Pain: On Psychoanalysis’ Crisscross with Poetic and Pictorial Expression







Freud first underlined the crisscross of psychoanalysis with other fields of human knowledge such as culture and art. 

In this webinar we will address the question of the contribution of art to the theoretical development of psychoanalysis, a contribution centred on the question of pain. If pain in psychoanalytic theory remains in its enigmatic essence, poetic writing as well as pictorial art, have the power to penetrate this pain-enigma. Dreams, free association, poetic and pictorial expression will be examined as psychic passages that are potentially opened up within a person in order to express and to treat his or her distress, while analyst and patient share this process with artists to develop their own self-analytic and creative endeavour. 

Jean-Claude Rolland proposes to develop this crisscross through Paul Célan and Charles Baudelaire for poetic word, and through Leonardo da Vinci for pictorial expression in connection with one of his most moving and mysterious paintings, the portrait of Ginevra de Benci. 

Silvana Rea will crisscross psychoanalysis and art based on the experience between receiver and work of art. For this purpose, the poetic work of contemporary Brazilian artist, Flávia Ribeiro, which Silvana accompanied in her atelier for some years, will be approached in reading.

Meg Harris Williams proposes to present the ‘burden of the mystery’ as seen in Keats’ ‘Ode on Melancholy’, in the light of the lonely problem of tolerating the mixed reactions to pain and beauty that stimulate our self-knowledge. 

Jean-Claude Rolland – is a psychoanalyst, training member of the French Psychoanalytic Association, and he was its president in 1994-1995. Member of the IPA, he is a former European representative of the IPA board. He works in Lyon, and co-edited the Libres Cahiers pour la Psychoanalyse. He is the author at Gallimard of “Healing from the Ache of Loving” (1998), “Before being the One who Speaks” (2006), “The Eyes of the Soul” (2010), “Four Essays on the Life of the Soul” (2015) and his latest book “Talk and Soul” is in print. Download paper


Silvana Rea – is a full member and Scientific Director of the Brazilian Society of Psychoanalysis of São Paulo. Graduated in cinema and psychology, Master and PhD in art psychology at Universidad de São Paulo, she was editor of the Brazilian Journal of Psychoanalysis. She is author of the books, “Through the Pores of the World: A Psychoanalytical Reading of the Poetry of Flávia Ribeiro” and “Transformativadade: Approximations Between Psychoanalysis and Art”. She has also published some articles, such as, “The Pillow Book”, “Ismael Nery and the Androgynous as Cosmogony”, “The Aesthetic Dimension of the Experience of the Other”, “Freud and H.D.: Psychoanalysis in Free Verses”, “Lygia Clark: Art is Life”. Download paper


Meg Harris Williams – is a literary critic specialising in the relation between psychoanalysis, aesthetic experience and literature, in particular poetry. Honorary member of the Psychoanalytic Centre of California, she has published many articles on the relation between psychoanalysis, art and literature. Meg is a visiting lecturer at the Tavistock Clinic and AGIP (Association of Group and Individual Psychotherapy). She is editor of The Harris Meltzer Trust and successor to the Clunie Press with which she has been involved since its foundation in the 1970s. Her books include “The Apprehension of Beauty” (with Donald Meltzer; 1998), “The Vale of Soulmaking” (2005), “The Aesthetic Development” (2010), “Bion’s Dream” (2010), “Hamlet in Analysis” (2014), “The Becoming Room: Filming Bion’s Memoir of the Future” (2016) and “The Art of Personality in Literature and Psychoanalysis” (2017). Her latest book, “Dream Sequences in Shakespeare”, will be published this year by Routledge. Download paper


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Posted by:   Dr. Dipl. Psych. Eléana Mylona
Posted on:   2020-03-01 21:46 PM
Comments:   A question for Mr Rolland: the passage from pain to pleasure in the creation and even the perception of an artwork, be it a poem or any other artistic or even scientific creation, is related to repression. Can you explain how the creative process and the passage from pain to pleasure is related to repression?


RESPONSE
JEAN CLAUDE ROLLAND

Portrait ou autoportrait ?
À propos des courants contraires du refoulement


En réponse à la question écrite du webinaire : comment le processus créatif et le passage de la douleur au plaisir sont-ils liés au refoulement ?

Appuyons-nous déjà sur cette déclaration du peintre George Braque recueillie par Tériade :

L’imprégnation c’est tout ce qui rentre en nous inconsciemment, qui se développe et se conserve par l’obsession et qui se délivre un jour par l’hallucination créatrice. L’hallucination est la réalisation définitive d’une longue imprégnation dont les débuts avaient remonté à notre jeunesse (…) Je constate que je peins aujourd’hui les aspirations qui m’avaient alors touché sans que je m’en aperçoive et qui m’avaient poursuivi depuis mystérieusement jusqu’à sa réalisation définitive (…) je découvre mon tableau sur la toile comme les voyantes voient l’avenir dans le marc de café.

