ASK ME! A Visit to the Rijksmuseum or the Analyst As a Painter

ABSTRACT

The article is actually made up of a series of digressions representing the author’s unique approach to engaging with J. Palmer’s ideas and offering a response. Instead of constituting a formal discussion, they have evolved into marginal notes inspired by an occasional visit to Amsterdam’s Rijksmuseum, which is world famous for the masterpieces it houses. This formula allows for the exploration of various issues related to representation in art and life, as inherently intersubjective. The problems of aesthetic experience overlap with those of psychoanalysis, and vice versa: themes such as distance and aura; the relationship between content and container, i.e., between form and content or between frame and artistic motif; the aesthetics of the sublime as a portrayal of the vicissitudes of the primary relationship with the object; the negative of the invisible as what enables vision; art as a thematization of intersubjectivity; the artistic gesture as the movement and expression of the body, or rather, of intercorporeality; the construction of meaning that occurs in the “carnal” intimacy with art; painting as meditation on perception as unconscious (Merleau-Ponty); the pictorial structure of the dream within the dream or mise en abîme: these are all themes touched upon in a fragmented manner but that refer to various other works in which the author has addressed them, giving the sense of an ongoing research endeavor, where what matters is not the destination but the process of traversing the path of art as access to the psyche. All are interwoven in a series of internal references, the final figure or figures of which are left substantially open. The importance of reflection on art in general is continually reaffirmed in the work, both explicitly and implicitly, in the lines and between the lines.

KEYWORDS:

• Aura
• distance
• intercorporeity
• Vermeer
• Rijksmuseum
• sublime
• mise en abîme

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Giuseppe Civitarese

Giuseppe Civitarese, M.D., Ph.D., is a psychiatrist and training and supervising analyst of the Italian Psychoanalytic Society (SPI), and a member of the American Psychoanalytic Association (APsaA) and of the International Psychoanalytic Association (IPA). He lives and is in private practice, in Pavia, Italy. His most recent books include Sublime Subjects: Aesthetic Experience and Intersubjectivity in Psychoanalysis, London 2018; Vitality and Play in Psychoanalysis (with A. Ferro), Milan 2022; Psychoanalytic Field Theory: A Contemporary Introduction, London 2022; The Hour of Birth: Psychoanalysis of the Sublime and Contemporary Art, London 2023, in press; On Arrogance: A Psychoanalytic Essay, London 2023, in press. In 2022, he received the Sigourney Award.