Psychoanalytic Reflections on Writing, Cinema and the Arts

Facing Beauty and Loss

Paola Golinelli

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000283051
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD)
• Index: Psychology

"Why are we so fascinated by beauty?" is a question many of us have asked ourselves, as have many who came before us. This book investigates the moment of ecstatic solitude in which everyone can experience emotions through films, works of art or natural phenomenon, when, even if for a "magic" instant, we feel "alive" and masters of our own Self.

Expanding from the author's personal experience, this book is a series of applied psychoanalytic essays on film, literature, and aesthetic pleasure. It explores the complexity of loss and mourning, destructivity, perversion, and revenge, as well as an exploration of what can facilitate transformation and how to lead a blocked healing process back to motion.

This fascinating and insightful book will be of interest to psychoanalysts, psychologists, teachers and students, and all those with an interest in psychoanalysis and the arts.

Chapter 1

Why do we write? Psychoanalytic writing and fiction

Everyone who works in the domain of fiction is a bit crazy. The problem is to render this craziness interesting.

François Truffaut

The remains of the analyst’s day

When, as a secondary school student, I happened to read Freud’s Clinical Case Studies and his prefatory letter to A Young Girl’s Diary, I had the feeling that I had discovered something quite new, in which the beauty of writing was associated with the search for some hidden truth. In Dora, in Little Hans, and in the Wolf Man, I was able to recognize characters that I could identify with, thus discovering a new, fulfilling intimacy with myself.

Many years later, I learned that the analytic experience is based on the analyst’s deep contact with herself and with her patients. This lays the foundations for the affective – somewhat paradoxical – intimacy which is the core of what the analytic dyad aims at establishing. This, however, is difficult to share with someone who has not had direct experience of it; in a way, it cannot even be said, or conveyed, lest that kind of intimacy itself might be betrayed, or deprived of its richness.

In the professional life of every analyst there are stories that transform themselves in a joyously unpredictable manner in the process of treatment, and there are others that do not change in an equally profound manner, and which we would have liked to conclude in a different way. And in the background, always present, looms one’s own history, with its conflictual remains. Its fundamental features are rewritten by the analyst every time she works with her patients, revisiting her passion for psychoanalysis, and with it, also the wish to start with every new patient that complex journey which has all the characteristics of a sentimental, exploratory journey, protected by the garde-fou of theory (Masciangelo, 1980) and setting, but which is, nevertheless, always a self-analytic journey, a re-encounter with one’s own intimacy, with one’s own most hidden Self and with the other one we reflect ourselves in.

Self-analysis is self-unveiling, until we find ourselves facing some sort of incomplete sense, and then we must once again start searching, each time finding ourselves facing some sort of otherness, something or someone other from us that questions us and demands that we reinvent a language in order to continue to communicate.

All this happens in the depth of the human heart, the place of greatest intimacy; it is a place that is difficult to reach and in which it is beautiful to linger, but at the same time it is a place that eludes us, or from which we want to escape to somewhere else. It is what we call the unconscious (Schmidt-Hellerau, 2018).

Writing fiction is, in a sense, the (often exhausting) processing of an intimate encounter between what is known and what is still hidden and unknown. The same thing happens in analysis: we do not know where we are going and yet we move on, being frightened, frustrated, gratified, sometimes losing sight of the person whose story we are constructing, or rather co-constructing, in the analytic field, in a sort of reverie or countertransference phantasy.

One writes, perhaps, first and foremost for oneself, to narrate a part of one’s own history which continues to appear incomplete. The hints from which we move on sometimes come from the patient, they are what I call the remains of the analytic working day.

We come across stories that seem to emerge from the dark depth of our mind, the dwelling place of creatures that take on strange and composite shapes, just like the habitat that surrounds them and in which they move. It would be easy and hasty to relegate to a dream dimension all those creatures and memories that seem unable to find shelter even in dreams. For this, it is necessary to camouflage them in the form of a “tale”, with that kind of emotion that may be a shiver of fear, anxiety or passion which is associated with the “uncanny” (Freud, 1919) and which at the same time allows us to approach it, giving it a narrative form, in order to represent what comes out from the shapeless matter of which the unconscious is made; something that still has not taken – and sometimes will never take – a more comprehensible and reassuring form. There is a dimension of the uncanny, however, that does not limit itself to the Freudian definition, which has to do with the inextinguishable “nostalgia” of a state that precedes language, the ability to symbolize, the separateness, that the two unconscious subjects, analyst and analysand go through in the course of treatment.

