The Sublime in Everyday Life

Psychoanalytic and Aesthetic Perspectives

Anastasios Gaitanidis, Polona Curk

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000317558
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Aesthetics in Philosophy

Notions of the sublime are most often associated with the extraordinary, and include the intra-psychic, high-cultural and exceptional occurrences of elation and exaltation as part ofthe experience. Using psychoanalytic and aesthetic theories, this book aims to revitalise the sublime by re-evaluating its significance for contemporary life and, in a unique and fascinating endeavour, opens up a space that explores the sublime in the ordinary, everyday and quotidian.

Through the exploration of familiar (i.e. love, death, art and nature) and unfamiliar (pornography, education and politics) threads of the sublime experience, this book posits the sublime as invoking an ordinary human response which contains minute, inter-psychic, inclusive and even mass-media cultural elements, and carries within it therapeutic and political potential. It explores loving and caring, as well as hateful, traumatic and destructive encounters with the sublime, demonstrating how it can overflow and destabilise our psychological and social symbolic structures and expose their fictional and constructed nature, but also shows it as something we can engage with in order to re-create and heal ourselves, above and beyond what any 'given' form of reality can offer us.

Demonstrating the urgent need to understand the sublime as something that is immanent in our everyday life, a source of energy and inspiration that can be invoked to support our mental health and well-being, this book will be of great interest to psychoanalysts, psychotherapists and art therapists, as well as scholars and students of philosophy and popular culture.

Chapter 1

Psychoanalytic fictions of the creative sublime

Tessa Adams and Anastasios Gaitanidis

Editorial note/letter: a sublime friend – the life and works of Tessa Adams

I would like to preface this chapter with a brief introduction to the life and works of my truly ‘sublime’ friend, colleague and mentor, Tessa Adams. Tessa was a remarkable, unique woman. Determined and obstinate, when needed … gentle and caring, when her friends needed her. Her spirit was indomitable and her outlook towards life always youthful. She was 65 when I first met her, but I hadn’t experienced anyone as ‘young’ as her. I often find myself thinking of my first encounter with her: I felt as if I was in the middle of a tornado. Her life force was simultaneously exhilarating and exhausting. But when she got to know me better, her power was transformed into this trans-liminal caressing force which protected me from the world’s mindless violence. Her magnanimous soul became a port in the storm, a shelter from life’s adversities.

She knew how to ‘believe’ – she realised very early on in her life that trust is a religious affair, not a scientific one. And she took a leap of faith in me. She gave me my first academic job, my first taste of Whitstable – the place she loved so much and inspired her artwork – and handed me the responsibility of finishing this book which was originally meant to be a joint project but was abruptly interrupted by the onset and rapid development of her dementia. She made me believe in hospitality and generosity … She was the exception to the rule, to the ugliness that condemns most people to a kind of a perpetual miserliness. They are enamoured with it …

And she hated ugliness: her life itself was a testament to the power of the ‘aesthetic’. The beautiful and the sublime were categories she wrestled with as they carried a quasi-ethical dimension for her. ‘Aesthetics is the ethics of the future’ she used to say. She believed that works of art convey a sublime, sacred message that could be the basis for a moral re-evaluation of the world. That is why she adored religious rituals – this is where the beauty of the sacred song, image and act meet the transcendental, transformative realm of the ethical.

I remember driving on the motorway with her … There were roadworks everywhere. We were unnecessarily delayed. I was irritated. She said: ‘Look, Anastasios! Just look! Aren’t they beautiful?’ ‘What is beautiful Tessa? I don’t understand’. ‘The road works, you silly. What else?’ And she went on to describe the exceptional symmetrical arrangement of the pylons and traffic cones that made the whole artificial landscape so aesthetically pleasing. I was struck by her ability to not simply observe, but to look – really look – and find what is beautiful even in the most mundane (and, frankly, deeply frustrating) aspects of everyday reality. I thought she was blessed with a vision that could make the world sacred again. From that moment onwards, all road works delighted my senses as they were baptised in the pool of a sanctified gaze that could discern the extraordinary in the ordinary, the sublime in the everyday …

The beautiful, the sacred, the sublime … and mountains. Tessa loved mountains or, more accurately, mountains loved her. These anarchic perturbations of earth, rock and lava, these awe-inspiring, imposing structures were an unending source of inspiration to her. She enjoyed climbing them but, mostly, she loved painting them. Once I asked her to explain her attraction to them, why she felt so compelled to include them in most – if not all – of her paintings. She said:

Isn’t it obvious? They stand tall and alone, but they’re also intimately connected with everything around them. Violent subterranean movements created them but nothing could currently move them. When a storm hits you, you don’t want to be in the middle of a turbulent sea; you need to be in the midst of a peaceful mountain. Actually, you need to ‘become’ the mountain as you will be able to withstand, and not be destroyed by the force of the storm.

I learned to like mountains, but mountains never liked me. I could never replace the blue of the sea with the grey of a Rocky Mountain. I was, and always remain, too Mediterranean. Mountains are a source of sublime terror for me. My Odysseus could have never visited the Himalayas … Edmund Hillary would have never been his companion.