Et admettons que ce soit ce qui a été refoulé chez le jeune Léonard dans sa prime jeunesse qui lui dicte, par projection, la représentation qu’il donne de Ginevra. Son propre évitement de la chose sexuelle le rapproche de son modèle pleinement engagé dans la philosophie de l’amour courtois. La douleur de celle-ci permet à Léonard de découvrir, de lire, sa propre douleur infantile, celle qu’on peut supposer qu’il a traversée lors de sa séparation violente avec sa mère Katarina – séparation dont Freud trouve encore des traces dans La Vierge avec sainte Anne. Pour cela plus que son regard, c’est la main du peintre, guidée par les émotions inspirées par son modèle, qui a contraint son pinceau à reconstruire cette mémoire perdue.

Cette entreprise suppose que le geste s’appuie sur les détails « conciliables » que le modèle a offert à son regard – c’est-à-dire des détails communs au modèle et à l’objet de mémoire dont le premier va devenir le « représentant » ; ces détails doivent se montrer plus insistants que d’autres puisqu’ils sont doublement chargés, de leur valeur propre, et d’une valeur de transfert leur venant de ce qu’ils représentent. Par exemple la pâleur réellement cadavérique du visage de la jeune femme pourrait avoir appartenu à la disparue que l’enfant aurait pleurée ; la moue qu’on peut dire par euphémisme « boudeuse » pourrait prendre la place d’un sourire soudainement figé, celui de la disparue ou celui de l’enfant découvrant cette disparition. Dans le visage devenu représentation et non plus mimesis de l’objet désiré, se mêlent les traits propres au sujet et à l’objet. C’est un patchwork des deux. Le troisième détail est le regard « perdu » où se fondent tous les ingrédients de la douleur ordinaire – peine chagrin déception tristesse plainte reproche colère – et qui se fondent comme en une complainte adressée au spectateur en un assemblage faisant résonner leur même tragique source. De sorte que cet assemblage solidarise les trois acteurs, le modèle (au centre) l’auteur (en amont) le spectateur (en aval). Le regard du modèle tient sous l’empire de sa détresse l’artiste et son spectateur.

Même si le spectateur n’en a ni l’autorisation ni les moyens, l’interprétation de l’œuvre, c’est-à-dire le déchiffrement de sa signification et de sa visée (passionnelle ou intellectuelle, amoureuse ou curieuse, esthétique ou psychologique) et sa décomposition de ce qui vient du passé ou de l’actuel, s’impose à lui pour se libérer de l’emprise par laquelle l’œuvre envoutante pourrait le hanter indéfiniment.

J’ai émis l’hypothèse qu’en reprenant ce même portrait avec Mona Lisa quarante ans plus tard, le peintre se libérait lui-même de l’emprise qu’avait exercé son premier modèle, et qu’en substituant à ce premier portrait triste un portrait heureux, jucundus, il avait converti sa noire et atone mélancolie en une mélancolie harmonieuse et « musicienne ». La mise en perspective historique du travail du peintre rend visible un mouvement spirituel que, par son statisme, chaque tableau pris isolément fige. Du sourire perdu de Ginevra à celui qu’esquisse Mona Lisa et qui lui vaut encore l’adulation des foules se devine un fil d’Ariane ouvrant à la recherche un chemin dans l’entrelacs d’émotions et de désir et de terreurs baignant intérieurement le peintre lors de l’exécution de ces tableaux. Du dernier, notons-le, le peintre éprouvera une immense douleur à devoir s’en séparer. Mérejkowsky, dont Le roman de Léonard de Vinci, inspira tant Freud, y rapporte cette scène :

Léonard menacé par l’Inquisition s’enfuit de Florence en compagnie d’un apprenti, n’emportant avec lui que le portrait de Mona Lisa et gagna le château d’Amboise où il savait que le roi François Premier l’accueillerait. À la vue du tableau le roi supplia le peintre de le lui céder. Celui-là s’y refusa tout d’abord ; puis sentant qu’il ne pourrait résister à pareille offre et pareil maitre ou parce qu’il souhaitait lui en faire don, il se rendit un soir tard à sa cour ; François et sa sœur Marguerite d’Angoulème le reçurent ; voici un fragment de leur mélancolique colloque :

- Seigneur prononça-t-il avec effort soyez miséricordieux, ne m’enlevez pas ce portrait ! Il est votre et je ne veux pas de votre argent mais laissez le moi jusqu’à ma mort ..
- Sire, intervint la Princesse Marguerite, exaucez la prière de Maitre Léonard. Il le mérite… Ne le voyez-vous pas ? Il l’aime encore
- Mais elle est morte
- Qu’importe ! N’aime -t-on pas les morts ?
Quelque chose brilla dans les yeux de Léonard de si enfantin et de si malheureux que le roi dit
- Ne crains rien mon ami, personne ne te séparera de ta Joconde.

