This edition arises from a sustained dialogue between Franz West and psychoanalyst Georg Gröller, shaped by years of conversation, correspondence, and critical reflection on West’s writings.

Rather than offering a psychological reading, it situates West’s work within its evolving conceptual framework, attentive to the shifting relationship between his practice and psychoanalytic thought.

Beginning with his early Paßstücke (Adaptives), which emerged from a confrontation with the social body and its implicit codes, West’s œuvre gradually transitioned toward installations and expansive sculptural ensembles that foregrounded viewer interaction and the instability of meaning. These later phases mark a decisive turn: moving from the expressive traces of psychic conflict toward a structural engagement with language, desire, and the symbolic order—inflected by Lacanian theory.

Throughout, West resisted aesthetic finality and interpretive mastery. His practice increasingly emphasized a logic of displacement, humor, and fragmentation—producing works that question authorship and unsettle the boundaries between art and life. In this context, the psychoanalytic becomes not a key to the artist's inner world, but a framework through which his refusal of mastery gains formal and conceptual clarity.