PSYCHOANALYTIC AESTHETICS: THE BRITISH SCHOOL
by Nicola Glover
| Introduction | Chapter: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | Conclusion | Bibliography |
Conclusion
This study has traced one particular trajectory of psycho-analytic theory: the progression from the Freudian paradigm, to the work of Klein and 'post-Kleinians' such as Wilfred Bion, Marion Milner and Donald Winnicott. This account has also emphasised how their clinical and metapsychological contributions have had important consequences for the development of psychoanalytic aesthetics, particularly through the writings of those such as Adrian Stokes, Anton Ehrenzweig, Peter Fuller and Richard Wollheim.In Part One, we examined the shortcomings of Freud's 'neurotic model' of art and his failure to develop his account of the joke mechanism in terms of aesthetic experience and the structural aspects of art - this, however, was explored further by Kris (1952) and Ehrenzweig (1967). As section one emphasised, the 'neurotic model' of art was too reliant on biographical material and thus the critic became more like a detective. This model construed the artwork as a "container" for the artist's desires, repressions, aggressions, and the formal, aesthetic qualities of this "container" were left unaddressed. This approach did not yield insight into the structure of the artwork itself, its purely formal qualities qua object.
Although Wollheim (1974) is no doubt right to point out that Freud was implicitly aware that the artwork was the outcome of a process (quite literally, art work) the implications of this were not fully developed into an explicit theoretical position. Indeed, Freud himself was aware that psychoanalysis was unable to tackle the problem of aesthetic value, but he was optimistic that eventually it would provide a coherent account. Chapter one concluded with the view that Freud's approach to art was limited by his own artistic preferences, his cultural milieu, and his personality. Indeed, much of the art that he selected for scrutiny perhaps tells us more about his own desire to elucidate clinical theory (for instance, his Leonardo essay, 1910), and his personal struggles with fellow-analysts (for example, the Moses essay, 1914).
Part Two of this study introduced the work of Melanie Klein and outlined her major theoretical contributions which have had import for the study of art: the account of the inner world; unconscious phantasy; the theory of 'positions'; the theory of innate envy, and also the focus on the structure of symbols and the mechanisms underling their formation, rather than purely their content. In essence, she transformed the Freudian paradigm, giving it a decidedly Platonic orientation by discovering that the inner world has its own type of geographic concreteness, and that it was the transactions of the inner world (manifest in dreams and unconscious phantasy) that the meaning of the outer world derived its origins.
Although Klein never formulated a systematic aesthetic theory of her own, and like Freud, looked at art mainly in terms of clarifying her clinical work, her contributions enabled new developments in psychoanalytic aesthetics. As we saw in Chapter three, it was Dr. Hannah Segal and the art critic and historian, Adrian Stokes who developed the fuller implications of Klein's insights into a distinctive and coherent 'Kleinian aesthetic' - a tremendous improvement on the classical Freudian practice of 'pathography'.
Broadly speaking, traditional Kleinian accounts emphasise the role of depression and mourning in creativity, and derive aesthetics from the nature of the object. This means that a Kleinian approach addresses the formal qualities of specific art works, and their relationship to the psychic mechanisms (unconscious phantasies) which are implicated in its production. According to Segal, 'authentic' creativity demands the artist's actual engagement with a medium - and the aesthetic value of an object is inextricably linked to the kinds of unconscious phantasies projected during the encounter with this. Kleinians emphasise that creativity and the aesthetic sense are linked via the developmental achievement of the depressive position.
As Wollheim emphasises, unlike orthodox theory 'Kleinian criticism does not demand material about the artist's mind and experience in the same extravagant and impossible scale as Freudian criticism' (1959, p. 43). The classical Freudian approach, which interprets works of art in terms of instinctual impulse (closely resembling dream-interpretation) raises a serious methodological problem: one needs to know a great deal about the associations and circumstances of its creator, which may or may not be available - or even desirable - to know. However, Wollheim rightly asserts that Kleinian criticism avoids this 'by relating the work of art not to the variable impulses of the artist's id, but to the invariable processes of the artist's ego'. In addition, because the critic can 'dispense with voluminous biographical material [...] the change from a predominantly id- to a predominantly ego-interpretation has obvious economic advantages' (p. 43).
