“Imagine you are lying on Freud’s couch. What can you see?” This is the question that opens “Collector, Naturalist, Surrealist,” John Forrester’s classic essay on the collecting habits of Sigmund Freud (Dispatches from the Freud Wars, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997, 107). In “The Image in Psychoanalysis and the Archaeological Metaphor,” the lead essay in her edited collection Psychoanalysis and the Image, Griselda Pollock returns to this scene, turning Forrester’s question around to muse: “As Freud sat in his analyst’s chair, what did he see?” (16) The one thing that neither the patient nor Freud could see was Freud himself, tucked away behind the couch and out of sight, free to gaze at his collections. Pollock opens this book by looking at Freud where he sat, an armchair archaeologist who, as Jacques Derrida once observed, seemingly “wanted to be more of an archaeologist than the archaeologist” (Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression, trans. Eric Prenowitz, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995, 97).

For Forrester, Freud’s psychoanalytic methodology is itself preeminently one of collecting. The antiquities, coins, rugs, and objets d’art Freud famously pursued and assembled in his consulting room at Berggasse 19 in Vienna represent, at the level of the setting, those other, more controversial collections he was systematically installing and examining in his work: the dreams, jokes, parapraxes, and early memories that are the foundational collections of psychoanalysis. As an art collector, Freud concentrated on precious objects, the relics of ancient civilizations. As a psychoanalyst (fart collector, “collector of farts and grimaces” [Forrester, 122]), he turned his attention to the seemingly trivial details of everyday life that were, in turn, to become the stuff of avant-garde art—art such as Surrealism, for which Freud evinced not the slightest sympathy. Film, the art form most closely identified with psychoanalysis today, was the object of his particular distaste. The encounter of psychoanalysis and modern art can be traced to the visual and material culture of psychoanalysis, to the consulting room itself, but there was no love lost between them.

Still, despite the initial, critically understated estrangement of psychoanalysis and the avant-garde, the two have long since become culturally intertwined, so that it would be as vexed an exercise to prise apart “psychoanalysis and the image” as it is to bring them together. Psychoanalysis and the Image does not approach that conjugation historiographically—the collection is extremely selective in its range of references—but it does commence historically, with Freud’s formulation of psychoanalysis as a reconstruction of the past. Pollock reminds readers that Freud’s theories were inspired by the study of cultural artifacts, by concrete remnants of cultural memory. Rather than, as is usual, introduce psychoanalysis as a theoretical system adaptable to the concerns of art history, she presents Freudian theory itself as an interdisciplinary mode of thought combining archaeology, anthropology, literature, and art history. With the help of Gradiva, the Pompeian maiden whose image, in bas relief, hung over the couch—the figure Freud enlisted for a journey into the history of Western civilization as an analogy to the past of the subject—Pollock reconstructs Freud’s own imaginative journeys to Pompei, Troy, and Knossos as distinct models of the past.

This attention to Freud’s historical formation allows Pollock to claim that psychoanalysis is not reliant merely on a general archaeological metaphor, but that it is grounded in particular ways of reflecting on the past, and that it is informed as much by the trend of forgetfulness as by memory. “Forgetting and remembering are deeply political and the lesson of Freud is that we are made by what we repress” (26), she observes, contending that art history too frequently abides by a wilful ignorance of its own repressions and exclusions. The further proposal of Pollock’s essay, and the statement that serves to introduce the other contributions to this collection, is that psychoanalysis offers not a “means of interpreting the image” but instead “shows how the image interprets the complexities of subjectivity to us” (26). What ensues is a demanding, eclectic, and distinctly uneven set of essays that in diverse ways serve to reinforce this claim.

“Art is like a dream” (33), ventures Mieke Bal in “Dreaming Art.” Drawing on Christopher Bollas’s description of dreaming as “night theatre” to reflect on the dramatic effects of Bill Viola’s video installation The Sleep of Reason (1988), Bal is determined to retrieve the analogy of art and dream from cultural cliché. By bringing Bollas’s language of theater “to bear” upon Viola’s work, with its elaborate manipulation of staging and theatrical effects, she highlights a crucial difference between cinema and projected image installations: namely, the shifting position of the viewer in the mise-en-scène of the piece. For Bal, the significance of the dream as a term of art, in particular installation art, is that the dream is a theater of encounter with the other. Rather than a free play of uninhibited desire, or wish fulfilment, Viola’s work is, for her, a space of “interplay,” a potentially threatening arena in which “images are out of control” (38).

More than an arena in which to rehearse psychic and social anxieties, Bal sees art as a scene in which to release control over one’s own subject position—a situation that makes it possible, as she repeatedly puts it, “to get inside the other’s pants,” where sexuality is at issue, or, in the case of interdisciplinary thought, to “get inside the other’s theory.” Referring specifically to a collaboration between the painter and art conservator Kathleen Gilje and the conceptual artist Joseph Grigley to reconstruct the creation of Caravaggio’s Musicians, the phrase “getting inside the other’s pants” is both an inside joke on the parodic strategies through which the two artists send up art history and psychoanalysis and a statement of Bal’s vision of a “heteropathic identification” (52) between disciplines.

