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I have spent most of my professional life immersed in psychoanalysis and in modern and contemporary art. In an essay for a show I curated at the Aldrich Museum, in Ridgefield, Connecticut, almost twenty-five years ago, titled “Inside/Out: Psychological Self-Portraits,” I wrote about the similarities between the psychoanalyst in his or her office and the artist in the studio. I focused on the aloneness and connection, and on the paradox D. W. Winnicott refers to in his seminal essay, “The Capacity to be Alone,” where he speaks of being able to do that while in the presence of another. So I relish the opportunity to edit this issue of The Psychoanalytic Review.
All the contributors to this issue are psychoanalysts, with the exception of Philip Larratt-Smith and Paul Zelevansky. Larratt-Smith is an art curator who has worked extensively with The Easton Foundation, Louise Bourgeois's foundation and archive. His essay introduces a series of dreams recorded by Bourgeois in her personal diaries, some of which are published here for the first time. Zevelansky is a practicing artist and his essay is his artwork. His interest in psychoanalysis is demonstrated by his relationship to the International Forum for Psychoanalytic Education, where he is the Chair of the Art and Psychoanalysis Committee.
Donna Bassin, in addition to being a psychoanalyst, is also an artist, photographer, and documentary filmmaker. I encouraged her to present the visual essay included in this volume, entitled “We the People: Portraits of Resistance and America Reconstructed.”
John Beebe and Lynne Oliva each write about two major artists from the late nineteenth century. Each of the paintings they discuss was created at the same time Freud was formulating many of his ideas about psychoanalysis. Interestingly, the insights put forward by Beebe and Oliva demonstrate how the artists' works reflect and reveal their struggles with personal, cultural, and/or social traumas. In so doing, Beebe and Oliva suggest