I am grateful to Susan Lawson for inviting me to write this book and for improving it with her keen editorial eye. I also want to thank my students and colleagues in the department of History of Art and the Center for Visual Culture at Bryn Mawr College for tolerating my translation of their scholarship and conversation into the Lacanian terms of the Imaginary, the Symbolic and the Real. Notable among them are David Cast, Christiane Hertel, Homay King, K. Malcolm ' Richards, Lisa Saltzman and Isabelle Wallace, as well as recent undergraduate and graduate seminar students on self-portraiture and psychoanalysis. The art historians Benjamin Binstock, Bradford Collins, Keith Moxey and Jack Spector gave me the opportunity to present or publish some of my thoughts on art and Lacan, as did the psychoanalysts Heather Craige and David Scharff, and members of the Philadelphia Psychoanalytic Center. Patricia Gherovici and Jean-Michel Rabate introduced me to Philadelphia's vibrant Lacanian community. And in the background of many of my sentences lies the phenomenology of Michael Fried.