La vue du modèle produit l’inspiration dont le premier temps est la projection automatique sur ce dernier d’une représentation du monde inconscient (la projection étant la seule voie offerte à cette dernière de se manifester). Le même mouvement dans la vie amoureuse donne le coup de foudre, dans l’exercice de l’art, l’inspiration. Inspiration parce que l’mage est aspirée à l’intérieur puis sera expirée dans l’œuvre. Inspiration et expiration relèvent toutes deux d’un même automatisme inconscient.

Mettons le zoom sur l’entracte ménagé entre ces deux temps que Braque préfère désigner d’ « imprégnation » et de « réalisation définitive ». On peut imaginer qu’il s’y produit instantanément une multitude d’opérations complexes et diverses dont on ne peut discerner la présence dans le produit fini. Imaginons un acteur qui, entre deux scènes, doit changer ses vêtements de cour contre un costume de guerre. Comme ce dernier doit, pour se faire, se déshabiller, la chose vue est d’abord décomposée afin que soient repérés les détails équivalents à ceux du modèle virtuel, que ceux-ci soient arrachés à la masse originelle et réservés. Après cette décomposition première, l’élément retenu sera intégré à la représentation qu’en construit le peintre et d’après laquelle il va réaliser son tableau. Cet art de l’intégration, qui manifeste l’immense talent du peintre, se voit dans le tableau final : ainsi de la pâleur sursignifiée, überdeutlich, dit Freud, qui tranche sur la configuration générale du visage ; on sent que ce détail est une pièce rapportée, il fait comme saillie sur la surface du tableau, le spectateur le ressent comme une étrangeté, il l’invite à une démarche interprétative en l’érigeant au rang de « signifiant d’image » ou d’« image signifiante ».

On remarque que ces signifiants affectent surtout la représentation du personnage, très peu le décor dans lequel celle-ci s’inscrit. Dans ce dernier on trouve tout au plus quelques informations sur le premier : le bouquet de génévrier, outre qu’il rappelle le prénom de la jeune femme, est une allusion marquée à la chasteté dont cet arbre et le symbole ; l’étang sur la droite pourrait évoquer sa mélancolie, sans doute ancienne, antérieure à sa rupture avec Bernardo Bambo. De ce dernier détail, dans la mesure où il serait la répétition furtive, déplacée, du même thème de la mélancolie éclatante qui ravage le visage de Ginévra, on peut se demander s’il ne mérite pas, lui aussi, la qualité de signifiant d’image. Cette répétition d’image indiquerait qu’une opération psychique se produit là : une reprise tempérée du refoulement des motions affectives et des représentations de désir qui ont engendré la « maladie mélancolique » éclatante manifestée par le visage.

C’est une chose mal connue encore que le refoulement est une opération très complexe qui admet différentes formes : à côté de ce qu’on range communément sous ce mot, d’une répression violente, durable possiblement réversible qu’au prix de techniques sophistiquées (telle que la fabrication du symptôme, ou la cure analytique), il existe des formes moins massives, ponctuelles, naturellement réversibles qui consentent au refoulé une voie vers le retour à la conscience et au langage, et qui accordent à la douleur le bénéfice de s’exprimer autrement que par l’hébétude. La douleur de Ginevra laisse sans voix le spectateur que je suis, l’étang me fait parler ; et il est probable qu’il en fut ainsi pour le peintre dont l’exécution du visage fait appel à une pure rhétorique de l’image tandis que celle de l’étang laisse voir une méditation qui en appelle à sa culture et à sa langue.

Ainsi entre la pâleur agonique du visage de Ginevra et la présence apaisante de l’eau dormante de l’étang, le discours d’image accompli par le peintre parcourt-il un chemin permettant à la formation inconsciente de désir - l’amour pour un objet perdu qui a initié en un temps immémorial le processus mélancolique- de refluer à la surface de l’esprit, de s’offrir à la parole et donc de se dégager partiellement de la douleur ; mais notons qu’on ne sort cependant pas de l’opération du refoulement : simplement le cours de celui-ci se corrige, s’adoucit, s’apprivoise. Ginevra s’extrait de son isolement ; sous son désespoir se dessine le retour d’un espoir qui « brille comme un brin de paille dans l’étable ».

Je veux conclure sur ceci : le refoulement est constamment présent dans la vie de l’esprit, ce qui a été une fois inconscient n’échappera plus à cet état, seulement par alternance et fugacement et, pour progresser vers la conscience, le refoulé devra emprunter cette même voie du refoulement dans un sens contraire. Nous en faisons incessamment l’expérience dans la cure : le discours de l’analysant ne va pas d’un seul tenant de l’inconscient au conscient, il procède, comme la nage de l’hippocampe par avancée et recul, élévation et plongée, révélation et obscurcissement. Ce mouvement de l’esprit superficiellement désordonné, erratique, Freud le désignait par les mots de Durcharbeitung, working through, « perlaboration ». Freud dans L’interprétation du rêve écrit :

Ces souhaits inconscients constituent pour toutes les orientations animiques ultérieures une contrainte à laquelle elles doivent se plier, qu’elles peuvent éventuellement s’efforcer de faire dériver et de diriger vers des buts plus élevés. Un grand secteur du matériel mnésique reste par suite de ce retard inaccessible à l’investissement préconscient .