Another objection to Freudian account is that because it focuses too heavily on content, Freudian criticism ignores the specifically aesthetic aspect of art. For, as Wollheim rightly points out, 'if products of identical content are treated identically, how do we distinguish between, say, a Leonardo and a day dream or a child's game with the same motivation?'1. Kleinian aesthetics, however, redresses the balance: it defines an artwork in terms of possession of certain formal characteristics and those characteristics are then analysed as the natural correlates or products of certain processes within the ego.
Part Three of our study explored the developments that have taken place in psychoanalytic aesthetics since Segal and Stokes first put forward a 'traditional' Kleinian account of art. Chapter four explored Bion enlargement of the Kleinian paradigm by his placing of Freudian and Kleinian theories into much wider, literary and philosophical dimensions. His (1970) account of 'O', or 'Ultimate Reality' (the 'thoughts that exist without a thinker') resonate with Plato's theory of the Ideal Forms that await their sensuous realisation. But where aesthetic experience is thrice removed from reality in the Platonic schema, it occupies central stage for Bion.2.
Bion (1970) regarded both the aesthetic and the psychoanalytic encounter to occupy the same space - both are an engagement with 'O' - an experience which cannot be directly "known about", although we can be it. Thus, rather than viewing art and aesthetic experience as an outcome of repression and instinctual renunciation (Freud) or mourning and reparation (Klein), the Bionian schema views art in terms of a Kantian thing-in-itself which is itself responsible for growth: Bion regards it to be as necessary to the psychic health as food is to the body. Indeed, Meltzer's (1988) development of this view suggests that, rather than applying psychoanalytic insights to aesthetics, aesthetics is shown to shed light on early infantile experience and to extend psychoanalytic theory. Rycroft concurs with this view, when he says that 'psychoanalysts have more to learn from historians, literary critics and philosophers than they have to teach them' (1957, p. 276).
The fundamentality of aesthetic experience is also integral to Winnicott's account of human nature, though he prefers to talk of an innate and fundamental creativity. He believed that it is through creative apperception, essentially grounded in bodily aliveness, that life becomes truly meaningful (1971). The British School analyst, C. Bollas, develops the implications of Winnicott's insights further when suggests that the first aesthetic is grounded in the maternal idiom, the mother's handling of her child and her total system of care.3.
However, despite these resonances between Bion and Winnicott, there is an important shift in emphasis with the clinical contributions of the latter, and the work of Ehrenzweig, from the non-clinical domain. Indeed, it was the 'Klein-Winnicott debate' of 1952 which truly polarised their fundamental theoretical differences, ones which have had important consequences for their respective views concerning art and creativity (see Chapter six, section two).
Winnicott and Milner both disagreed with the fundamental Kleinian view that there was a rudimentary ego from birth and that it is the interplay of the life and death instincts which structure mental life (via the unconscious phantasies of projection and introjection) from the start. They took the view that the new-born child is essentially a tabula rasa; the basis of all thinking and knowledge being derived from the child's interaction with the mother and especially her 'mirroring 'role. (This concurs with the empiricist philosophical tradition of Hume and Locke, as opposed to the distinctly Platonic and Kantian idealism implicit in Bionian and Kleinian thinking.) Unlike Klein and Segal, Winnicott and Milner did not regard the essence of art to be reparative and (as we saw in Chapter five) Ehrenzweig concurred with this view, arguing that the production of specific objects is not the central feature of creativity - neither does he assign a central role to depression in creative experience. He emphasises the 'manic-oceanic' fusion of the infant, the role of illusion and the need to recreate within the creative unconscious a sense of infantile omnipotence and oneness with the mother - an experience which the Kleinians regard as a regressive feature, inimical to creativity and emotional creative development. Indeed, Kleinians would argue that with this account, no distinction is made between 'authentic' creativity grounded in the specific phantasy of recreation (reparation), and omnipotent (inauthentic) phantasies of creation.4.
