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Using the dance in her title as a metaphor, Danielle Knafo describes psychoanalysis and art as kindred transformative spirits as they convert pain into process and trauma into growth in the differing settings of consulting room and studio. In a lyrical, graceful writing style, Knafo explores art as treatment, addressing exile and loss as primary issues in the lives of selected artists. An analyst whose own family emigrated from French Morocco to the United States when she was a young child, Knafo has had extensive experience treating artists in her practice.
The first half of the book discusses bedrock psychoanalytic principles—free association, transference, dream theory, regression, narcissism—as related to artists and art-making, citing the contributions of theorists such as Kris, Ehrenzweig, Ogden, Kohut, and many others. Examples from sessions with her own patients serve to illustrate a psychoanalytic “dance” as Knafo sensitively describes the resonance of analyst leading patient into the unknown, the unconscious, just as the artist explores the unknown of his or her art. Both are seen as essentially creative processes. Knafo then examines the work of several mostly well-known artists to illustrate the therapeutic tasks each undertakes while working in a particular medium. Well-chosen reproductions amplify her discussion.
Knafo is most successful when the work of the artist described shows direct and clear evidence of the influence of psychoanalytic thought. Michal Heiman is an Israeli artist who works primarily in photography and is also a theoretician in psychological testing, the inventor of the projective M.H.T. (Michal Heiman Tests). She herself has undergone extensive psychoanalytic treatment. As an adolescent, Heiman discovered the body of her uncle in a closet where he had hanged himself. By happenstance she saw her own reflection in a mirror in the room at the same moment. Heiman found that viewing her reflected image at this instant reinforced her sense