Art and Psychoanalysis

Maria Walsh

• Publisher: I.B. Tauris
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9780857732798
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Developmental Psychology
• Index: Psychology

Often derided as unscientific and self-indulgent, psychoanalysis has been an invaluable resource for artists, art critics and historians throughout the twentieth century. Art and Psychoanalysis investigates these encounters. The shared relationship to the unconscious, severed from Romantic inspiration by Freud, is traced from the Surrealist engagement with psychoanalytic imagery to the contemporary critic's use of psychoanalytic concepts as tools to understand how meaning operates. Following the theme of the 'object' with its varying materiality, Walsh develops her argument that psychoanalysis, like art, is a cultural discourse about the mind in which the authority of discourse itself can be undermined, provoking ambiguity and uncertainty and destabilising identity. The dynamics of the dream-work, Freud's 'familiar unfamiliar', fetishism, visual mastery, abjection, repetition, and the death drive are explored through detailed analysis of artists ranging from Max Ernst to Louise Bourgeois, including 1980s postmodernists such as Cindy Sherman, the performance art of Marina Abramovic and post-minimalist sculpture.
Innovative and disturbing, Art and Psychoanalysis investigates key psychoanalytic concepts to reveal a dynamic relationship between art and psychoanalysis which goes far beyond interpretation. There is no cure for the artist - but art can reconcile us to the traumatic nature of human experience, converting the sadistic impulses of the ego towards domination and war into a masochistic ethics of responsibility and desire.

Chapter 1

Distortion and Disguise: The Dream-Work

Freud’s concept of the dream-work, as elaborated in his book The Interpretation of Dreams challenges commonsense notions of meaning in dreams.¹ We like to think that the images in our dreams mean something in particular, that they tell us who we are, even predict our future. There are myriad books on this topic in any general bookstore. Interest in dream interpretation goes back to ancient times and, in some sense, Freud could be said to continue this tradition. However, Freud’s concept of the dream-work and the role it plays in relation to art is very different from the interpretation of dream symbolism per se. It has less to do with translating an image or scenario into words or symbolic meaning than it has to do with the dynamics of translation in itself. On the one hand, there are artists who, directly inspired by the content in The Interpretation of Dreams, used its imagery as readymade symbols to construct symbolic narratives through which they could engage their psychic fantasies and traumas – the Surrealists are clearly in this camp; on the other hand, Freud’s discovery of an untranslatable core to the dream-work around which its associational imagery revolves makes it difficult simply to interpret one element, an image, in terms of another, its reporting in words. Considering the dream machine as a dynamic interplay between images that correspond to one another in an associational, accumulative manner, liberates us from reducing images and image production to singular meaning. It also allows us to consider Surrealist imagery in more ambiguous terms rather than, for example, simply equating its symbols to the Oedipus Complex, a psychoanalytic narrative that greatly inspired the Surrealist Max Ernst. While Ernst’s paintings and prints are undoubtedly riddled with narratives of castration anxiety, reducing them to being about the Oedipus Complex and the artist’s troubled relationship with his father is to deny them their artistic autonomy.

The importance to art of an approach to dream symbolism that might consider it in terms of a resistance to being translated into words can be seen in relation to more recent work such as Paula Rego’s paintings and drawings. Rego’s work is sometimes illustrational of fairytales, folktales, perhaps even dreams, but her strongest work has a latent eerie quality full of portent which transcends the illustrational. For example her painting The Policeman’s Daughter, 1987 – a cheesy Freudianism might say that of course the policeman’s boot being polished by the girl is a phallic object which signifies incestuous desire and/or penis envy. However, the image retains mystery in the face of such an approach. Rather than simply being an illustration of an incestuous desire for or envy of the father in which the boot is a stand-in for a missing object such as a penis, the image of the boot has its own structural integrity as a black painted shape that generates internal relationships between the different elements in the frame such as the perpendicular lines of the window and the diagonal line of the black cat. Rego’s painting, like others in this series, emits a psychic force, which on a conscious level one might attribute to forbidden desires, but the symbolic ambiguity of each element in the painting is multiplied by being juxtaposed with the other elements in it – the girl begins to look like a man, the boot is reminiscent of the position of the child in images of the Madonna and child, the action is both caressing and threatening. Nothing is definitive.