Nous en retrouvons l’équivalent chez le peintre à qui l’inspiration, grâce à la projection, offre une saisie immédiate de son motif mais qui doit par son art, son obstination, le rendre visible lisible et aimable.

Le même refoulement qui engagea sa victime dans la détresse la plus absolue devient dans certaines circonstances alternatives - l’art, la cure - l’outil de sa guérison.

Updated By:   Dr. Dipl. Psych. Eléana Mylona
Updated On:   2020-03-23 02:30 PM
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Posted by:   Dr. Dipl. Psych. Eléana Mylona
Posted on:   2020-03-23 14:38 PM
Comments:   ENGLISH TRANSLATION is following
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Posted by:   Dr. Dipl. Psych. Eléana Mylona
Posted on:   2020-03-21 19:43 PM
Comments:   In response to the webinar's written question: How are the creative process and the transition from pain to pleasure related to repression?

Let us already rely on this statement by the painter George Braque collected by Tériade:
Impregnation is everything that comes into us unconsciously, that develops and is preserved by obsession and that is released one day by creative hallucination. The hallucination is the definitive achievement of a long impregnation whose beginnings had gone back to our youth (...) I see that I paint today the aspirations that had touched me then without my noticing and that me had continued mysteriously since its final realization (...) I discover my painting on the canvas as the visionaries see the future in the coffee grounds.

And let us admit that this is what was repressed in the young Leonardo in his early youth who dictates to him, by projection, the representation which he gives of Ginevra. His own avoidance of the sexual thing brings him closer to his model fully engaged in the philosophy of courtly love. The pain of this allows Leonardo to discover, to read, his own childhood pain, that which one can suppose that he went through during his violent separation from his mother Katarina - separation of which Freud still finds traces in La Virgin with Saint Anne. For this more than his gaze, it is the painter's hand, guided by the emotions inspired by his model, which forced his brush to reconstruct this lost memory.
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Posted by:   Dr. Dipl. Psych. Eléana Mylona
Posted on:   2020-03-21 19:51 PM
Comments:   This enterprise supposes that the gesture is based on the “reconcilable” details that the model has offered to its gaze - that is to say details common to the model and to the object of memory, the first of which will become the “ representative ”; these details must be more insistent than others since they are doubly charged, of their own value, and of a transfer value coming to them from what they represent. For example, the really cadaverous pallor of the young woman's face could have belonged to the missing woman that the child would have cried; the pout that can be said by understatement "sulky" could take the place of a suddenly frozen smile, that of the disappeared or that of the child discovering this disappearance. In the face that has become a representation and no longer a mimesis of the desired object, the features specific to the subject and to the object are mixed. It’s a patchwork of both. The third detail is the "lost" look on which all the ingredients of ordinary pain are based - grief grief disappointment sadness complaint reproach anger - and which melt as in a lament addressed to the spectator in an assembly making their same tragic source resonate. So that this assembly brings together the three actors, the model (in the center) the author (upstream) the spectator (downstream). The model's gaze holds the artist and his spectator under the influence of his distress.

Even if the spectator has neither the authorization nor the means, the interpretation of the work, that is to say the deciphering of its meaning and its aim (passionate or intellectual, in love or curious, aesthetic or psychological) and his decomposition of what comes from the past or the current, is imposed on him to free himself from the grip by which the captivating work could haunt him indefinitely.
I hypothesized that by taking this same portrait with Mona Lisa forty years later, the painter was freeing himself from the grip of his first model, and substituting for that first portrait. sad a happy portrait, Jugundus, he had converted his black and toned melancholy into a harmonious melancholy and "musician". The historical perspective of the work of the painter makes visible a spiritual movement that, by his statism, each painting taken in isolation. From the lost smile of Geneva to the sketch of Mona Lisa, who still deserves the adulation of the crowds, she becomes a thread of Ariane, looking for a way into the interweaving of emotions and desire and terrors bathing inland. the painter when performing these paintings. Of the latter, note it, the painter will feel immense pain in having to separate from it. Mérejkowsky, whose Leonardo da Vinci novel, inspired Freud so much, relates this scene:

Leonardo threatened by the Inquisition fled Florence with an apprentice, taking with him the portrait of Mona Lisa and winning the castle of Amboise where he knew that King François Prime would welcome him. At the sight of the painting the king begged the painter to give it to him. The first one refused; then, feeling that he could not resist such an offer and such a master, or because he wished to give it to him, he went to his court late one night; François and his sister Marguerite d 'Angoulème receive him; Here is a fragment of their melancholy colloquium:

- Lord said with effort be merciful, do not take away this picture of me! It's yours and I don't want your money but leave me until I die.
"Sire," said Princess Marguerite, "listen to Maitre Léonard's prayer." He deserves it ... Don't you see? He still loves it
- But she's dead
- It matters! Don't you like the dead?
Something flashed in Leonard's eyes so childish and so unhappy that the king said
- Fear nothing my friend, nobody will separate you from your Joconde.