But I admired Tessa’s love for them. I could see why they were so important to her. They were the only thing that could remain solid after everything melted into thin air. Nothing else could survive. Mountains became the symbol of her resilience, the measure of her ability to initially survive the assaults of her mother and then the devastating losses of her twin sister and her beloved father. And she was still able to carry on being thrilled by the sublime nature of life and love in spite of everything.

Yet, there was an assault she couldn’t survive … The assault of this insidious disease on her brave and beautiful mind. She fought against it in the same way that the majestic lions fought against their royal hunters in the Assyrian reliefs exhibited in the British Museum. But it was only a matter of time before she was injured and captured. I felt the intensity of her pain when she finally admitted her defeat to me: ‘It is so horrible, Anastasios. I don’t want to believe it but I am losing my mind’. I couldn’t deceive her: ‘Yes, Tessa, it is horrible. But I and your friends will be here for you’.

And most of her friends were there for her. They took good care of her during this turbulent time, as she used to take good care of them when they were fragile and vulnerable. But at the end, I wasn’t there for her as much as I wanted to. The gradual deterioration in my late wife’s condition and her unavoidable death almost five years ago made it impossible for me to witness and withstand the progressive worsening of Tessa’s condition too. Yes, I should have been less scared. I should have become a ‘mountain’ – but I felt more like a soft rock cliff being gradually eroded by the relentless, unending assault of the sea waves and the constant bombardment of the elements.

But I am here now, keeping my promise to Tessa by finishing this book with the help of another good friend, Polona, and all my friends who have generously contributed to the creation of this book – including Tessa herself who wrote the first chapter, although she never managed to properly finish it and I had to do it on her behalf.

I would never forget my interminable conversations with Tessa about our patients … how I admired the depth of her care for them, her fearless, creative interventions. ‘Do I dare disturb the dust in a bawl of roses?’ she said (paraphrasing one of her favourite poets, T.S. Eliot) to one of her patients who didn’t want to upset his family with his revelations. Her peer supervision taught me a lot – but it mostly taught me to leave all conceptual tools and rule books aside when faced with the immense pain of another human being. ‘It’s foolish to believe you could only use reason to explain the affairs of the human heart’, she once said to me.

I believed her … and because of her I have become a better therapist and, hopefully, a better person too. I don’t know if there is another life after this one. I would like to believe there is – it is so comforting to know that Tessa could meet all my deceased loved ones and keep them company … eternally. In the absence of this certain knowledge, I can be partly reassured by the hope that one day the wind will carry my dust and deposit it with hers and theirs into a pile that would produce a sublime artwork, a new life composed by all our dust particles. Until then, I will miss my mentor, my colleague, my friend.

Psychoanalytic fictions of the creative sublime

In the Summer of 2002 Bristol University presented a centenary celebration symposium in recognition of the birth of art critic Adrian Stokes. As a leading aesthete, Stokes developed his life-time project of welding psychoanalytic insight into art practice inspired by his experience (during the 1920s) of intensive analysis with Mrs Klein. It was not surprising, therefore, to find that the papers presented at this symposium demonstrated how psychoanalytic assumptions can service aesthetic judgement; that is, an account of judgement as a feeling-based appreciation and contemplation of the aesthetic.

Stokes’ poetic writing, with its fusion of psychoanalytic understanding and art practice, gained him an almost mythical reputation during the period running between 1940s and the 1970s as one of the finest and most discriminating writers on art in the twentieth century. Scholars now see his work as instrumental in the establishment of what has been termed the British School of Psychoanalytic Aesthetics. School, meaning the collaboration and development of the debate that engaged art historians and psychoanalysts in the ‘Imago’ group, whose membership included Stokes, Segal, Milner and others that secured an on-going exploration of the artist’s practice, process and product. Significantly, central to this fertile exchange was the viewer, that is, the way in which an artefact impacts on our viewing experience. In other words, attention was given as to how an affective work might furnish the recall of our earliest unconscious experience, namely, primary process.

From this position, it can be argued that Stokes’ Kleinian influence, through his analysis and his personal/professional connection with Hanna Segal and other psychoanalysts, resulted in a large body of work devoted to his thesis, which demonstrates the way in which movements in the Italian Renaissance can be perceived in terms of psychological affect. It is clear that Stokes’ engagement with psychoanalytic thinking indicated that aesthetic judgement could include the evaluation of the dynamic of unconscious processes. Furthermore, it was this feature of art criticism that brought psychoanalysts out of the consulting room to claim expertise in assessing ‘good and bad art’, of which Segal is an exemplar.