These seem to be the surviving remains of dream reality or of a wakeful state – reveries – which emerge from the encounter with the dark depth of other minds met in the therapy room: they are the “original ingredients” in search of a shape, or simply of something in which to be placed, so as not to keep obstructing the analyst’s mind.

Sometimes they describe the search for an isolated, lost Self, or they feature an object or a place capable of gathering in itself a memory, either denied or experienced – which goes beyond the subject and embraces other generations, other existences; or it is a gesture that accompanies a whole lifetime, conveying its depth. The analyst’s negative capability allows her to accompany the patient in her search for those modes of expression that allow her experiences to be uttered, until they can be turned into narrations or narratives.

Thomas Ogden (2016b) writes that the conjugation of the experience of the present and the knowledge of the past in the articulation of psychoanalytic speech and clinical experience is the goal of analytic writing itself. It is, however, in the sustaining of a vital conversation or dialogue between the analytic experience and the life of the story that has been written that the art of writing psychoanalysis lies, because personal history and analytic history are intertwined in the clinical account or narrative. So what is the point of writing fiction, as Ogden himself does in his two novels: The Part Left Out (2013) and The Hands of Gravity and Chance? (2016a) Should we then think that in the clinical report that she has written, the analyst has completed her search for meaning as regards the analytic couple, her own internal truth and herself?

One is reminded of Umberto Eco (1975) when he said that what cannot be theorized about must be narrated. Could it be that this wish to write about something else on the part of the analyst is just a trivial sin of pride and omnipotence? Or could it be, instead, a search for other possible constructions and narrations that might provide an answer/interpretation which can never be completely saturated, since memories and recollections are enriched and reflected in the psychic dynamics and in Freud’s notion of deferred action/Nachträglichkeit?

The human being is persecuted by his own mind and thoughts (Vallino, 1996), pursued by a feeling of fear which is not only linked to what has been repressed, but also to the fact that one is perhaps never sufficiently provided to face one’s own emotional experiences. The need to transform fear itself fosters the need to narrate, to find words; it becomes a primordial, pulsional drive in oneself and in the Other, which prompts in the analyst the search for a way out, a possibility for growth, development, order, tranquillity and beauty.

A great writer like Elias Canetti (2017) identifies in the fear of death, that is, in something that comes before repression, the necessity to go on writing. One narrates, in his view, in order to transform fear itself, to push away the extreme limit of human existence. The writer, therefore, reacts to the mourning of the original separation (from the maternal body) with the incessant motivation to create new representational forms, each time repeating the illusion of getting closer to the perfection represented by that original, lost union.

The basic creativity of the psyche does not stop; creativity is experienced as an obscure push, which is difficult to decipher. Once the original union is lost, psychic life is structured and restructured incessantly, through a relentless creative process which can occasionally become a necessity, that is, to go on writing and thinking, as if there were only two possibilities: to be creative and give shape to new ways, or to be immobilized in psychic death. We write in order not to yield to psychic death, to keep our infantile desire alive, activating, through writing and artistic expressions, those resistances, defences, censures and transformations which allow for the knowledge of one’s internal world, in a sort of oscillation between approaching and distancing ourselves from the abyss of unknowable experiences which we constantly struggle to represent. The need to write, in this perspective, is linked to one’s incessant internal dynamism and therefore to the process of working through mourning.

Whoever writes, whether she is an analyst or not, must be able to find a “technical/creative” language which can be shared, which can express her subjectivity, but also in order for others to follow a pathway similar to hers. Her goal is to provide shapes and meanings which can help to express what is striking in its intensity but keeps avoiding – in its entirety – any representation and thinkability.

