Reflections on the aesthetic experience : psychoanalysis and the uncanny /

An attempt to stretch psychoanalysis in the direction of aesthetics, these rather disjointed essays will leave art historians dissatisfied. Kohon (training analyst, British Psychoanalytic Society) discusses Louise Bourgeois, Juan Muñoz, Anish Kapoor, Richard Serra, Edvard Munch, and Kurt Schwitters in relation to the idea of the uncanny. Willy Brandt's kneeling in front of the Warsaw Ghetto Memorial merits a chapter. The meaning of a work of literature (Kafka, Borges) or visual art is declared (with reference to Freud, Lacan, Klein, and Kristeva) a function of the subject's psychic reality, past as well as present. When one confronts a work of art, one may experience something unfamiliar, something that one recognizes without being able to name it, i.e., the uncanny. Bernard Berenson, Franchesco Borromini, and Clifford Geertz are mentioned, but any reader hoping for a cross-disciplinary adventure will be disappointed. That psychoanalysis, art, and literature share "a commonality of experience'' (as the author writes in chapter 1)--namely ideas and emotions--and even that this can extend to strangeness, negation, and disruption, one might well suppose. Writing sometimes in the first person, sometimes in the third, the author goes so far as to quote himself, but he never achieves either an authoritative or a personal voice. Summing Up: Optional. Graduate students, researchers, faculty. --Patricia Emison, University of New Hampshire