Art and the Clinical Encounter

How is psychoanalysis like making art?

Published on April 5, 2013 by Molly S. Castelloe, Ph.D. in The Me in We

 

How is practicing psychoanalysis like being an artist? In Dancing with the Unconscious: The Art of Psychoanalysis and the Psychoanalysis of Art, Routledge, 2012) Danielle Knafo elaborates this connection with thoughtful care and insight. For inspiration she calls on her own childhood immigration from French Morocco to Dutch Pennsylvania, which required she creatively bridge the world of “couscous and b’stilla” and “funnel cakes and shoo-fly pie” (p. xvii).
For Knafo, psychoanalysis takes the form of dance because it seeks movement, action, and release – the dissemination of unconscious energies. It also engages stillness and interludes of incubation. But beginning with Breuer and Freud's study of women's bodies that were physically stuck, sometimes literally, psychoanalytic healing animates places in the flesh cut-off from embodiment.

The first half of the book discusses the artistic components of clinical practice beginning with three forms of unconscious expression: free association, (integral to Surrealism), transference-countertransference, and dream making. Knafo updates the concept of "regression," too often misunderstood, she argues, highlighting its various purposes "in the service of art" as well as ego (p. 23).

Data is gathered from extensive personal interviews the author conducted with artists and her own clinical research. Knafo describes Kasia, a second-generation holocaust survivor who used the consulting room as a "concentration camp," screaming through sessions in which Knafo felt more the vibration than heard her patient's words (p. 86). At home Kasia, a photographer, hung her pictures with the image side turned to the wall. The author describes an arduous therapeutic journey through which anger became agency and her analysand gained freedom through “imaginatively created embodied images” (p. 87).

Knafo suggests that collective catastrophe, such as holocausts, need be re-presented, however partial, even though the aesthetic experience risks retraumatization and assault on the viewer. She cites concerns about exploiting the pain of victims by affording aesthetic pleasure. Yet pleasure does not preclude learning. Knafo puts it this way: aesthetic recreations of massive trauma induce in the spectator "sensations felt by the artists, themselves, and thereby have viewers share the psychological burden as well as ethical responsibility of containing the trauma. . . artists possess the gift of using aesthetic forms to present us with these unpalatable truths and help us digest them" (p. 88). Repetitions of trauma, in aesthetics and in psychoanalysis, are remade as shards of symbolization struggle to find gentler form.

Knafo asks us to consider: death is something that people deny more than anything else. Although conscious of mortality, people dissociate from the actuality of their own demise (not only the fact of it but its literal context: the possibilities of how, when, where). If we could be more accepting of our own attitudes about death could we more fully register our near-death experiences and thus "transcend our fear and clinging?" (p. 65).

The second half of the book studies the work of artists, among which Knafo includes Freud’s “Dream of the Three Fates” and pieces by Egon Schiele, David Lynch, Bruno Schulz and Ana Mendieta. Although referencing the performance work of artists such as Mendieta, Orlan, and Marina Abramović, Knafo overlooks the intriguing parallel between psychoanalysis and the theatrical Avant-Garde. Both Movements rely on the body as primary instrument, use autobiography explicitly, and question the function of the frame.
Knafo addresses the frame in her discussion of Michal Heiman's work, a prominent contemporary Israeli artist who films herself looking through a rear-view car mirror as she drives to Jerusalem. The use of a second frame, the mirror, calls attention to filmmaking as a mirroring process. Jean Luc-Godard, once said that an honest film would merely “show a camera filming itself in a mirror.” (Stam, 59) An honest life is the face inside the mirror gazing back at the lens. In this instance, it is one precariously poised between life and death -- the spectator worries Heiman could run off the road! This work, Mirror Test, (2001), viscerally conveys the political anxiety and violence that Heiman inhabits daily, exemplifying what Knafo describes as “art in an age of terror” (p. 76).

"Leben? Order Theater?" (Life? or Theater?)

Reframing was also imperative to the psychic and spiritual survival of painter Charlotte Salomon who descended from a line of family suicides and was murdered in Auschwitz at age 26 when she was five months pregnant. Salomon's exquisite series of pictures Leben? Order Theater? (Life? or Theater?) (1940-42) wrests beauty from doom by recontexualizing it.

In Salomon's final self-portrait, the artist kneels on the beach painting a transparent canvas held in her lap. The composition blurs the distinction between sexualities, between life and art. Such “boundary fluidity” between inside/outside, masculine/feminine is a "hallmark of creativity," asserts Knafo (p. 6). In her forward-thinking work, Knafo expands the limits therapeutic intervention. Psychoanalysis, like dance, is messy and demands the courage of uncertainty. But when this pas de deux remains open in choreography it can lead to creative transcendence.

REFERENCE
Stam, Robert. (1992). Reflexivity in Film and Literature: From Don Quixote to Jean-Luc Godard. New York: Columbia.

http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/the-me-in-we/201304/art-and-the-clinical-encounter