In the summer 2015, famous performance artist Marina Abramovic and
psychanalyst Jeannette Fischer spent four days together at Abramovic's
house in the Hudson Valley. Associating freely, they took a
psychoanalytical perspective for a lengthy exploration of Abramovic's
biography and art and their interrelation.
Abramovic 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
rarer. The resulting book is neither a therapist's report nor a
Fischer's analysis of Abramovic. Rather, it is a search for
understanding conducted by the pair, looking for the structures and
dynamics that underlie Abramovic's life and art. The dialogues are
presented along with Fischer's comments on them and images of some of
Abramovic's performances that are referred to in the discussion.