Segal’s propositions are critical, not only in the way that she revisioned Kleinian theory to accommodate a more specific referent to the genesis of the creative process, but also in her associating aesthetic evaluation with psychopathology. That is to say that she offers a system designed to establish the way that we might distinguish works in terms of ‘symbolic equation’ and ‘symbolic representation’; the former being the product of paranoid-schizoid phantasy, the latter depressive resolution. This is the polarity of classification that virtually locates one category in opposition to the other, as ‘good’ or ‘bad’, since she speaks about the oppositions of ‘beauty’ and ‘ugliness’ in respect of an artwork in terms of the harmony or disharmony of the artist’s ‘internal world’. By 1975, Segal was so convinced of her position in terms of authoritative statements about artistic practice that she produced an article for the public published in the Times Literary Supplement, titled ‘Art and the Inner World’ in order to promote her unequivocal mandate that, ‘It is [the] internal world, with its complex relationships, that is the raw material on which the artist draws for creating a new world in his art’ (Segal, 1975, p. 800). Here the implication is that the prospect of the artist reaching the sublime creation of a new world rests upon the status of the artist’s internal world in terms of psychological maturity.

What is historically significant is that Donald Meltzer refers to the Imago group and Stokes’ collaboration with Segal some 13 years earlier. This reference which is reported verbatim in Stokes’ publication of similar title Painting and the Inner World (in which an extensive dialogue with Meltzer is located) advances the proposition that: ‘Segal’s formulation of the Depressive Position affords the ‘mise-en-scene’ for aesthetic creation’ (in Stokes, 1963, p. 25).

There are many gems within this erudite exchange from these distinguished men, including Meltzer’s claim that Klein posited that ‘only by knowing the genius of an object can we be certain of its value’ (Stokes, 1963, p. 27). Furthermore, it is notable that Meltzer speaks both of the psychodynamics of ‘successful and unsuccessful’ art and the function of the gallery experience. ‘Contemplating Art’, Meltzer tells us, ‘is a form of intercourse between viewer and artist – in exact parallel to the sexual relationships between individuals’ (in Stokes, 1963, p. 31). Furthermore, he proceeds to discuss the attitude of the viewer on entering the ‘gallery’. It is Meltzer’s view that the gallery visitor is purposefully charged with an unconscious agenda, namely, seeking to satisfy primitive libidinal needs. That is to say, Meltzer situates the viewer, on the one hand, psychologically at work exposing himself to a situation of intensely primitive (oral) introjection ‘through the eyes, ears and touch’, while on the other hand, in contrast, ‘passively receptive to the prospect of … exposing himself, in a masochistic sense, to the experience of having projected in him a very destroyed object or a very bad part of the self of the artist’ (Stokes, 1963, p. 32). What we have here is an analysis of both the active and passive viewer in each case, seeking to be enhanced or repudiated by the artist through the process of projective identification.

We find that Stokes (in reply to Meltzer’s propositions) appears to be in agreement with Meltzer’s analysis of viewer and artwork in terms of sexual intercourse yet is concerned to ensure that the autonomy of the art object, which Meltzer omits to acknowledge, is not obviated. Stokes (1963) presents his position thus:

As to sexual intercourse as a process identical in its method with relationship to the art object, while endorsing the interchanges with viewer and picture that you suggest, I would like to add that the relationship exists, as does the parallel, only because of the essential otherness, the character of self-subsistent entity, the complement to the breast relationship, that has been created.

(p. 35)

Now, what is this essential self-subsistent otherness of the object to which Stokes refers to as the quality that he cites as ‘the complement to the breast’? Certainly, the Kleinian drama of projection and introjection to which the viewer is exposed, according to analysts such as Meltzer and Segal, from their predictable psychoanalytic focus leaves little room for the concept of the art object as an autonomous agency. Art as object in their view is self-serving with no otherness, and the interaction of viewer and artefact is cast in terms of primitive gratification, or reparation, leaving no room for the trajectory of the artist’s canonical gaze. What Stokes is alluding to, of course, is the social basis of art. That is that the artist is a product of art-historical heritage, where the clashes and exchanges of style have passionately revisioned the canon through movements, patronage and ideological alliance. That is to say, although Stokes can be viewed as a respectful ex-analysand of Klein, in his inclusion of the breast, and endorsement of Meltzer’s post-Kleinian perspective, he certainly indicates an allegiance to the phenomenological experience of the work that goes beyond the simple trajectories of our internalised infant conflicts.

What seems to be the case here is that Stokes, as art theorist, would prefer to acknowledge the prospect that there is an aspect of the artist’s engagement that cannot be accounted for – a social, collective...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Endorsements
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• List of contributors
• Introduction
• 1. Psychoanalytic fictions of the creative sublime
• 2. The silence of Ajax: Reading Longinus against himself
• 3. The sublime in the everyday: How theatre crafts art out of the ordinary
• 4. Ordinary idolatrous pleasure and the fateful fashioning of an adolescent boy
• 5. Experiencing the sublime through encounters with the Real
• 6. Wisdom through desire: When truth meets love as a sublime event
• 7. ‘How extraordinary that you should exist’: On playing and experience of truth
• 8. The sublime and the feminine jouissance: A Fantastic Woman, The Untamed and St Teresa
• 9. The lure of humiliation: Sublime aspects to success in the school mathematics classroom
• 10. The sublime in Catch-22 as bridge between post-modern literature and psychoanalysis
• 11. The Diogenes complex: Sublime living in irrational times
• Index