Where Bion (1970, 1991) and Meltzer (1988) regard the aesthetic capacity as being fundamental, Winnicott (1971) argues that it is the capacity for creative living which grounds our being. What is clear in both traditions, however, is the increasing focus on Truth as being at the heart of the post-Kleinian approach to human behaviour and meaning. Where Winnicott (1958) postulates a spontaneous, non-compliant 'True Self' arising from the partnership of psyche and soma (to be distinguished from the adaptive compliance of the 'False Self') Bion talks in terms of a transcendental, Kantian Self that cannot itself be known, but which is the filter through which we perceive ourselves and the world as they truly are. This is akin to what could be described as the Neo-Platonic view which conceives art as being one of the most profound ways by which we apprehend the true nature of the world, and also our place within it - ostensibly a return to the idea that art and aesthetic experience are essentially concerned with the 'True, the Good and the Beautiful'.
Taken as a whole, the post-Kleinian contributions of Bion. on the one hand, and Milner and Winnicott, on the other, have come a far distance from the normative, adaptive account of art as stressed by Freud and the ego-psychologists on the one hand, and 'traditional' Kleinians such as Segal, on the other. What seems to be one of the most interesting development in post-Kleinian psychoanalytic theory, is the centrality that is increasingly being given to the role of aesthetic and creative experience in the analytic encounter itself - a theme that we explored in Chapter four, section six.
Perhaps one of the most significant developments in both psychoanalytic aesthetics and clinical theory which has in part been spurred by this "dialogue" between art and psychoanalysis, is the reappraisal of the classical distinction between the primary and secondary processes. Ehrenzweig's (1967) account of art drew attention to the need for this revision, and much of his thinking was informed by developments in British school thinking which were beginning to question the classical view that the conscious and the unconscious were two quite distinct, antithetical systems (Rycroft, 1956, 1962, and Milner 1956, 1967).
Ehrenzweig says that we do wrong to assume that art's structure is exclusively shaped by secondary processes and believes that the questioning of the primary/secondary process distinction is an example of "applied" psycho-analysis of art actually modifying original clinical theory (1971, p. 3). Indeed, Milner pointed out in her Freud-Centenary Lecture (1956), that such a revision has been partly stimulated by the problems raised by the nature of art.5. More recently, M. Likierman has noted that because of a too clear distinction between primitive and higher levels of mentality in psychoanalytic theory, aesthetic experience and creativity have unfortunately been assigned to 'purgatory' - to a 'developmental limbo which places them neither in the underworld of primitive mental life, nor in the 'higher' realm of civilised functioning' (1989, p. 133).
What has been discussed above points to a theme which bears directly on our concerns in this study, for one could raise the objection that a 'British psychoanalytic aesthetic' is problematic because it conceives the origin of aesthetics and creativity almost entirely in terms of infantile psychic functioning. It is certainly true that in the chapters above we encountered a number of theorists who do claim that aesthetic experience and creativity evoke earliest infantile experiences, for instance Fuller's analysis of Natkin and the 'potential space', in Chapter seven. So, the question must be addressed as to how far we "regress" into more "primitive" modes of functioning6. during the aesthetic encounter and during creative experience ?
Perhaps part of the problem is to do with our modern tendency to value scientific, 'rational' thinking over and above intuition and iconic, non-verbal ways of thinking. Indeed, not only do we privilege words over images, our scientific world-view tends to isolate the two modes of functioning. As Rycroft observes, it is not surprising that
this idea that the primary processes are unconscious, primitive, neurotic, archaic, etc., and are normally subject to repression, was to cause psychoanalysis considerable trouble, both in its theorising and its public relations, since it soon became evident that there was some similarity between the imaginative activity displayed by artists and writers and the primary processes described by Freud as characteristic of dreaming and symptom-formation. Given the clinical origins and bias of psychoanalysis, the easiest and most tempting way of explaining this similarity was to assert that artists and writers are neurotic and that works of art are analogous, or homologous to, dreams and neurotic symptoms; and that the techniques of psychoanalytical interpretation can be transferred without modification to artists and their works.7.
Rycroft reminds us that Freud lived in a cultural milieu very different from our own; he was born in 1856 which meant that during his formative years, he would not have encountered revolutionary figures such as Picasso, Pound and Joyce who challenged the superiority of words over images, and questioned the so-called 'rational' structure of linguistic syntax. Thus it would have been natural for Freud to have assumed a much closer relationship between verbal discourse and rationalism, on the one hand, and the non-verbal, the irrational and the imaginary, on the other. However, despite developments in art, our culture still tends to be suspicious of the artist; we still tend to regard the creative individual as possibly unstable, possessed of a little 'divine madness', perhaps. Maybe this is also motivated in part by an envy of creative people? It is certainly true that most of us would like to think that we could create an enduring work of art.
