Analyze This!

April 14, 2023 5:54 AM

I'm in love with a very niche genre. Books by therapists (and other non-artists) about art and/or literature. Academic scholarship about art doesn't much interest me, but "putting fictional characters on the couch" does--as does relating art to real-life clinical studies. (More inside about what I've already read and what I'm looking for.)

I'm not much interested books about art therapy or in psychological profiles of artists.

What I like is when someone in who isn't an artist, art historian, critic, or scholar explores works of art from an unusual but deeply-penetrating angle. I would certainly be interested in books about art by lawyers, doctors, or plumbers, too--though therapists are the thinkers I'm most-interested in.

(I could also imagine enjoying, say, a book about paintings by a musician or a book about Shakespeare by a sculptor.)

I have read psychoanalyst Josh Cohen's wonderful book How to Live, What to Do, in which he uses classic works of literature to explore life's stages, from childhood to old age, and I've read neuroscientist Eric Kandel's equally wonderful book on Expressionist painting, The Age of Insight. I've read essays on art by Freud and Jung.

What am I missing?

posted by grumblebee to Media & Arts (15 answers total)

Let me be the first of probably many to suggest Musicophilia!
posted by babelfish at 6:04 AM on April 14, 2023

Here's an overview of Adam Phillips's work that might help you to decide whether his writing/speaking might be of interest to you. Not all of his essays delve into art/literature, but the ones that do often capture that combination of unusual & insightful angles you describe in your question.
posted by Hellgirl at 6:36 AM on April 14, 2023

The first thing that sprang to mind is this absolutely stunning piece of Good Omens fanfic, in which demons and angels get some therapy and learn about how the Fall affected their emotional development. Novel-length and incredibly worth it.
posted by restless_nomad at 6:47 AM on April 14, 2023

OK, I can't in good conscience recommend Rod Dreher. He's always had his problems, but recently he's gone fully off the deep end. That being said, "How Dante Can Save Your Life" is from earlier in his career, and is about how reading the Divine Comedy helped him through some mental health struggles. Caveat about how there's not much overlap between what helps Rod Dreher with his mental health and what would help most other people with their mental health. If you're interested, borrow it from a library so that you don't inadvertently put money in his mean-spirited pockets. He, uh, could stand to read Dante again, at this point in his life.
posted by kevinbelt at 6:49 AM on April 14, 2023

Marion Milner's On Not Being Able to Paint?
posted by spibeldrokkit at 7:05 AM on April 14, 2023

How Proust Can Change Your Life by Alain de Botton, a philosopher.
posted by meijusa at 7:14 AM on April 14, 2023

Alain de Botton also wrote about architecture and its effect on people in The Architecture of Happiness.
posted by meijusa at 7:16 AM on April 14, 2023

You'll want to look into Adam Phillips's books, but I also recommend Imagining Characters: Six Conversations about Women Writers, which is a series of conversations between the novelist A.S. Byatt and the psychoanalyst Ignes Sodré.
posted by verstegan at 8:28 AM on April 14, 2023

I came here to recommend Adam Phillips: Missing Out does just this.
posted by jshttnbm at 9:39 AM on April 14, 2023

You might be interested in the work of Peter Gay, particularly Weimar Culture: The Outsider as Insider. While his historiography is inevitably dated now (he died in 2015), his insights into particular artistic works or movements are still valuable.
posted by praemunire at 10:09 AM on April 14, 2023

Adding to the Adam Phillips dogpile: as a preview of his whole vibe here's the essay, On Giving Up, where he muses about Kafka and what it is to "give up" on anything.
posted by obliterati at 11:39 AM on April 14, 2023

Cinema Therapy is a youtube channel with what I suspect is a less highbrow version of this than you had in mind. But exploring works of art using concepts from therapy, and vice versa, is indeed what they do, and they're good at it.
posted by nebulawindphone at 9:37 AM on April 15, 2023

Haha from where I sit that's not a niche area at all! There's an incredible amount of scholarship on that exact subject by psychoanalysts, to the extent that this seems to me to be the main thing psychoanalysts obsess about.

Some great books to get you started:

- Otto Rank's entire ouvre, especially ART AND THE ARTIST but also many other works.
- Ernest Becker's DENIAL OF DEATH which was influenced by Rank's work
- Alison Bechdel's graphic memoirs FUN HOME and ARE YOU MY MOTHER (not a psychoanalyst herself but hugely influenced by psychoanalysis and it's a major part of the books)
- This six-book series by Routledge of which I've only read the one about poetry.
posted by MiraK at 11:46 AM on April 15, 2023

Not entirely what you want, and perhaps too academic, but you might look at Louis Sass's Madness and Modernism.
posted by painquale at 8:55 AM on April 16, 2023

Jonathan Shay is a psychiatrist who's written two books about the Iliad and the Odyssey, respectively: Achilles in Vietnam and Odysseus in America. It's been some time since I read them but I remember them as being interesting. He writes about the parallels he sees between the poems and the experiences of his veteran patients.
posted by aussie_powerlifter at 1:13 AM on April 17, 2023