For Want of Ambiguity

Reviews / Votes

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) * In their deft, sensitive, and probing examination of art as a function of the need to create meaning and form from the often inchoate realities of human subjectivity, Lumer and Oppenheim move from insights about particular works by numerous artists to the theory and practice of psychoanalysis to the mechanisms of neurobiology. For Want of Ambiguity is a model for what genuine interdisciplinary scholarship can do. By illuminating their subject through several disciplinary lenses but never conflating them or reducing one view to the other, they have enhanced our understanding of artists and the art they make. * Siri Hustvedt, Lecturer in Psychiatry, Weill Cornell Medical College, USA, author of A Woman Looking at Men Looking at Women: Essays on Art, Sex, and the Mind (2016) *