This is what Freud had realized when he turned art in general – and writing in particular – into a precious ally for disclosing the truth of psychic mechanisms. Probably following an opposite pathway, the contemporary writer Annie Ernaux (2016) asks herself in her latest novel: “What’s the point of writing … if not to dig up things, maybe just one thing, irreducible to any sort of explanation … one thing … that can help us to understand – to tolerate – what is happening and what we are doing?” When we write fiction are we perhaps pursuing the enigma of an intimacy with ourselves and the Other, whether they are patients or readers, of the kind of encounter about which Freud wrote in 1905, “Every finding of an object is in fact a re-finding of it.”?

Not everything that emerges from the encounter between two unconscious minds in the analytic room can be shared, because of the unacknowledged limits of the analyst, her “blind spots” (Guignard, 1996), or because of the new dimension of contemporary analysis, which has extended its boundaries to new pathologies and has changed the notion of interpretation, which now tends to be unsaturated, thus opening up, (ad infinitum?) the possibility of finding new meanings, interpretations, and narrations.

A clinical vignette

As an example of what I said before, I end with a short story about a memory that slowly acquires meaning and shape, re-emerging in the analyst with intense emotion: something which happened in the past and that returns as a mental state which silently finds its way during a session and which helps the patient remember; however, it does not end there: instead, it reawakens in the analyst too, the memory of an event experienced in the past but not fully thought about. The story describes that ineffable instant in which the need to endure waiting leaves the dimension of frustrating negative capability and reaches an area of suspension, the prelude to remembrance, which is retrieved and savoured in all its evocative fullness since it is no longer isolated by affect (Green, 1978).

The memory that emerges in the story is charged with nostalgia, but the ability to mourn what has been lost and has trapped the mind in an idealized dimension can finally become the prelude for a transformation. Now it is no longer laden with loss, but indeed enriched by nostalgia, that is “longing and loss.” It can be read as an attempt to capture that particular experience of suspense, excitement and apprehension that lies between the desire to prolong the prelude of things and the return to everyday reality; everything is then magnified by the uniqueness and the enormity of the expected event in that morning of the past. There is something that becomes an enormous metaphor, just as feelings experienced in adolescence can be, with the expectation of a life shared in the resonance of a group of peers, “those young boys, companions of her fairer season” (Leopardi, 1825).

There is an expectation for a surprising awakening, in a moment which is halfway between “an air which is no longer wintry and is still not spring-like,” it is the moment of imminent change, or of insight, an oscillation between something extraordinary and the anxiety of something terrible that might happen; something that in any case will be unique and irreplicable. And then comes the relief of not having lost the normality of daily life and the slight regret of having already experienced the unforgettable moment.

The description of the past event is activated in the analyst by the atmosphere of a session in which the memories of the patient, which had been blocked by repetition for a long time, can re-emerge. On that day, the patient had entered the therapy room carrying with her the physical sensation of an undefinable “air;” in that moment, however, instead of complaining – as many other times in the past – about the town’s impossible climate, or her oncoming cold, she was left suspended in a different sort of nostalgia which was heralding something new. After her initial irritation at the thought that the session would follow the same sterile pathway, the analyst had perceived the patient’s wish to share with her “that air” and to understand what it might signify. As the session progressed, the analytic couple were committed to finding the words to describe the intense feeling, charged with emotions and affects, which had been roused by the physical sensation, until the analyst said “an air that feels like the end of winter and the beginning of spring: the kind of air that anticipates changes.” It was one of those moments in which the analyst while interpreting, put into words what the patient was ready to understand (Busch, 2014). At that point, the patient was able to recall memories of her adolescence, retrieving her past desires, dreams and disappointments, but above all a kind of vital energy that for a long time she had experienced as being extinguished and harness...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Series Editor’s Foreword
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Why do we write? Psychoanalytic writing and fiction
• 2 On the idea of beauty: Standing before the Venus de Milo
• 3 Traumatic States of the Self: Castaway by Robert Zemeckis
• 4 In search of the lost father: My Architect. Different architectures of creativity: Louis and Nathaniel Kahn
• 5 Feminine Representations on the Screen:
• 6 Love and the internet: Her by Spike Jonze
• 7 A brief incursion in the theatre: Freud, or the Interpreter of Dreams
• 8 A tribute to Bernardo Bertolucci
• Index