Freud’s concept of the dream-work shows us that a constructed image or scene, let’s say, the dream-content, does not translate directly into words, as it is itself a translation of dream thoughts that not only operate without making conscious distinctions between words and things, but that also occur in a time and space that are inaccessible to the dreamer. Thereby the dream that we recount or draw is merely a trace of mental processes that have already lost some of their affective resonance in being translated into another system, i.e. from unconscious thought to a more conscious form of representation. Freud says, ‘A dream does not simply give expression to a thought, but represents the wish fulfilled as a hallucinatory experience.’² This hallucinatory experience is a fabrication, as is an artwork. In fact, I would go so far as to say that the hallucinatory production of the dream-work is akin to the work of art as a process that bypasses the censorship of repression, not simply to allow for the satisfaction of a sexual drive as Freud implies, but in order to expand the range of our capacities for expression. Freud though, like many interpreters of art, wanted to be more definitive, so in parts of The Interpretation of Dreams he gives us reductive metaphoric equivalences for dream symbols, concluding that ‘It is highly probable that all complicated machinery and apparatuses occurring in dreams stand for the genitals (and as a rule male ones [1919]) – in describing which dream symbolism is as indefatigable as the “joke-work”.’³ This follows his elaboration of things that often appear as symbols for the penis in dreams – neckties, long, sharp weapons, umbrellas and tree-trunks – and things which he deems represent the uterus – boxes, cases, chests, cupboards and ovens. While some artists have used this symbolism to comic effect, for example Jake and Dinos Chapman’s Little Death Machine (Castrated), 1993, in which hammers and artificial penises are attached to a mechanical contraption whose workings are suspended in a parody of both the Surrealist poetics of the readymade and Freudian symbolism of sexual intercourse, this does not really get us very far in thinking about process and meaning in art. Fortunately Freud also counters this metaphoric literalism by emphasising the metonymic production of dream imagery in which certain elements are not meant to be interpreted as such but act as ‘determinatives’ to establish the meaning of some other element, as in Egyptian hieroglyphics.⁴ In other words, meaning emerges out of a play of differences between signs rather than being crudely derived from a predetermined list of symbols and signs. The making of meaning may court the latter, but is not reducible to it. Before going on to look at artists’ works in relation to the dream-work, let us look at its theoretical components which prevent the easy application of symbolic meaning to images such as Rego’s sexually charged tableaux and which open up a more expanded sense of the relationship between images and words.

The dream-work is the name that Freud gives to the work which transforms the latent, i.e. unconscious, dream thoughts into the manifest ones, i.e. how the dream images appear, which in turn are distorted in the telling of the dream. One can already see here an analogy to a traditional model of art interpretation, which artist Susan Hiller critiques for repeating a Western separation between theory and practice, word and dream, where ‘[t]he artist’s production of work is, like the dream, an untheorised, unauthorised, almost unintelligent symptomatology whose meaning is unknown to the artist. Someone else must provide the key to the work.’⁵ However, Freud also problematises this approach. At first, Freud saw the work of interpretation simply as being a matter of decoding the manifest content to get at the latent content, but very soon he realised that there was a limit to the work of interpretation, which he called the navel of the dream, a core which remained unconscious and untranslatable. He figures this out via the three characteristics of the dream-work: the phenomena of displacement, condensation and the translation of words (ideatic elements) into images. Art can be loosely aligned to these processes. For example, in displacement, parts of the body, especially the lower regions, are displaced upwards. This type of body image is frequently found in the Surrealism of René Magritte, most notably his painting Rape, 1934, in which a female torso forms the features of a face, as well as in Robert Gober’s Slides of a Changing Painting, 1982–83, in which 80 images of male and female body parts and images of nature morph, creating bodily composites in which orifices and organs metamorphosise into one another. The second characteristic of the dream-work, condensation, also involves imagistic distortion in that two or three images may be condensed together to form a new composite image similar to the mythical figure of the centaur, half man, half horse. If dreams do represent the fulfilment of wishes, then it could be said that these types of image represent destructive fantasies and anxieties about the body, which for psychoanalysis are part and parcel of childhood, or what Freud refers to as infantile sexuality. The third characteristic of the dream-work, the transformation of thoughts into visual images, poses the greatest threat to translation. Freud states that there will be a certain clumsiness and unreliability in the exchange from the alphabetic script to the picture one, as well as there being the problem of words such as ‘because’, ‘however’ and prepositions which have no pictorial representation. While this difficulty is partly due to the position Freud takes up as a decoder of dreams who prioritises language, it does lead him to conclude that the dream-work is not simply a translation from latent to manifest, but that something new is produced in the transcription from one register to another. This is inspirational for thinking about art as being newly produced from the encounter between different registers of signification rather than simply being an illustrative translation of desires and feelings.

