Just what do psychoanalysis and modern sculpture have to do with one another? The present collection of essays, unique in its field, shows how key metaphors of Freudian and Kleinian psychoanalysis - splitting, projection, sublimation, identification, the schizoid and reparative mechanisms - as well as Lacan's concepts of the stade du mirroir and the objet petit a, can be fruitfully applied to a range of modern three-dimensional art, from Surrealism to the present day. As these essays show, figures such as Barbara Hepworth, Eva Hesse, Jean-Jacques Lebel, Robert Morris, Donald Judd, Gilbert and George, Rebecca Horn and others have often approached the material of sculpture with something like these mechanisms in mind. The need to unlock the levels of psychoanalytic connection between artist, object and viewer in recent debate has fuelled the diverse proposals of this original and important book.

A revolution is brewing in psychoanalysis: after a century of struggle to define psychoanalysis as a science, the concept of psychoanalysis as an art is finding expression in an unconventional 'return to Freud' that reformulates the relationship between art and psychoanalysis and in this process, discovers and explores uncharted routes through art to re-think problems in contemporary clinical work. This book explores recent contributions to the status of psychoanalytic thought in relation to art and creativity and the implications of these investigations for todays analytic practice. The title, 'Art in Psychoanalysis', reflects its double perspective: art and its contributions to theory and clinical practice on the one hand, and the response from psychoanalysis and its "interpretation" of art. These essays expose the "aesthetic value of analytic work when it is able to 'create' something new in the relation with the patient". The authors surprise the reader with an immense array of fresh and stimulating hypotheses which reflect the originality of their own creative process that has overturned ideas including the 'application of psychoanalysis' to art and the entity of the object of art.

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.

Just what do psychoanalysis and modern sculpture have to do with one another? The present collection of essays, unique in its field, shows how key metaphors of Freudian and Kleinian psychoanalysis - splitting, projection, sublimation, identification, the schizoid and reparative mechanisms - as well as Lacan's concepts of the stade du mirroir and the objet petit a, can be fruitfully applied to a range of modern three-dimensional art, from Surrealism to the present day. As these essays show, figures such as Barbara Hepworth, Eva Hesse, Jean-Jacques Lebel, Robert Morris, Donald Judd, Gilbert and George, Rebecca Horn and others have often approached the material of sculpture with something like these mechanisms in mind. The need to unlock the levels of psychoanalytic connection between artist, object and viewer in recent debate has fuelled the diverse proposals of this original and important book.

A pioneering overview of art and psychoanalysis that shows how each field can enrich and enlarge the other.

The arts.