ABSTRACT
The swlogo of the International Journal of Psychoanalysis (IJP) is patterned after Ingres’s iconic 1827 painting, Oedipus and the Sphinx, a reproduction of which Sigmund Freud hung at the foot of his analytic couch. Depicting the moment at which Oedipus solves the riddle of the Sphinx, Ingres’s heroicizing treatment of its subject alludes to, yet ultimately eludes the riddle of his origins, deflecting the horrific in favour of the heroic. In line with more contemporary psychoanalytic formulations of the myth, Francis Bacon’s 1983 Oedipus and the Sphinx after Ingres forbids such disavowal, and implicates the horror of Oedipus’s trauma, and also his guilt. The comparison of these two very different aesthetic representations of the Oedipus myth holds a mirror to evolving interpretations of one of the cornerstones of psychoanalytic theory. At the same time, this exercise affords a springboard for a broad survey of the past 100 years of writing on visual art, artists, and creativity in the pages of the IJP.