Hiller’s research into the cultural implications of dream analysis in her writings, as well as her artwork, can usefully extend Freud’s approach into the field of art. She categorises artists’ dream images into three categories: ‘the illustrative or descriptive, which picture or illustrate dream imagery of a more or less conventional kind, the documentary or artefactual, which attempt to achieve a kind of accurate reportage; and the evocative, which are meant to trigger off an experience similar to a dream’.⁶ These modes of picturing give us insight about the place of dreams in specific historical eras. Both Freud and Hiller emphasise the legibility of dream images, but they have different approaches to the notion of interpretation, Freud emphasising the linguistic register, Hiller imaginative apprehension. In works such as Dream Mapping, 1974, and Belshazzar’s Feast, The Writing on Your Wall, 1983–84, Hiller, attempted to shift the Western modern sense of the dream as something private and individual to exploring the collective nature of dreaming and its relation to technology. For Dream Mapping, she invited ten participants to sleep outdoors for three days in a site in the country where there was an unusual occurrence of fairy rings. For a month prior to this, the participants had been asked to invent ways of notating their dreams in a notebook that Hiller had given them with a map of the dream site on the cover. This practice continued during the three-day event, the final stage of the piece being the making of three collective dream maps which took the individual diagrams from each day and superimposed them to explore the overlaps and differences between them. This work explores the proximity of dreaming to occult forces such as telepathy and is a challenge to the individualism of Freud’s approach. Belshazzar’s Feast, The Writing on Your Wall relates to dreaming in a more evocative way in that the installation attempts to induce dream or visionary experience via a cluster of monitors arranged in the shape of a campfire which show video footage of flames, alluding to the ritual of storytelling around an ancient hearth. The installation is also presented as a single monitor in a sitting-room, the place of hearth in the home having been taken over by television. The work was inspired by a newspaper article Hiller found recounting a story about people who had phoned the BBC complaining that they had seen ghostly images on their television after station closedown. Over the flame images, a soundtrack consisting of an authoritative voice interspersed with a child’s (Hiller’s son) recounting of a memory of seeing Rembrandt’s Belshazzar’s Feast, is combined with whispering, improvisational nonsense in Hiller’s own voice to invoke different mnemic registers that explore the interchange between image and word. The intention of the piece is that as viewers listen and gaze at the flames they begin to make visionary pictures out of the after-images they experience as a result of staring, ascribing meaningful narratives to the nebulous and suggestive. This is interesting to consider in the light of Freud’s dream-work and the early history of psychoanalysis, when hypnosis and the occult were repressed in the emphasis on language and analysis. Belshazzar’s Feast can be seen as an oblique interrogation of this history which echoes the history of Western philosophy as a moving towards enlightenment from the darkness and superstition of medieval times. However, in pursuing enlightenment, the irony is that Freud finds opacity everywhere, given the indistinguishable nature of word and image in relation to unconscious processes of repression, displacement and association.

