ABSTRACT
The main objective of psychoanalysis is to bring to consciousness this ‘cut-off material; to heal, in some measure, the split between conscious and unconscious – a direct consequence of human language – and to arrive at a fuller, though necessarily partial, realization of the whole self. So the psychoanalytic encounter can involve more participants than two, with ‘ghosts’ or ‘images’ from the past of each richly complicating the interaction, while, always, it is what is happening ‘now’, at the moment of the meeting, that is the source of meaning and psychic healing. The account of psychoanalytic practice conforms closely to the approach of Freud and his contemporaries. Although recent psychoanalytic criticism has developed the notion of essential cognitive factors in the process of artistic creation, Freud’s pioneering venture saw art as ‘regression in the service of the ego’. The psychoanalytic dimension could lend a special poignancy.
