Hannah Forbes Black

I have no idea how this happened, but an event that was billed as combining two of my favourite things in all the world - art and psychoanalysis - turned out to be so subtly off-putting, in some indefinable way, that each word of this review represents a drop of blood harvested from a particularly recalcitrant stone.

I saw two of the programme of talks - a précis by Brian Dillon of his recently published book Tormented Hope, about famous hypochondriac writers and artists, and the star turn by Darian Leader, who writes ponderous, literate books about things like depression, Freud and why women write more letters than they post. (I can confirm that I unquestionably write more letters than I post, but I'm not sure if that's because I'm a woman or because I have internet access.) Nevertheless, Leader's investigations into the weirder aspects of being a person are thought-provoking in the nicest possible way, and so was his talk at the Tate. He talked about hypochondria as a condition and what it reveals about having a body.

It was left to the audience to draw their own links between this and the 'culture' part of the event's title - perhaps one of the difficulties with this symposium was that awkward word, 'culture', which has so many possible interpretations. Almost any human collective behaviour can be shoved in under the heading of culture without a second glance. Maybe the venue was misleading, too - under the familiar roof of the Tate I couldn't help but wish for a more thorough investigation of the intersection between hypochondria with its invented symptoms and art with its invented bodies (of work, if nothing else). Leader teaches at the Royal College of Art and probably has some really brilliant things to say on the subject, but there wasn't the time or the will to say them on this particular occasion.

Brian Dillon began with a kind of history of hypochondria, rifling through the lives of writers and artists for evidence. He paid particular attention to Bronte's novel Villette, drawing out its autobiographical implications. Villette is a good novel, and the inner lives of writers and artists are interesting whether post-structuralists like it or not, but for me there was something queasy about this conjunction of art and psychology. Psychoanalysis sometimes has a tendency to treat artworks as symptoms and the desire to create as a species of neurosis. It can make us prone to loving artists in their weakness, not their strength.

Perhaps I was having a spasm of idealism, but I left the Tate with the uneasy feeling that psychoanalysis and art aren't as well matched as I'd thought. They jostle each other for room in the same space, at the point where our interpretative powers reach out to grapple with the world. Psychoanalytic perspectives can of course illuminate art in all sorts of ways, but somehow it feels demeaning to plunge into artists' psyches as if the work wasn't sufficient expression of their inner conflicts. The point isn't the creator, but the creation.