Art, whether in a gallery or recruited into advertising, provides another medium of representation through which we might be confronted, and confront ourselves, with the truth, even if we may never be able to put it into words. The shock of recognition, the uncanny sense that an image is familiar to us even if we cannot remember seeing it before, the experience of a sensation that we cannot even account for to ourselves, is something an artwork can produce. This art practice, so pervasive now in various sign systems designed to sell us something, sometimes sidesteps the ego, and something of the unconscious is made present; but then we need to ask ourselves, when we are in the presence of such images, whether we will put those impressions at a safe distance – assume that it is the unconscious of the artist that erupts in the work – or own up to what lies, and for a moment speaks the truth, within us as we view it.

So, what would it mean to turn around and think reflexively about ourselves so that we include the image we actually have of ourselves in the myriad of idealised images of ourselves in commodity culture, in a culture suffused with psychoanalysis? What would happen if we deliberately bought into the idealised images of self that surround us and agreed to ‘make love to our ego’? A first response to this could be that we would then be wallowing in the culture of narcissism, taking as our object this seat of illusions and feeding it.