While Freud’s emphasis on language would be taken to extremes in psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan’s influential reinterpretation of his ideas for the twentieth century, the French philosopher Jacques Derrida’s essay on Freud’s dream-work underscores the textual nature of the dream-work, the dream-work as a form of visual writing. This aligns nicely with Hiller’s assertion that in relation to the images, artefacts and maps of dreams from other societies, ‘“drawing” might actually be better understood as “writing” in the sense that the ancient Greeks had only one word for what we divide into two ideas, pertaining separately to images and to words’.⁷ Approaching the dream-work or the artwork as ‘writing’ enables us to think of it as a form of production that plays with culturally predetermined or readymade aspects of meaning but combines them in ways that redirect the former to produce the poetic, or what René Magritte called the ‘sensational’. Contrary to popular readings of Magritte’s work being bound up with the trauma he experienced aged 13 of seeing his mother’s corpse after she had drowned, and a subsequent repressed sexuality, he describes the poetic dynamic of constructing a painting which remarkably echoes Freud’s description of condensation:

The creation of new objects; the transformation of known objects; the alteration of certain objects’ substance – a wooden sky, for example; the use of words associated with images; the false labelling of an image; the realisation of ideas suggested by friends; the representation of certain day-dreaming visions – all these, in sum, were ways of forcing objects finally to become sensational.⁸

The artwork as dream-work can be considered as a poetic writing or mapping. Within such ‘writing’ there can be metaphoric allusions which threaten to make the image’s meaning transparent. However, this legibility is constantly being undermined by the mechanics of the dream-work, the wheels and cogs of whose spokes interlock and come apart again to unmoor meaning from its resting place, generating a metonymic displacement of signifiers in a potentially limitless chain of signification, which in psychoanalytic terminology is referred to as over-determination. Discussing the Symbolist artist Odilon Redon’s lithographic series Les Origines, art historian Penny Florence makes the point that the metonymic seriality at work in his titles, for example The Eye Like a Strange Balloon Moves Towards Infinity, 1882, which operates by replacing one thing – an eye – with another not naturally related thing – a balloon – echoes and interweaves with the visual condensation in the corresponding pictures in the series, where eyes appear in the centre of flowers and allusive spirals and coils generate a complex tissue of visual and verbal meaning.⁹ Florence’s argument is that while certain meanings, both visual and verbal, anchor us in relation to a picture, at the same time the force of the metonymic chain of equivalencies generated in the series unhinges us from this fixity and opens our perception to the dedifferentiated sense register of unconscious primary process, which loosens our attachment to sense. (Secondary process is more conscious and bound up with the differentiated sense register of vision, i.e. making clear-cut distinctions between things.) The dream-work operates as a processual machine, generating associations between images that act as ‘representatives’ of the primary sensational and mnemic traces from which consciousness derives, which is why dream imagery is often nonsensical. But there is also a sense in which this nonsense, rather than being a withdrawal from reality, is instead ‘an attempt at perceptual readjustment in order to allow pleasurable reconciliation of subjective truths with external fact’.¹⁰ This can be productively aligned with the dynamics of both Magritte’s and Rego’s tableaux in which images retain a resemblance to the everyday, but their strange combinatory relationships generate disruptive forces that are consciously registered without their mystery being unlocked.

The Surrealists were more literal-minded, using psychoanalysis as a lexicon that provides access to the codes and signifiers of the psyche as long as one is versed in its narratives. As Hiller says, Surrealist painting tended to employ a ‘rebus-like homage to Freud’s equation of dream imagery with wordplay’.¹¹ Ernst for one employed a met...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Chapter 1 Distortion and Disguise: The Dream-Work
• Chapter 2 Uncanny Eruptions
• Chapter 3 Refashioning Fetishism and Masquerade
• Chapter 4 Female Fetishism in the Expanded Field of Narcissism
• Chapter 5 Eye and Gaze: Restoring Body to Vision
• Chapter 6 The Evolution of Abjection
• Chapter 7 Black Narcissus
• Chapter 8 Repetition and the Death Drive
• Chapter 9 Returning to Melanie Klein
• Chapter 10 ‘Real-Making’: A Transitional Phenomenon
• Chapter 11 New Skins for Old
• Afterword
• Notes
• Select Bibliography