It is quite common to see art and psychoanalysis as disciplines related to each other, especially in the gallery space and in academic contexts. Their relationship, however, is more often than not an interpretive one, with art giving itself up and psychoanalysis offering a masterly reading of the artist’s intention, or the meaning of the work. This is disconcerting to us, who have been or are engaged in both. Through our activities as artists and analysands we found that they have a lot in common when thought of as practices, rather than bodies of theory, critical tools or scientific endeavour.

Interpretation of the patient’s repressed material is a tool of psychoanalysis, but one that is less important than construction or transference, its most arduous task. A transferencial relation, where repressed feelings are redirected towards a new object, can also be established with works of art, as Sigmund Freud revealed in his 1936 letter to Romain Rolland. Certain works of art – Simon Morris or Marcel Duchamp’s, for example – do not apply psychoanalysis, or its interpretive methods. Instead, their disruptive constructions, much like those Freud spoke about, capture everything interpretations do not. What these works show is that interpretations may get in the way of an encounter with the work of art.

In this paper, which takes the form of a particular encounter, we develop arguments for, against and around interpretation in relation to art and psychoanalysis. When it comes to these practices, things may be more complex than the production of an explicative structure. This will pose questions around certain contemporary debates, such as the frame of reference for practice-led PhDs and their outcomes. No matter how much we try, however, works of art resist interpretation.