Clinical theory, to be effective, must provide psychoanalytic practitioners with a framework and a mental space that takes into account the "disturbance in the analytic field" that neccesarily occur during the work in progress. Since Freud there has been no psychoanalytic school of thought that has been able to address the realm of illusion, images,and bodily sensations together with the conditions that open the field of speakable desire.

The Art of the Subject provides this unique theoretical space by weaving together, for the first time, Winnicott's (British School) focus on the necessity of illusion and Lacan's (French School) emphasis on the limit that makes subjectivity possible. And as is true of the process of psychoanalysis itself, the one plus one of Winnicott and Lacan yields here a potentiating "third" from which fresh and vibrant aspects of the analytic matrix emerge and are voiced.