Rycroft suggests a much healthier alternative to this view. He believes that 'the primary and secondary processes coexist from the beginning of life and under favourable conditions they may continue to function in harmony with one another, one providing the imaginative, the other the rational basis of living'.8. So rather than assuming that creativity is grounded in more than just a little 'craziness', Rycroft suggests that we should regard as creative those individuals who 'retain in adult life something of that imaginative freedom which healthy children display'. However, this is a freedom which, sadly, we tend to lose when we enter the adult world of our present rationalist, bourgeois culture.
In his The Dynamics of Creation (1972), the psychiatrist A. Storr examines some of the myths surrounding creativity and the notion of 'the Artist' in our culture. although he does well to dispel the myth that, in order to create enduring art, the artist must somehow have suffered pain or deprivation, or have failed to establish personal and social relationships (a view held by O. Rank, 1932, for example), he does not pursue the work of those such as Rycroft. This is surprising for Rycroft's ideas concur with Storr's view that a major weakness of psychoanalytic theory lies in its 'failure to make sufficient distinction between [the] normal and [the] neurotic' and that 'the unconscious from which [creativity] takes its origin can no longer usefully be regarded as simply the product of repression'.9.
As we saw in Chapter five, the constructive role of the primary process is central to Ehrenzweig's account of art. Indeed, he criticised the ego-psychologists for viewing art and creativity as a controlled 'regression at the service of the ego' (Kris, 1952), a view which essentially construes art as an adaptive achievement - autonomous of the id and libidinal impulses. This means that, for those such as Kris and Hartmann, the primary process is still relegated to an archaic and primitive form of functioning, one that is supposed to be antithetical to constructive, conscious thought. They asserted that creativity controls the 'regression towards the primary process', but not the work of the primary process itself.
It is the Kleinian concept of unconscious phantasy which is highly significant here and played a key role in the development of Ehrenzweig's account of artistic perception. It is a concept which cuts across the primary/secondary process distinction, and caused much controversy in the 'Controversial Discussions' which divided the British Psychoanalytical Society during the early forties.10. Isaacs (1948) account of the mechanism suggested that although it was 'unconscious', phantasy includes activities of so-called 'secondary process' functioning: it has cognizance of space and time and recognises opposites. As we saw in Chapter two, section two, Kleinians believe that unconscious phantasy structures all mental activity and perception - including both conscious and unconscious modes of functioning. Indeed, in virtue of these qualities, the notion of unconscious phantasy corroborated Ehrenzweig's (1967) thesis concerning the positive, constructive role of the id, and provided him with a structural and dynamic concept which gave considerable substance to his belief that conscious and unconscious mental life are not merely linked: 'surface thought is wholly immersed in the matrix of the primary process'. (p. 262).
He admits that 'this constructive role of the unconscious is difficult to accept' from the point of view of our conscious, 'surface' thinking, yet it is the facts of art which suggest that the undifferentiated matrix is technically far superior to the narrowly focused conscious processes, if only because of its wider focus that can comprehend serial structures irrespective of their order in time and space. Indeed, most of us would agree that there is certainly nothing that could be described as 'primitive' or 'regressive' about Riley's handling of pictorial space, or Schoenberg's ability to handle a theme without regard to its sequence in time! For according to Ehrenzweig's account of 'dedifferentiation', the kind of syncretistic, wide-sweeping vision that is needed to perceive these hidden structures cannot be described as a regression to pre-existing infantile or primitive percepts and concepts. He prefers to describe this as 'the creation of an entirely new matrix, the undifferentiated structure of which is made to fit precisely a particular task'; creative work infuses 'new and controlled stimulation into an utterly flexible unconscious phantasy' (p. 261).
Thus, we have drawn attention to an important instance of how clinical theory and "applied" psychoanalysis have significantly developed and modified one another in the on-going "conversation" between clinicians and non-clinicians. It would seem that this openness to change and insight is a sign of health and augurs well for future dialogue between the two domains.
