought and perception” (p. x). In Trauma and Mastery in Life and Art , “the interaction between art and mind—based on their corresponding structures—[is] viewed as a form of resonance [which] either generates or is associated with currents of affect” (p. x). Necessary Illusion: Art as Witness (1996) argues that art, a “highly refined sensorimotor nutriment,” and psychoanalysis, “a unique form of reflective discourse,” can each be regarded as “a ‘witnessing’ presence, the subjective essence of which involves an experience of empathic interaction; with this, comes emotion” (p. 1). The new book expands and refines the views of the preceding books—the idea of “a continuum between primary process imagination and secondary process knowledge of reality” (p. 22), and the affective illusions of “resonance” (connectedness (p. 109) and responsiveness (p. 112) that come with it—to explain how such “witnessing” works in both art and psychoanalysis.
From a psychoanalytic point of view perhaps the most interesting thing about the book is Rose's attempt—in the course of tracing witnessing back to Winnicott's idea of the “holding environment of the infant/ caretaker relationship” (p. 28) and to “the intermediate area of mixed external and internal reality” (p. 63)—to move “from a closed [classical] to an