Psychoanalysis, crime fiction, and art criticism: the relevance of mutual cross-references

The text underlines the links and logic between psychoanalysis, crime fiction, and art criticism, the common basis of which is the “aesthetic of the sign”, a formula composed of two unbeatable devices: the semiotic-hermeneutic code and the method of abduction. Abduction, a procedure theorized by Peirce (1989), uses a lateral approach, an icon of choice of the creative processes underlying the “discovery”; an investigative culture that does not stop at surface level and the obvious but identifies alternative levels of interpretation. The protagonists of this approach are those secondary details which, although negligible, are instead vehicles of meaning, supporting a sort of epistemology of predictability, attentive to the fragments of meaning that are reconstructed from thin clues, minimal signs, which seem insignificant and negligible. Very similar to this is the approach proposed in Morelli’s method (1890) of art criticism, which refers to a minimalist perspective that captures the residual data, the marginal element, as something revealing. These methods used in the investigation by the detective and art critic are treated in the contribution as a way of “importing” into the analysis room the salience of transformative clues, such as the patient’s plasticity parameters and the register of his/her evolutionary needs. The indices of alternative and change that are at the margin of the patient’s story, but not marginal, take on a vague and nuanced contour, indicating their germinal state. The proposed hypothesis is that the therapeutic value lies in welcoming these clues, recognizing the patient’s potential for change, and proposing them again for self-reflection in the analytical pair. To conclude, clinical vignettes are presented.