ABSTRACT
In their essays on the art of Giorgio de Chirico and Max Ernst, Milly Heyd and Charlotte Stokes emphasize how these artists compulsively repeated something of their traumatic past in their art—specifically, repetitive visual symbols alluding to unresolved feelings about a dead sister. But the psychic presence of conflicts over sibling rivalry, incest, and murder are too universal to characterize the individual or to explain the oeuvre of an artist.
