ABSTRACT
The portraits require people to take up multiple emotional and intellectual positions, and different ways of approaching them historically and art-historically invite to find their counterparts in forms of analytic thinking, attitude, and orientation. Historians have found in the history of the French alienists the roots of a more adaptive and repressive psychoanalysis. Laure Murat felt that only psychoanalysis has properly been able to take this incompatibility into account. For the work of art is like the analytic session as described by Laplanche: he called it a particle accelerator, "a cyclotron of libido". In a fascinating book Gregorio Kohon has recently proposed an understanding of the aesthetic experience as in essence uncanny, relating this to the uncanniness of people encounter with ourselves as both familiar and unfamiliar. Historically and culturally, however, the experience of the face of the other undergoes changes; it has a history.
