ABSTRACT
When Susan Sontag delivered her broadside Against Interpretation, she singled out for opprobrium what she called the ‘most celebrated and influential modern doctrines, those of Marx and Freud’, adding that they ‘actually amount to elaborate systems of hermeneutics, aggressive and impious theories of interpretation’.1 While her fire was primarily directed against such tyrannical and tunnel-visioned strategies, ‘a philistine refusal to leave the work of art alone’,2 it has to be said that psychoanalytic approaches, judiciously applied, had already begun to expand the parameter of art criticism in fruitful directions: the belief in a ‘latent’ content which reveals the workings of a textual or authorial unconscious; the attention to personal motives and drives, especially sexual ones, whether of author, character or recipient; the identification of a psychic as well as a social content for the art work; the artistic implication of neurotic, fetishistic impulses or the process of sublimation; the mechanisms of the Oedipal economy of desire and its impact on textuality; the centrality of dream and its attendant processes of symbolisation.
