Art and psychoanalysis

Often derided as unscientific and self-indulgent, psychoanalysis has been an invaluable resource for artists, art critics and historians throughout the twentieth century. Art and Psychoanalysis investigates these encounters. The shared relationship to the unconscious, severed from Romantic inspiration by Freud, is traced from the Surrealist engagement with psychoanalytic imagery to the contemporary critic's use of psychoanalytic concepts as tools to understand how meaning operates. Following the theme of the 'object' with its varying materiality, Walsh develops her argument that psychoanalysis, like art, is a cultural discourse about the mind in which the authority of discourse itself can be undermined, provoking ambiguity and uncertainty and destabilising identity. The dynamics of the dream-work, Freud's 'familiar unfamiliar', fetishism, visual mastery, abjection, repetition, and the death drive are explored through detailed analysis of artists ranging from Max Ernst to Louise Bourgeois, including 1980s postmodernists such as Cindy Sherman, the performance art of Marina Abramovic' and post-minimalist sculpture.

Innovative and disturbing, Art and Psychoanalysis investigates key psychoanalytic concepts to reveal a dynamic relationship between art and psychoanalysis which goes far beyond interpretation. There is no cure for the artist - but art can reconcile us to the traumatic nature of human experience, converting the sadistic impulses of the ego towards domination and war into a masochistic ethics of responsibility and desire.

From the publisher:
Contemporary art can be difficult. Reading about it doesn’t need to be. Books in the 'Art and...' series do two things. Firstly, they connect art back to the real stuff of life – from those perennial issues like sex and death that trouble generation after generation to those that concern today’s world: the proliferation of obscene imagery in the digital age; our daily bombardment by advertising; dubious and disturbing scientific advances. Secondly, 'Art and...' provides accessible theme-based surveys which energetically explore the best of contemporary art. 'Art and...' avoids rarefied discourse. In its place, it offers intelligent overviews of art – and the subjects of art – that really matter.