The model's view is inspired by the first time being the automatic projection on the latter of an unconscious representation of the world (projection being the only way for it to manifest itself). The same movement in love life gives lightning, in the exercise of art, inspiration. Inspiration because the image is sucked inside and then expired in the work. Inspiration and expiration are both of the same unconscious automatism.
Let’s zoom in on the interval between these two times that Braque prefers to call “impregnation” and “final realization”. One can imagine that there is an instantaneous multitude of complex and diverse operations of which one cannot discern the presence in the finished product. Imagine an actor who, between two scenes, has to change his court clothes for a war costume. As the latter must, to do so, undress, the thing seen is first decomposed so that details equivalent to those of the virtual model are identified, that these are torn from the original mass and reserved. After this first decomposition, the element retained will be integrated into the representation that the painter builds and from which he will create his painting. This art of integration, which manifests the immense talent of the painter, can be seen in the final picture: thus the oversignified pallor, überdeutlich, known as Freud, which contrasts with the general configuration of the face; we feel that this detail is an added piece, it protrudes from the surface of the painting, the viewer feels it as a strangeness, he invites him to an interpretive process by raising it to the rank of "image signifier" or of "significant image".

We note that these signifiers mainly affect the representation of the character, very little the decor in which it fits. In the latter there is at most some information on the first: the juniper bouquet, apart from recalling the young woman's first name, is a marked allusion to chastity with which this tree and the symbol; the pond on the right could evoke his melancholy, undoubtedly old, prior to his break with Bernardo Bambo. From this last detail, insofar as it would be a furtive, out of place repetition, of the same theme of the bright melancholy which ravages Ginévra's face, one can wonder if he too does not deserve the quality of signifier of 'picture. This repetition of the image would indicate that a psychic operation is taking place there: a temperate resumption of the repression of the emotional motions and of the representations of desire which have engendered the dazzling "melancholic disease" manifested by the face.
Posted by:   Dr. Dipl. Psych. Eléana Mylona
Posted on:   2020-03-21 19:41 PM
Comments:   It is still a little known thing that repression is a very complex operation which admits different forms: alongside what is commonly classified under this word, a violent, lasting repression possibly reversible only at the cost of sophisticated techniques (such as the fabrication of the symptom, or the analytic cure), there are less massive, punctual, naturally reversible forms which allow the repressed a path to return to consciousness and language, and which grant pain the benefit of express yourself otherwise than by stupidity. Ginevra's pain leaves the spectator who I am speechless, the pond makes me speak; and it is likely that it was so for the painter whose execution of the face calls for a pure rhetoric of the image while that of the pond lets see a meditation which calls to his culture and his language .

Thus between the agonic pallor of Ginevra's face and the soothing presence of the still water of the pond, the image discourse accomplished by the painter travels a path allowing the unconscious formation of desire - love for a lost object which initiated in time immemorial the melancholic process - to flow back to the surface of the mind, to offer itself to speech and therefore to partially free itself from pain; but note that we do not, however, get out of the operation of repression: simply the course of the latter is corrected, softened, tamed. Ginevra extracts herself from her isolation; beneath his despair is the return of a hope which "shines like a sprig of straw in the stable".

I want to conclude on this: repression is constantly present in the life of the mind, what was once unconscious will no longer escape this state, only by alternation and fleetingly and, to progress towards consciousness, the repressed must take this same path of repression in a contrary direction. We incessantly experience it in the cure: the discourse of the analysand does not go in one piece from the unconscious to the conscious, it proceeds, like the swimming of the hippocampus by advancing and retreating, raising and diving , revelation and obscuration. This superficial disorderly, erratic movement of the mind, Freud called it by the words of Durcharbeitung, working through, "perlaboration". Freud in The Interpretation of the Dream writes:

These unconscious wishes constitute for all subsequent animate orientations a constraint to which they must comply, which they can possibly endeavor to cause to drift and direct towards higher goals. As a result of this delay, a large sector of memory equipment remains inaccessible to preconscious investment.


We find the equivalent of it in the painter to whom the inspiration, thanks to the projection, offers an immediate grasp of his motif but who must by his art, his obstinacy, make it visible legible and kind.

The same repression which engaged its victim in the most absolute distress becomes in certain alternative circumstances - the art, the cure - the tool of its cure.
Reply
Posted by:   Dr. Dipl. Psych. Eléana Mylona
Posted on:   2020-03-21 19:40 PM
Comments:   It is still a little known thing that repression is a very complex operation which admits different forms: alongside what is commonly classified under this word, a violent, lasting repression possibly reversible only at the cost of sophisticated techniques (such as the fabrication of the symptom, or the analytic cure), there are less massive, punctual, naturally reversible forms which allow the repressed a path to return to consciousness and language, and which grant pain the benefit of express yourself otherwise than by stupidity. Ginevra's pain leaves the spectator who I am speechless, the pond makes me speak; and it is likely that it was so for the painter whose execution of the face calls for a pure rhetoric of the image while that of the pond lets see a meditation which calls to his culture and his language .

