Being in Analysis: On the Intimate Art of Transference

In this article the author considers psychoanalytic transference in the context of contemporary art. The author focuses on the work of artists who have been in psychoanalysis and have put this personal material to use within their creative practice, and argues that these artworks enact the experience of being in analysis. Using an expanded understanding of transference wherein the fantasy and reality experienced in the ‘here and now’ of the consulting room is transposed onto sites of cultural production, the author considers the very real and often disruptive emotional and psychological affects that are a part of the viewer’s experience of these artworks. In this article, the author asks: When we are with such work, what do we experience? How might we respond and engage with such intimate work? What is being required of us as viewers? Are we being invited to participate in a form of psychoanalytic therapy? Who is the analyst? Who is the patient? If psychoanalysis is a process of transformation, what do these practices and our engagement with them encourage us to risk personally, socially, and politically? It is in considering these questions that we are able to move from the intimate life of the consulting room to an intimately complex psychic, social, and political world. Ultimately, the author aims to find a space in which the individual affects (such as anxiety and crying) experienced while fully engaging with an artwork (through transference) can be dissipated or released, as a form of subjective transformation, and ultimately be mobilized as a form of political and collective action.