Fischer, Jeannette: Psychoanalyst meets Marina Abramovic

In summer 2015, famous performance artist Marina Abramovi¿ and psychoanalyst Jeannette Fischer spent four days together at Abramovi¿‘s house in the Hudson Valley. Associating freely, they took a psychoanalytical perspective for a lengthy exploration of Abramovi¿‘s biography and art and their interrelation. Abramovi¿ went into this discussion in hopes of reaching a better understanding of herself, her personality, and her work. Conversations with artists are widely available, she notes, but a chance to use psychoanalysis to put an artist‘s life and work in context is much more rare. The resulting book is neither a therapist‘s report nor a Fischer‘s analysis of Abramovi¿. Rather, it is a search for understanding conducted by the pair, looking for the structures and dynamics that underlie Abramovi¿‘s life and art. The dialogues are presented along with Fischer‘s comments on them and images of some of Abramovi¿‘s performances that are referred to in the discussion.