An iconology driven by Freud’s interpretive art of dreams

Abstract

In 2015, the XVIII National Meeting of ABRAPSO hosted a work group dedicated to the discussion of the challenges confronted by psychologists who use pictorial resources in research and intervention projects. One of the challenges discussed concerned to the delicate task of reading images. Such task has been ordered in a particular field of image studies, iconology, in general headed by art history. But there are cases of iconological projects based on psychology, such as Ian Verstegen’s cognitive iconology, anchored in Arnheim’s gestalt. In this paper we propose an iconology based on psychoanalysis. However, instead of the traditional forays into Freud’s aesthetical essays, we found our starting point in The interpretation of dreams. In the interpretative art of dreams we found some guidelines, already familiar to the psychoanalytical work, which might as well be redirected by psychologists to an iconological work of delimitating some guidelines for image reading, outlined here with selected cases of the work group.