“Dreaming Art” is passionate in its defence of “psychoanalysis-and-art.” Bal takes pains to elucidate methodological questions, arguing, for example, that psychoanalysis should not be reduced to an iconographic code and that “psychoanalysis cannot be ‘applied’ to art, but only ‘brought to bear’ on it” (39), a distinction that allows for the “productive integration” of the two disciplines. She condemns any hierarchical or oppositional distinction between theory and practice, revisiting her own influential observation that the work of art is itself a “theoretical object” that presents thought in a visual way and is not subservient to theoretical writing but in dialogue with it. She reprises her refutation of the historicist “charge of anachronism” that would “deprive art of the one theory that, for better or worse, has gender at its core” (50) and remonstrates against denying the “complexities of subjectivity in texts [including works of art] that are temporally ‘other’” (50). Finally, she claims that “psychoanalysis is indispensable . . . to the art of women, especially women from non-white traditions” (31). Relying on Claudia Tate’s Psychoanalysis and Black Novels: Desire and the Protocols of Race (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998) to advance the case for psychoanalysis as a discourse historically and theoretically bound up with the representation and experience of otherness, Bal surprisingly fails to remark that “psychoanalysis-and-art” is actively invoked in the work of several prominent African American artists—Lorna Simpson, Ellen Gallagher, Kara Walker, Glenn Ligon, and Kerry James Marshall among them—reflecting on sexuality, subjectivity, and history in ways that explicitly or implicitly bring psychoanalysis to bear on questions of cultural remembering and forgetting.

In “Fascinance and the Girl-to-m/Other Matrixial Feminine Difference,” Bracha L. Ettinger, a psychoanalyst, theorist, and artist who has frequently collaborated with Pollock, presents an intertextual reading of Freud’s “Fragment of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria” (1905), better known as the Dora case, and Marguerite Duras’s novel The Ravishing of Lol V. Stein (1964). Beginning from the incontestable and not insignificant observation that “we have in psychoanalysis a long tradition of ignorance concerning the woman-to-woman, non-Oedipal relations” (61), Ettinger adapts a term, fascinum, used by Lacan to designate the gaze “inside an image,” to reflect upon the exchange of gazes between a “woman-girl” and a mother figure (or an image of such a figure), evocatively describing this attraction as fascinance, a gaze that exceeds the “arresting” (or castrating) power of the image in the Lacanian scheme. Re-reading the Dora case through Duras’s novel, Ettinger contends that Freud’s exclusive attention to the Oedipal trend led him to misconstrue what Dora “wanted” twice over, first suggesting that she “wanted Mr. K., and under him veiled by repression she wanted her father, and beyond him hidden in suppressed transference she wanted another father-figure, Freud himself” (60)—before changing his mind and concluding that she was actually in love with her father’s mistress, Mr. K.’s wife. Taking her cue from Dora’s reported fascination with the Sistine Madonna in Dresden, Ettinger suggests that Dora’s desire was not (yet) sexual, but was instead driven by a vision of her “future self” glimpsed as “a potentially ravishing being” (67), like the Madonna of Raphael’s imagination.

The Dora case remains a pivotal text for psychoanalysis and feminism and is ripe for reinterpretation, as instanced by Juliet Mitchell’s recent reflections on the sibling relationship that haunts and eludes Freud’s interpretation (“Dora: A Fragment of a Case of Hysteria in a Female,” in Mad Men and Medusas: Reclaiming Hysteria and the Effect of Sibling Relationships on the Human Condition, London: Penguin Press, 2000, 82–108). Ettinger’s reading with Duras, and her attention to Dora’s imaginative response to a painting and to the museum setting, highlight the question of what viewers “want” from art, or from the image. If, as Ettinger argues, psychoanalysis remains confined by the Oedipal logic of Freud’s initial formulation, this also limits “psychoanalysis-and-art” in its effort to understand the complex dynamics of transference that operate in the making and the viewing of art.

The other essays in the book are the Kristevan “Melancholia and Cézanne’s Portraits: Faces beyond the Mirror” by Young-Paik Chun; “Yayoi Kusama between Abstraction and Pathology,” by Izumi Nakajima, an interpretation of Kusama’s Net paintings that draws on Ettinger’s theories of matrixial borderspace; “Diaspora without Resistance: Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s DICTEE and the Law of Genre,” Karyn Ball’s fascinating exploration of cultural assimilation as a transferential encounter with the authority of an adopted cultural model; and “Fragments of an Analysis: Chantal Akerman’s News from Home (or a Mother-Daughter Tale of Two Cities),” in which Adriana Cerne returns, via Ettinger, to the scene of Dora, the Madonna, and the question of the woman-to-woman relationship, reflecting on how the mother-daughter dynamic informs the making of a work of art. All are complex, adventurous, and demanding pieces that constitute, or at least include, useful contributions to the interpretation of these bodies of work. The psychic predicament of separation—and attendant experiences of exile and estrangement, melancholia and nostalgia—is a common concern, as it has been through the history of “psychoanalysis-and-art.”

A caveat in conclusion. One wishes that greater care had been taken over the editing of the volume. The quality of the writing is uneven, with some passages verging on the unreadable, and one contribution in particular is marred by a profusion of basic errors, including misspellings, misquotations, and faulty grammar. Such mistakes are particularly regrettable in a book that introduces new critical voices and that makes high claims for its textual precision and attention to “reading.”