Psychoanalysis

Melanie Klein serving tea in her consulting room at the Tavistock Clinic in London to me (center), my brother, and my mother in 1957.

Psychoanalysis has given me empirical tools to structure the relationships of ideas and emotions. The underlying theoretical foundation of my book Art Since 1940: Strategies of Being comes from a psychoanalytic perspective on how individual artists negotiate the interface of their inner lives with the world. My newest book Modern Art at the Border of Mind and Brain (University of Nebraska Press, 2015) also draws on contemporary neuroscience to speculate on the necessity of art to society and to the human brain.