Comics on the Couch: Introduction

Psychoanalyst Didier Anzieu said that psychoanalysis gave him a new "geography," a "map to guide through the internal continent" (1991, p. 26, as cited in Segal, 2018, p. xxii). Anzieu echoes Freud's metaphor of the "dark continent" (1926, p. 212) to chart the unknown terrain of his inner life. In a prolegomenon to his work on what he called the "skin ego," Anzieu presciently proclaimed that as the twentieth century was nearing its end, now more than ever "psychoanalysis has a greater need of people who think in images than of scholars, scholiasts, abstract or formalistic thinkers" (1995, p. 6). Comics, of course, "think" in images. As Alison Bechdel remarks, "Cartoons are like maps to me" (2007). But maps of what? Comics critic Hillary Chute interprets this metaphor explicitly: "Because of its spatial conventions, comics is able to map a life, not only figuratively but literally. It can diagram a life on a page" (2011, p. 109).

Comics and psychoanalysis, each in their own way, map internal continents and contexts of human life. Both modes of mapping human experience in the world share a form: with comics there is a union of the visual and the verbal, with psychoanalysis a union of dream and interpretation, also uniting image and word. This special issue of American Imago puts comics "on the couch," restless as this denizen may be. The contributors to this special issue each in their own way explore how the ideas that inform and inspire psychoanalysis also frame comics, while revealing how comics expands upon the discoveries and designs which imbue psychoanalysis. Yet it may come as something of a surprise to this journal's readers to discover that, historically speaking, there has been an embattled, even anguished history between comics and the mental health professions in America. In this introduction to "Comics on the Couch," we briefly summarize that history in order to offer a background to the articles here collected.

A Psychoanalytic Comic

In The Interpretation of Dreams (1900), Freud reproduces a plate of "A French Nurse's Dream," an 8-panel comics strip (Figure 1),¹ which Sándor Ferenczi shared with him because, as Freud notes, he "at once saw how well they [these comics strips] could be used to illustrate the theory of dreams." He further writes, "The ingenious artist has in this way cleverly depicted the struggle between an obstinate craving for sleep and an inexhaustible stimulus towards waking" (1900, p. 367). Freud reprints the comic because it captures the dreamwork, but he also recognizes how this strip illustrates the feeling states of the characters, a strength of the comics form, which reaches into affective realms in ways that other media cannot. That Freud enlists this comic strip depicting a dream of a little boy's oceanic urination in The Interpretation of Dreams definitively situates comics in the origins of the psychoanalytic method—despite the relative neglect of this comic in the discussions of his followers. And if the reprinting of the cartoon situates sequential art in the past of psychoanalysis, it may also, in some ways, hold a key to its future. Freud included this amusing comics vignette as an instance of wish fulfillment, exemplifying the function of dream work. Freud thus offers a comics map in his pioneering dream-book as an explanatory illustration and condensation of theory.² While Freud did not shy away from such a simple and a common form of illustration, his followers may have dreaded the populist implications of considering comics with any seriousness. Mental health practitioners, many of whom were influenced by psychoanalysis, derided comics in the 40s and 50s in the United States.³

Figure 1.

Nándor Honti, "A French Nurse's Dream." Reproduced in Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, p. 368.

In 1905, not many years after Freud published his book on dreams, Winsor McCay, in the United States, created the comic, Little Nemo in Slumberland, a series of strips that ran for nearly three decades across different newspapers, including...