ABSTRACT
This note suggests a psychoanalytic interpretation of René Magritte’s painting Person Meditating on Madness (1928; fig. 1). Such an analytic study of Magritte’s work poses particularly delicate problems, because he so resented and resisted psychoanalytic approaches to his art. For example after hearing an interpretation of The Red Model as a castration theme, he wrote to his friend Louis Scutenaire:-“It’s terrifying to see what one is exposed to in making an innocent picture” (Torczyner, 1979, p- 58). Magritte’s own sophisticated study of imagery and representation must have seemed far more satisfactory to the artist than such naive applications of psychoanalytic symbolism to his work. René Magritte, Person Meditating on Madness. 1928. Oil on canvas. Private Collection. https://s3-euw1-ap-pe-df-pch-content-public-p.s3.eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/9780203778456/85a5da50-c914-41c2-bda6-cd286432f3ce/content/fig10_1_OB.jpg" xmlns:xlink="https://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"/> Photo: Giraudon/Art Resource, New York.