As we noted in the Introduction, the British School comprises a variety of psychoanalytic approaches: Freudian, Kleinian, Bionian, Winnicottian. What I hope has become apparent through this study, is the extent to which the thinkers explored above share a common understanding - the commitment to a view of human nature that is broadly humanistic in conception, yet not in any sentimental sense of this term. For their account of human nature is one that emphasises the importance of a truthful relationship to the world, where the forces of cynicism, perversity and violence (cf. Bion's 'minus L,H,K' links, outlined in Chapter four above) are mitigated by an openness to change and growth (which is often painful) nourished by the non-omnipotent, aesthetic apprehension of psychic reality.
A British psychoanalytic approach art and creativity (indeed, to human behaviour in general) teaches us humility: that 'creativity is for the self, impossible' (Meltzer, 1988, p. xiii). Essentially it is a function of what Bion called the unknowable Self, the filter through which we perceive inner and outer reality veridically, asserting of the Kantian belief in the existence of a transcendental (noumenal) reality which is essentially a thing-in-itself, although we can be it.
Similarly, Winnicott (1958) developed an account of the 'True Self', to be distinguished from the adaptive and compliant 'False Self', which he regarded as being the basis of a creative relationship to the world, through which arises a sense of meaning and value. This 'True Self' is spontaneous and arises from the partnership of psyche and soma - when the head and the heart are working together. There is, then, in both the Bionian and Winnicottian conception of human nature, an emphasis on the necessity of truth - which the mind needs for growth just as the body craves food for its nourishment. This truthfulness is essentially an aesthetic and creative phenomenon (Meltzer, 1988, Winnicott, 1971).
Indeed, this emphasis on the 'love of truth' (what Bion calls the 'K' link) as a factor basic to all creative human relationships would seem a fruitful approach to the dynamics of aesthetic encounter. Such a conception could provide an approach to criticism which is not grounded in positivism, on the one hand, or the barrenness of structural-linguistic approaches, on the other, Such approaches do not distinguish between explanation and description, neither do they see any difference between symbols and signs, or have any conception of psychic change and growth. The humanistic conception of human nature characteristic of the British School can be viewed as a welcome counterbalance to the nihilism characteristic of much post-structuralist, 'postmodern' thinking - a stance which is popular in current academic debate.11.
In addition, many academic approaches to art tend to conceive of the critic as one who imposes some 'secondary process' on art's 'primary process' in order to keep it within the bounds of the explainable and the known. Such criticism is based on the unconscious phantasy of uncovering the secrets of the unconscious (thereby making no distinction between secrecy and mystery) and such criticism which shows no awareness of a distinction between sign-systems and symbolic forms tends to talk about the art-symbol as if it were the merely the outcome or manifestation of ideological forces, the "basic assumptions" of society (Bion). For as Herbert Read argued, 'art is art as symbol, not as sign' (1951, p. 73).
According to the British School, what makes an artwork of aesthetic (symbolic) significance is the very fact that is the outcome of psychic work, a process which involves the negotiation between self and other, inner and outer reality. Art is not purely imagery and 'content' - it concerns an activity which is itself symbolic and therefore more than merely the deployment of learned skills and techniques (Wollheim, 1987, Podro, 1990, ).12. Indeed, the question of how the activity of painting has developed in such a way as to be an art - that is, why it is more than just the rendering of mundane copy of the world - is one that British psychoanalysts have been able to address more effectively than many other approaches to the visual arts.
The aesthetic critic, according to the British psychoanalytic view, is aware of these distinctions: he or she respects the difference between symbol and sign, secrecy and mystery; evocation and explanation - between 'knowing' and 'knowing about'. The sensitive critic will have a grasp of the aesthetic quality of the material he is handling, and will try to approach it in an aesthetic manner (we may think, perhaps, of those such as Stokes and Wollheim). Seen in this perspective, the task of the critic is analogous to that of the artist, for both are trying to conceive a language which is capable of containing the implications and resonances of emotional experience.
