Visual Narrative and Lacanian Psychoanalysis

This book analyzes narrativity in painting from a Freudian-Lacanian perspective. Narrativity in painting is prominently discussed through disciplinary laws and lens of art history, art theory, poetics and more. Yet such points of view never shed light on its ambiguous status or nature. This book offers a new way of thinking about painting. Its point of departure is the complexity of the term narrative painting, which includes the relationship between painting and literature, as well as the boundaries of each medium. This book develops an alternative way of thinking about narrative painting, in which the viewer constitutes an active part in the visual narrative. Based on Lacanian topology, this book demonstrates how the subject is never distinguished from the painting she is looking at. Moreover, her way of seeing, which constitutes visual narrativity, is not necessarily unequivocal and coherent but partial, scotomized and fragmentary. This form of narrativity is explored through psychoanalytic concepts, such as fantasy, gaze and subject positions, which are discussed in light of their counterparts in the field of art theory. This book will be key reading for Lacanian psychoanalysts and psychotherapists, as well as art scholars wishing to gain a fresh perspective on narrativity in art.

Table of Contents:
1. Beyond Laocoon 2. Three models of narrative painting 3. Three models of narrative painting 4. The split image: constituting visual narrativity 5. The gaze and the picture: temporality, reflexivity and blindness as vision 6. The subject position of the viewer: the case of self-portraiture 7. Subject positions in perspective: amplifying or negating narrativity 8. Subject positions in perspective: amplifying or negating narrativity

About the Author :
Efrat Biberman is a Professor of Theory and Philosophy of art at Beit Berl College. Her research focuses on art and Freudian-Lacanian psychoanalysis. She is the author of Art, Death and Lacanian Psychoanalysis (with Shirley Zisser, 2018) and Weaving a Painting: Israeli Art and Lacan's Late Teaching (2022, in Hebrew).

Review :
'Providing a lucid account of Lacan and Freud’s theorizations of aspects of the visual field from the mirror stage to the gaze as object a, Efrat Biberman’s brilliant book shows how painting cannot be thought of separately from the subject of the unconscious and enjoyment. The first book in English to closely engage with Lacan’s seminal analysis of Diego Velázquez’s Las Meninas, it shows the inextricability of painter and observer in the constitution of painting as a site of subjective drama where inside and outside flow into one another.' Shirley Zisser, Lacanian Psychoanalyst and Professor of English at Tel Aviv University 'How do we experience painting's story? In this stimulating and highly original book, Efrat Biberman ensues by astutely surveying the ways in which paintings were historically understood in relation to the verbal arts; from Lessing's Laocoon, to the high modernism of Clement Greenberg and beyond, Biberman exposes the flaws they share in subjugating painterly narratives to those of literature, either through comparative (and reductive) opposition, or by way of equally compromised analogies. Instead of this binary model, Biberman brilliantly employs the psycho-analytical toolkit of Freud, Žižek and especially Lacan, to offer a new, fruitful and compelling understanding of visual narrative as standing on its own ground; it is a proposal of visual narrative as multilayered and innately distinct – with incongruity at its very core.' Roee Rosen, artist and writer