Thus between the agonic pallor of Ginevra's face and the soothing presence of the still water of the pond, the image discourse accomplished by the painter travels a path allowing the unconscious formation of desire - love for a lost object which initiated in time immemorial the melancholic process - to flow back to the surface of the mind, to offer itself to speech and therefore to partially free itself from pain; but note that we do not, however, get out of the operation of repression: simply the course of the latter is corrected, softened, tamed. Ginevra extracts herself from her isolation; beneath his despair is the return of a hope which "shines like a sprig of straw in the stable".

I want to conclude on this: repression is constantly present in the life of the mind, what was once unconscious will no longer escape this state, only by alternation and fleetingly and, to progress towards consciousness, the repressed must take this same path of repression in a contrary direction. We incessantly experience it in the cure: the discourse of the analysand does not go in one piece from the unconscious to the conscious, it proceeds, like the swimming of the hippocampus by advancing and retreating, raising and diving , revelation and obscuration. This superficial disorderly, erratic movement of the mind, Freud called it by the words of Durcharbeitung, working through, "perlaboration". Freud in The Interpretation of the Dream writes:

These unconscious wishes constitute for all subsequent animate orientations a constraint to which they must comply, which they can possibly endeavor to cause to drift and direct towards higher goals. As a result of this delay, a large sector of memory equipment remains inaccessible to preconscious investment.


We find the equivalent of it in the painter to whom the inspiration, thanks to the projection, offers an immediate grasp of his motif but who must by his art, his obstinacy, make it visible legible and kind.

The same repression which engaged its victim in the most absolute distress becomes in certain alternative circumstances - the art, the cure - the tool of its cure.
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Posted by:   Dr. Dipl. Psych. Eléana Mylona
Posted on:   2020-03-01 21:45 PM
Comments:   A question for Mrs Rea: do you think that a poet’s psychoanalysis should include the psychoanalyst reading his/her books before or after or during the analysis? Or, maybe, it would be better to discuss the poems that are important for the poet with the psychoanalyst.


ANSWER:
All analysands are different and unique. And as alterity, it is up to all of them to shake our preconceptions and even our feeling of identity. The analyst must be open to this, open to listening to what is not known or spoken in order to be able to know and elaborate a speech. Prior knowledge ends up becoming something that cushions this much needed impact on the analytical process.
With any patient I try to open myself up to meet the one who comes to me, the way he comes. Whether he/she is an artist or not.
Many patient artists at some point feel the need to bring their work during the session. They often want to share some new work with me, want my testimony of a change, or want to exchange ideas about what we can see at work. They often bring something still unfinished, something to come.
I open myself to these clinical situations, understanding the work as any other material that appears in an analysis session; it can be spoken, dreamed, typed in whattsapp or elaborated as work of art.
And particularly, if we consider that the work is the subjectivity of the artist that is built as form, the artist and his work in the analysis session are one.
At this point I agree with Winnicott, who says that an analysis needs to offer the setting that the patient needs.
Updated By:   Dr. Dipl. Psych. Eléana Mylona
Updated On:   2020-03-01 10:11 PM
Reply
Posted by:   Dra. Silvana Rea
Posted on:   2020-03-02 11:42 AM
Comments:   We cannot lose sight of the fact that a work of arte is not a person.
But like the relationship between analyst and patient, between reader and work it is also about the encounter of otherness, that demands listening and requires understanding.
However, the artist requests an interpretation if he is in the process of analysis, even if he brings the work for his personal analysis. But the understanding produced in the session, the game of figurability experienced there, concerns him. Outside this scope, what is offered for interpretation (or reading) is his work - whose impact and reading also sets in motion the game of figurability and knowledge, but becomes an element of culture.
Both the artist on the couch and the work in the exhibition, as a relationship of otherness, create a space “between” as the analytical transferential space, a place of experience where the same becomes another through the ability to migrate from one to another.
Transiting the limits of the self to the other is a fundamental point of psychoanalytic ethics. And in this sense, understanding the work or the artist as otherness, as one who opens up to the other, leads us to the ethics of recognizing the other as another and not “another me” - which indicates the act of dominance and violence. This ethics that should guide us inside and outside the office.
Recently, there was censorship of the exhibition "Queermuseu: cartographies of difference in Brazilian art." Then, the internationally recognized and awarded artist Adriana Varejão suffered a violent web attack, photomontages of her in almost pornographic positions, and with bad words. See, as in Psychoanalysis, art leads us to openness to the other - who, if not considered in his right to otherness, could be a victim of ethical violation and violence.
Reply
Posted by:   Dr. Dipl. Psych. Eléana Mylona
Posted on:   2020-03-01 22:08 PM
Comments:  
Reply
Posted by:   Dr. Dipl. Psych. Eléana Mylona
Posted on:   2020-03-01 21:45 PM
Comments:   A question for Mrs Williams: do you think that the poet’s main pain is due to his power of projection and his constantly shifting persona that eats up his inner time?

