
Psychoanalytic Perspectives on Art, V.2
Author(s): Mary M. Gedo
- Publisher: Routledge
- Publication Date: 1 Mar. 1987
- Edition: 1st
- Language: English
- Print length: 342 pages
- ISBN-10: 0881630586
- ISBN-13: 9780881630589
Book Description
This new hardcover annual offers a unique scholarly format, an interdisciplinary dialogue that, it is hoped, will foster the development of a sound, useful methodology for applying psychoanalytic insight to art and artists. The series provides a medium for those who study art, those who interpret it, and occasionally those who create it, formally to explore the meaning of an artistic work as the direct reflection of the inner world of its creator.
Within each volume, individual topics are addressed by either an art historian or a psychoanalyst, with a response frequently tendered by an expert from the other field. Reviews of important books of cross-disciplinary interest are treated in a similar manner, and include rebuttals by the authors themselves. It is precisely this exchange of ideas among scholars with difference perspectives on the meaning of a work of art that sets PPA apart from the standard art history publication. Its depth of scholarship, coupled with its innovative format, make it a fascinating addition to the burgeoning field of psychoanalytic studies of art history.
Editorial Reviews
Review
“Extra-textual analysis involves bringing cultural information that is extrinisic to the artwork into the critical process in order to recover the ‘intentionality’ of the artwork by a complex process of rhetorical mirrorings. But what about the discourse that seeks to contradict this and demonstrate that instead, codified structures of artistic communication owe a debt to the creative process? It is just this idea that the sixteen essays and reviews anthologized by Editor Mary Matthews Gedo in the second volume seek to explore with a heady mixture of academic erudition and speculative zeal. Psychoanalytic Perspectives on Art holds out to the reader a promise of an erudite and rigorous discourse that is bound to have a positive impact on the very way art is thought about.”
– Mark van Proyen, Artweek
About the Author
A former clinical psychologist, Mary Matthews Gedo received her Ph.D. in art history from Northwestern Univeristy in 1972. She is the author of Picasso – Art as Autobiography, and of numerous essays on the art and artists of Chicago.
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