Analyst (Couch) (I)

Sarah Jones’s photograph shares more with Balthus’s The Living Room than a couch to sit on. The two works are linked, perhaps psychically, by Sigmund Freud’s influential ideas. Balthus and his Surrealist friends in Paris read Freud and interpreted his ideas through fantastical figurative narratives. Balthus’s couch features an adolescent girl asleep in the world of dreams that Freud argued revealed hidden meanings in our waking life. While well aware of the Surrealist tradition, Jones’ riff on Freud is much more austere and concrete. She is interested in capturing the practical details of psychoanalytic treatment---how a psychoanalytic office looks. The dream world here is clinical and a bit drearier.