Art of the Subject

Clinical theory, to be effective, must provide psychoanalytic with a framework and a mental space that takes into account the "disturbances in the analytic field" that necessarily occur during the work in progress. Since Freud, there has been no psychoanalytic school of thought that has been able to address the realm of illusion, images, and bodily sensations together with the conditions that open the field of speakable desire. The Art of the Subject provides this unique theoretical space by weaving together, for the first time, Winnicott's (British School) focus on the necessity of illusion and Lacan's (French School) emphasis on the limit that makes subjectivity possible. And as is true of the process of psychoanalysis itself, the one plus one of Winnicott and Lacan yields here a potentiating "third" from which fresh and vibrant aspects of the analytic matrix emerge and are voiced. The reader will discover an interlacing of strands pulled from Winnicottian and Lacanian theory--ideas that are different and,complementary occupying the arc of tension between the psychic realm, e.g., image, fantasy, and necessary illusion versus the psychic field of language, speech, and desire; as well as ideas that are supplementary to one another, such as the nation of what is "Real" within the psychoanalytic discourse. The Art of the Subject tenders an odd clinical and theoretical coupling and persuasively presents why these two, when put into play together, uniquely address both the art and the suffering of the analytic subject.

Dr. Mardy S. Ireland is a psychoanalyst and clinical psychologist with a practice in Berkeley, CA. She is on the core faculty of the New College of California, and is the author of Reconceiving Women: Separating Motherhood from Female Identity.