Thus, in the practice of aesthetic criticism, the critic's sensibility is grounded in the faculty of a receptive congruence to the formal structures evolved by the artist for containing of "meaning" (Bion, 1970) or the "artistic import" (Langer, 1952). As Williams and Meltzer argue, he is 'dealing with the same mysterious phenomena, the life of the mind in process' (1988, p. 180). Indeed, this theme of 'creative criticism' takes us right back to our Introduction where we identified the overlapping areas of creativity, criticism and the aesthetic encounter. What much of the work of British School thinking has done is to forge a link between these areas in such a way as to give an account of the mind which is in itself based on a conception of aesthetic experience, from out of which grows the human individual - one who is capable of growth and reciprocity - even in the face of uncertainty, anxiety and 'catastrophic change'. In Bion's (1970) view, the creative individual is one who can bear the 'cloud of unknowing' (Meister Eckhart), one who respects 'the burden of the mystery' (Wordsworth) and can tolerate frustration: that is, he has what Keats called 'Negative Capability'.
The Victorian critic Walter Pater believed that the aim of all true criticism is 'to see the object as in itself it really is'13. and that the task of aesthetic critic is to 'know one's impression as it really is'. One could regard these as analogous to the tasks of the psychoanalytic encounter itself (especially in the light of Bion's insights). Indeed, Williams and Waddell have expressed very clearly what, for me, is the raison d'être informing a British psychoanalytic aesthetic, and one which this study has undertaken to explore. For under the aegis of its broadly humanistic approach, both art and psychoanalysis
may be seen as different media for exploring the world of the mind, related through congruence and a common drive towards self-knowledge, rather than reductively in terms of a literary phantasy content and psychoanalytic interpretation.14.
What British psychoanalysis teaches us is that this 'self-knowledge' is not an abstract, mystical or transcendental awareness, but one that is grounded in the 'sagacity of the body' - the partnership of body and mind, when the head and the heart are working together.
NOTES
1. Note that for Winnicott, there is no essential difference. Winnicott explicitly separates the idea of creativity and aesthetic experience from the formal qualities, the art product itself. He argues that 'it would perhaps be better to say that these things could be creations'. The creativity that 'is a universal [and] belongs to being alive' is what concerns him, not 'the finished creation [which] never heals the underlying lack of sense of self' (1971, p.64, p.79). See chapter 6, section 2 above.
2. For a full account of the philosophical background to Bion's thought, see Grotstein (1981), pp. 10-31.
3. This aspect of Winnicott's thinking is developed more fully by Bollas (1978, 1979, 1987, 1989).
4. See Segal (1986), pp. 207-216, for she explores this distinction through a reading of William Golding's The Spire.
5. Milner (1956) in her The Suppressed Madness of Sane Men (1987) p. 211.
6. For a very interesting account of the ideological, political and cultural vicissitudes underlying this distinction between the visual and the verbal, between discursive and non-discursive ways of thinking, see W.J.T. Mitchell's Iconology: Image, Text, Ideology (Chicago, 1986).
7. 'The Literary Imagination', in W. Phillips, ed., Art and Psychoanalysis (1957), p. 265.
8. Ibid., p. 266.
9. Storr (1972), p. 13, p. 295.
10. For a transcript of the heated debates which took place, see King and Steiner (1992), pp. 330-1, 373-7.
11. However, one notable exception is C. Falck's Myth, Truth, and Literature (1989). This is an attempt to re-work the somewhat unfashionable notions of 'inspiration', 'truth' and 'intuition', towards what he calls 'a true post-modernism'. Although he focuses on literary theory, his insights have relevance to aesthetics and criticism in general. He argues that Saussurean and post-Saussurean linguistics have 'abolished reality'. Such linguistic theories effectively eliminate any notion of 'incarnation, transcendence, a concept of the self, intuition, creativity, apprehended extra-linguistic meaning, poetry, historical context and truth'. Falck stresses that its 'crucial weakness' is that the fact that it 'undermines our belief in - and must therefore indirectly help to bring about an actual withering of - our capacity for particular insights into the real meanings of particular life situations'. Such theories are thus incapacitated to be any kind of value-establishing branch of aesthetics and criticism. Falck suggests that all meaning and value originate in a shared corporeality which is reflected by, and structured within, language. This view resonates with much British School thinking, especially Isaacs (1948) account of the link between language and the body - structured through unconscious phantasy.
12. This could be seen in terms of preparing a special meal for one's guests. It is not so much the meal itself which is overridingly important (although it is by no means insignificant) but more a case of what the actual activity of preparing the food and sharing it means to the cook and the guests.
13. The Renaissance ([1873] Oxford, 1986), p. xxix.
14. The Chamber of Maiden Thought (1991), p. 1, my italics.