ANSWER:
I shall try write a response that covers various of the original points raised. I think the poet has a special power of perception rather than projection; projection-introjection is the usual mechanism. The capacity to perceive external reality is founded on the degree to which we are in touch with internal reality. The poet’s pain derives from perception of the beauty of the world (including human and psychic beauty) and the attacks upon it, and he writes poetry basically because he has that particular talent and feels the need to use it to try to restore or repair the damaged beauty. He may well have personal life-pains, but these are absorbed in the general pain from heightened perception, which is both sharpened and relieved by the process of work (poetry). Shifting personae are like shifting vertices - they are ways of perception, from different angles, getting at the heart of the pain. But the poet does often feel his personal time is being used on behalf of humanity as a whole, and is of more benefit to others than to himself.
Updated By:   Dr. Dipl. Psych. Eléana Mylona
Updated On:   2020-03-01 10:13 PM
Reply
Posted by:   Dr. Dipl. Psych. Eléana Mylona
Posted on:   2020-03-01 21:44 PM
Comments:   Could the shifting persona be compared to multiple personalities?
Reply
Posted by:   Dr. Dipl. Psych. Eléana Mylona
Posted on:   2020-03-01 21:44 PM
Comments:   Would you say psychoanalysis indulges in a compromise formation between its artistic and scientific dimension, not being able to fully develop one and the other
Reply
Posted by:   Dr. Dipl. Psych. Eléana Mylona
Posted on:   2020-03-01 21:44 PM
Comments:   A question to all: do we leave our souls on the couch when we become analysands?
Reply
Posted by:   Dr. Dipl. Psych. Eléana Mylona
Posted on:   2020-03-01 21:43 PM
Comments:   A question for any or all of the panellists. Could you kindly develop the problem of inhibition of the expression of pain within the cure?
Reply
Posted by:   Dr. Dipl. Psych. Eléana Mylona
Posted on:   2020-03-01 21:43 PM
Comments:   For Silvana: Is there an ethical issue about interpretation of the work of art/interpretation in analysis?
Reply
Posted by:   Dra. Silvana Rea
Posted on:   2020-03-01 22:50 PM
Comments:   We cannot lose sight of the fact that a work of art is not a person.
But like the relationship between analyst and patient, between reader and work it is also about the encounter of otherness, that demands listening and requires understanding.
However, the artist requests an interpretation if he is in the process of analysis, even if he brings the work for his personal analysis. But the understanding produced in the session, the game of figurability experienced there, concerns him. Outside this scope, what is offered for interpretation (or reading) is his work - whose impact and reading also sets in motion the game of figurability and knowledge, but becomes an element of culture.
Both the artist on the couch and the work in the exhibition, as a relationship of otherness, create a space “between” as the analytical transferential space, a place of experience where the same becomes another through the ability to migrate from one to another.
Transiting the limits of the self to the other is a fundamental point of psychoanalytic ethics. And in this sense,understanding the work or the artist as otherness, as one who opens up to the other, leads us to the ethics of recognizing the other as another and not “another me” - which indicates the act of dominance and violence. This ethics that should guide us inside and outside the office.
Recently, there was censorship of the exhibition "Queermuseum: cartographies of difference in Brazilian art." Then, the internationally recognized and awarded artist Adriana Varejão, that was against closing the exhibition, suffered a violent web attack, photomontages of her in pornographic positions, and with bad words. See, as in Psychoanalysis, art leads us to openness to the other - who, if not considered in his right to otherness, could be a victim of ethical violation and violence.
Reply
Posted by:   Dr. Dipl. Psych. Eléana Mylona
Posted on:   2020-03-01 21:42 PM
Comments:   Could the speakers mention what prompted them to their particular selection of works for this lecture? Was today’s presentation the first analysis on that artist/writer?
Reply
Posted by:   Dr. Dipl. Psych. Eléana Mylona
Posted on:   2020-03-01 21:42 PM
Comments:   It seems to me that the crisscross with poetic and pictorial expression coming from our own inside world not from the poetic world outside. What do you think about that?
Reply
Posted by:   Dra. Silvana Rea
Posted on:   2020-03-01 22:59 PM
Comments:   The bases of human life and its process of subjectification are based on the presence of the Other. The subjectivation process is inaugurated by the identification movements, each constituting itself from the other.
Therefore, subject and world are inseparable - without disregarding the importance of singularities, which often provoke a move beyond the spirit of time.
Freud begins the clinical work and elaborates his theoretical body in line with the historical moment, in the midst of a crisis of Enlightenment reason and identity founded on the notion of identical, typical of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Today, the socio-cultural environment emphasizes narcissistic issues, and contemporary man suffers from emptiness, from chronic disillusionment, from the disenchantment of the world and, above all, from the incapacity of any relationship of otherness.
In art history we can clearly see that artistic movements are correlated with moments. We can say that it is in Romanticism that art focuses on the notion of self, of interiority. A self that takes the scene for the freedom of the artist's subjective expression in empathy with his theme (That is why I said that Keats, as a romantic poet, fits well by reading fro Bion and Meltzer).
At the beginning of the 20th century, the industrialization process divided society into classes with profound inequality. In addition to the advent of World War I, the feeling of self becomes increasingly fragmentary and in art, the “bitterness of beauty” becomes an epidemic among artists - particularly in Expressionism, but also in the artistic vanguards, of modernism in art.
In contemporary art, in line with the right of everyone to choose their lifestyle and can exercise, by experimenting with themselves, the construction of themselves, we have the exercise of plurality: body art, performance, hyperrealistic painting, graffiti.
In other words, the subject and the world are united and in a continuous relationship, both for conformity and resistance and opposition.
Reply
Posted by:   Dr. Dipl. Psych. Eléana Mylona
Posted on:   2020-03-01 21:42 PM
Comments:   Shifting persona. Could you say more about it please?
Reply
Posted by:   Dr. Dipl. Psych. Eléana Mylona
Posted on:   2020-03-01 21:41 PM
Comments:   I’d like to propose a consideration in addition to the paper by Meg Harris. The possibility of tolerating the paradoxes (Paulo C. Sandler), the impossibility to resolve the antinomies of life, would be the matrix of artistic inspiration, a fundamental way through man is in search to know the reality, internal and external?
Reply
Posted by:   Dr. Dipl. Psych. Eléana Mylona
Posted on:   2020-03-01 21:40 PM
Comments:   For Silvana: Could you please elaborate a bit on ethical issues about interpretation of the work of art versus interpretation in a psychoanalytical session?
Reply
Posted by:   Dra. Silvana Rea
Posted on:   2020-03-02 11:43 AM
Comments:   We cannot lose sight of the fact that a work of arte is not a person.
But like the relationship between analyst and patient, between reader and work it is also about the encounter of otherness, that demands listening and requires understanding.
However, the artist requests an interpretation if he is in the process of analysis, even if he brings the work for his personal analysis. But the understanding produced in the session, the game of figurability experienced there, concerns him. Outside this scope, what is offered for interpretation (or reading) is his work - whose impact and reading also sets in motion the game of figurability and knowledge, but becomes an element of culture.
Both the artist on the couch and the work in the exhibition, as a relationship of otherness, create a space “between” as the analytical transferential space, a place of experience where the same becomes another through the ability to migrate from one to another.
Transiting the limits of the self to the other is a fundamental point of psychoanalytic ethics. And in this sense, understanding the work or the artist as otherness, as one who opens up to the other, leads us to the ethics of recognizing the other as another and not “another me” - which indicates the act of dominance and violence. This ethics that should guide us inside and outside the office.
Recently, there was censorship of the exhibition "Queermuseu: cartographies of difference in Brazilian art." Then, the internationally recognized and awarded artist Adriana Varejão suffered a violent web attack, photomontages of her in almost pornographic positions, and with bad words. See, as in Psychoanalysis, art leads us to openness to the other - who, if not considered in his right to otherness, could be a victim of ethical violation and violence.
Reply
Posted by:   Dr. Dipl. Psych. Eléana Mylona
Posted on:   2020-03-01 21:40 PM
Comments:   Meg, in your book in the chapter Post-Kleinian poetry you write about the appearance of an aesthetic dimension in psychoanalysis, how can you explain this?

