Freud’s Art: Psychoanalysis Retold by Janet Sayers, 2007, Routledge, East Sussex
Chapter 8 - Milner
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| Paul Cézanne, Still Life with Teapot, 1902-06 National Museum, Wales |
I simply sat and looked, too inert to remember whether I ought to like it or not. Slowly then I became aware that something was pulling me out of my vacant stare and the colours were coming alive, gripping my gaze till I was soaking myself in their vitality.
She found herself becoming similarly drawn into another painting. Looking at it, she noted:
My mind settled down to complete absorption, oblivious to all but the harmonies of shape and colour which took on a life of their own and continued to grow out of the paint the longer I looked….so that I could see the whole all at the same time.
This could be evidence of someone, in this case Marion Milner, going into some kind of trance by looking at paintings? Could use this with James Elkins on Tears (“Trance Theory”)
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‘The image is equally an expression of the unconscious as of the conscious situation of the moment’.
(Milner quoting, J.Field (1937) An Experiment in Leisure. London: Verago, 1986, p. 171)
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Precursors of this account of art-making can be found in the account by artist-turned-philosopher, William James, of mystical ‘oneness’ with ‘the Absolute’ or with God as inspiration of religion (James, The Varieties of Religious Experience, 1902). The Nobel prize-winning writer, Romain Rolland, similarly wrote to Freud of the inspiration he inspiration he derived from the feeling of the ‘eternal ….without perceptible limits, and like oceanic, as it were’(Rolland (1927) in a letter to Freud dated 5 Dec). The art historian, Bernard Berenson, wrote too of oneness with the otherness of art. He called it ‘the aesthetic feeling….that fleeting instant, so brief as to be almost timeless, when the spectator is at one with the work of art he is looking at’.
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Milner also observed that her art-making was particularly satisfying in so far as it involved ‘a dialogue relationship between thought and the bit of the external world represented by the marks made on the paper’ (1952 The role of illusion in symbol formation. SM: 83-113, 97)).
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Chapter 9 – [Anton] Ehrenzweig
[Herbert] Reed ….added, ‘most works of art do not admit of any possible fixed focus – they deliberately invite a wandering eye’. (Reed (1934) Art and Industry. London: Faber and Faber, p.113).
Agreeing with Reed, Ehrenzweig observed that, long before Picasso, artists brought together different perspectives as one in their art. We often overlook this Ehrenzweig argued, because we repress it from consciousness in obedience to the repressive superego and secondary revision processes of the mind governed by prevailing conventions regarding perspective, chiaroscuro, truth to nature, ‘open-air colours’, and so on. (A. Ehrenzweig (1949) Unconscious form-creation in art: Part III. British Journal of Medical Psychology 22: 88-109, 103)
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Dreams, Ehrenzweig maintained, involve a similar dynamic in uniting unconscious perception with consciously perceived gestalts. He related unconscious depth perception to the loss of sharp and well-defined focus in dream like states of mind in which, he said, forms intermingle and separate in continuous flux, condensing and bringing different images together. He gave the example of a pram, hearse and canon combining into a single dream-like element. He also related this to Nietzche’s account of art uniting Dionysian chaos and Apollonian order, and to William James’ emphasis on ways in which thinking involves both vagueness and clarity.
Opposing the philosophy of Berkeley and Hume, who characterized thinking as consisting solely of clear and distinct ideas, and in contrast to Freud’s account of neurotic and defensive forgetting of names and words, James argued that when we try to recall a name or word, nothing distinct and clear at first occurs. Instead a ‘sort of wraith of the name’ appears which we forget as soon as ‘we “twig” it’, he said. Thinking begins in vagueness, in what is incoherent, unclear and diffuse. ‘It is’, he continued, in forwarding his theory of thinking as a continuous stream of consciousness, ‘the reinstatement of the vague and inarticulate to its proper place in our mental life which I am so anxious to press on the attention’. (W. James (1892) Psychology. New York: Fawcett, 1963,pp. 156, 157).
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Freud similarly likened the emergence of the analyst’s interpretations from the vagueness of the analysand’s free associations to Schiller’s dictum: ‘where there is a creative mind, Reason….relaxes its watch upon the gates, and the ideas rush in pell-mell, and only then does it look them through and examine them in a mass.’ (S. Freud (1900) The Interpretation of Dreams. SE4-5: 1-621, 103).
Just as psychoanalytic interpretation begins with vagueness, with the analysand’s more or less vague free associations, so does art. ‘At the beginning [the artist] knows only vaguely, if at all, what he is going to produce; his mind is curiously empty while he watches passively the forms growing from under his brush,’ Ehrenzweig claimed, adding:
Automatic form-control means that the depth mind has taken over the form-production which therefore now reflects the gestalt-free structure of the depth mind. Hence, the lack of a pregnant eye-catching pattern, the superimposition, overlapping and general ambiguity of forms which could never be achieved by conscious form control.
(Ehrenzweig 1948: 191)
This has always been the method adopted by artists, Ehrenzweig maintained. Modern art simply goes further in not restricting the vague and ambiguous forms of the artist’s initial automatic form-creation to the background of their art. Instead modern art allows these forms to permeate the whole picture plane.
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Generalizing this [Picasso’s saying ‘I do not seek, I find’] and other examples, Ehrenzweig characterized art-making as a three stage process. It begins in a paranoid-schizoid state of mind. At this state the artist must be able to tolerate, ‘without undue persecutory anxiety’, given that this state of mind consists ‘of projecting fragmented parts of the self into the work’ in the form of marks which can, Ehrenzweig added, ‘easily appear accidental, fragmented, unwanted and persecuting’. This is followed by a second stage of oceanic oneness of the artist with their emerging art-work, in which they bring together their initial scribbled marks and unconscious form perception and integrate it into consciously perceived gestalt shape and form. This is achieved through the artist’s ‘scanning that integrates art’s substructure’, said Ehrenzweig, through cross-ties [which] bind the single elements together [so that] an unbroken pictorial space emerges as the conscious signal of unconscious integration’. Third, and finally, he maintained, ‘part of the work’s hidden substructure [re-introjected] into the artist’s ego on a higher mental level’. (Ehrenzweig (1967) The Hidden Order of Art. St Albans: Paladin, 1970, pp. 117, 118)
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