Pictures into words. Visual models and data in psychoanalysis

The psychoanalytic method is considered as an instrument or medium of observation, with attention to certain peculiarities of data collection and recording. Freud's visual models and metaphors are then reviewed. Subsequent approaches to visual data in analysis are examined in the work of Charles Fisher, Mark Kanzer, Bertram Lewin, and M. Robert Gardner. A corresponding theory of therapeutic action is suggested.