Therese Lichtenstein, Sue Taylor

in her text, 'Behind Closed Doors: the art of Hans Bellmer' Therese Lichtenstein focusses on the prolific images of La Poupee, photographs of his dolls that he made.
She focusses on psychoanalytical approaches copuled with biological, gender and cultural/political studies. She focusses on the Nazi culture which was dominant at the time, and within Bellmers pesonal life.

She pays homage to Freud within her text and his influential essay on 'The Uncanny'. She refers to essays about the hysterical female, studied by Freud and draws on this knowledge in understanding the manipulation which Bellmer exerts on the female body within his work.

The sometimes distressing manipulated female forms, Lichtenstein offers a softer more familiar reading too, suggesting the spiritual transcendence achieved through gender appropriation. The dark side of sex, sexuality and gender is given a positive spin in this 'proto-feminist' reading. Sue Taylor offers a more conventional reading of Bellmer. She focusses on his later work, sexually explicit drawings, prints, paintings and photographs produced up to his death. She maintains the psychoanalytical approach, with chapters titled, 'Iconography of the Nursery', and 'Loving and Loathing the Father'. She explores the oeidipal complex where the childs want of the mother to itself at the cost of the father bringing into question the threat of castration.

His later work is, possibly, the most interesting, with the artist exploring in much more detail his own relationship with the nazi regime he explores earlier, but more explicitly this work focusses on the personal effect of this regime, namely his father.