For Want of Ambiguity - (Psychoanalytic Horizons) by Ludovica Lumer & Lois Oppenheim (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

Nominated for the 2019 Gradiva(R) Award for Best Book by the National Association for the Advancement of Psychoanalysis (NAAP)

For Want of Ambiguityinvestigates how the dialogue between psychoanalysis and neuroscience can shed light on the transformational capacity of contemporary art.

Through neuroscienfitic and psychoanalytic exploration of the work of Diamante Faraldo, Ai Weiwei, Ida Barbarigo, Xavier Le Roy, Bill T. Jones, Cindy Sherman, Francis Bacon, Agnes Martin, and others, For Want of Ambiguity offers a new perspective on howinsight is achieved and on how art opens us up to new ways of being.

Review Quotes

Authors Lumer (independent scholar) and Oppenheim (Montclair State Univ.) are trained in psychoanalysis, neuroscience, and literary theory, and they are to be congratulated on crafting such an original, wide-ranging work.
CHOICE

If the purpose of learning is to better predict how to meet your needs in the world, then what is the purpose of art? This fascinating book explores how the brain deals with things that are inherently ambiguous and unpredictable, and therefore cannot be mastered through learning. Interestingly, as this book reveals, such things abound in aesthetic experience.
Mark Solms, Professor and Director of Neuropsychology, Neuroscience Institute, University of Cape Town, South Africa

This extraordinary book is a pioneering work that breaks new ground for psychoanalysts and neuroscientists alike. By utilizing art to explore key relationships between analysis and neuroscience, the authors have shed new light on how metaphor and symbol shape our perceptions, and our lives. This is one of the most original books to appear in many years. It will prove invaluable to anyone interested in the behavioral sciences and the innovative work that is taking place in those fields.
Theodore J. Jacobs, M.D., Training and Supervising Analyst, The New York and the IPE Psychoanalytic Institutes, and author of The Possible Profession: The Analytic Process of Change (2013)

About the Author

Ludovica Lumer is a psychoanalyst with a private practice in New York City, USA. She earned her PhD from University College London, UK, where she worked in the Department of Anatomy and Developmental Biology conducting research in the field of neuroaesthetics on the relationship between visual perception and artistic representation. She is the co-author (with Marta Dell'Angelo) of C'è da perderci la testa: scoprire il cervello giocando con l'arte (2010), and (with Semir Zeki) La bella e la Bestia (2011).

Lois Oppenheim is University Distinguished Scholar, Professor of French, and Chair of the Department of Modern Languages and Literatures at Montclair State University, USA. Dr. Oppenheim is the author of over ninety papers and the author or editor of thirteen books, including Psychoanalysis and the Artistic Endeavor: Conversations with Literary and Visual Artists (2015), Imagination from Fantasy to Delusion - awarded the 2013 Courage to Dream Prize from the American Psychoanalytic Association - and A Curious Intimacy: Art and Neuro-psychoanalysis (2005).