Fernand Khnopff's Caresses is a quintessential Symbolist painting in several notable ways. The first impression is that of a woman with a panther's body in a gentle cheek-to-cheek encounter with a bare-chested young man. Like the sphinx, the panther-woman in this painting confronts the viewer with an enigmatic riddle. The man's lips are red, while the woman's lips have their natural color. The man's feminine demeanor and the woman's heavy masculine jaw gives the couple an ambiguity similar to the anima and animus idea put forth by Jung. With their penchant for containing the opposites, Symbolist artists often introduced androgynous characters in their paintings.

Over time, Khnopff gave his artwork three different titles — Sphinx, Art and Caresses — that are clues to the painting's symbolic meaning. Like the legendary sphinx, the panther-woman is a production of the imaginary world. With her eyes closed in a caress, the woman's mind is turned inwards, symbolizing imagination itself. The man is pensive yet determined and his image contains clues about his identity. Holding a caducei, he can be associated with Hermes's bright mental faculties. The title, Art, implies that the man is, more specifically, an artist. The presence of the two blue isolated columns of equal length in the background symbolizes the duality of the artist's consciousness and his imagination.

While in this caress, the man's eyes are wide open into the outer world, while the woman's eyes are shut and she is turned into her inner world, symbolizing the connection between the conscious, isolated artist and his unconscious imagination. The man's naked torso symbolizes his vulnerable innocence in relying on his imagination as artistic inspiration. The imaginary scenery with cabalistic hieroglyphs on the walls adds to the mysteries of the painting.

On a basic level, the underlying message of this painting concerns the problematic role of the imagination in the Symbolist movement, being simultaneously a source of excitement and terror. Hence, the bizarre and ambiguous feeling one experiences with this painting stems from an ideological tug of war between pleasure and pain.

Beyond the ideological abandonment of reality in favor of imagination, however lies a more existential dilemma. In Khnopff's Caresses, a grave young man's face is juxtaposed with the face of an enigmatic and seductive older woman. The man's wide open eyes gazing into the distance symbolize a look into visible reality, while the woman's closed eyes signify the inner voluptuousness of fantasy. On this level, the young man is torn in a fight between his material obligations and his desire for fantastical pleasures.

The beauty of the panther symbolizes the quality of seduction. As a primal, savage, instinctive, and carnivorous animal, the panther devours its prey. Carried a step further, the panther-woman symbolizes the Femme Fatale with the quality of devouring the victim once he is seduced. The man's dilemma between his head and his heart expands to a conflict between Eros and Thanatos, the symbols of Love and Death often present in Symbolist paintings. Seen as incarnating dilemma, women play an important role. The symbolic woman is by turns a mother, friend, or muse. She can also be a seductress, temptress, or lethal Femme Fatale.

The enigmatic beauty of the woman-sphinx in Caresses inspires the feeling of seduction and temptation with a possible outcome of the young man's submission to her. A clue to the torment of the artist that produced this mysterious painting might come from his biography. Khnopff's model for the woman's head in Caresses is the same as for almost all of the women in his paintings. Khnopff seemed obsessively attracted to this model, an inaccessible muse: his sister Marguerite.