ANSWER:
About the aesthetic dimension in psychoanalysis – this appears in later Bion, though it is Meltzer who elaborates on it, first in The Psychoanalytic Process when he notices an aesthetic feeling mutually in analyst and patient towards the end of an analysis; later in the idea of aesthetic conflict underlying all developmental crises. Meltzer and others think of psychoanalysis as an art-science, that is, a mixture not as alternatives: the method is artistic, owing to reliance on reverie and transference intuition, and the results gradually add up to a scientific quest for knowledge. But since both depend on the capacity for observation and perception there’s not much difference. The main problem is pseudo-scientific pretensions, which interferes perception.
(My own interest in Keats goes back a very long time to my doctoral dissertation on Inspiration in Milton and Keats – which was rejected by Oxford University for being heretical! – though all my subsequent work is based on this.)
Updated By:   Dr. Dipl. Psych. Eléana Mylona
Updated On:   2020-03-01 10:15 PM
Reply
Posted by:   Dr. Dipl. Psych. Eléana Mylona
Posted on:   2020-03-01 21:39 PM
Comments:   The experience of creativity brings the poet to his/her pre-verbal relation with the mother?

ANSWER:
I meant to add, about the poet and pre-verbal relation to the mother - this is what the poets mean by inspiration and listening to the words of the Muse (internal mother/object). Because poetry, though in words, is a presentational form not a discursive form (Susanne Langer's distinction), it goes all the way back to the origins of language in pre-verbal musical communication, and its meaning exists on complex levels. Symbol formation is rooted in the first relation with the mother or maternal object, not the paternal object, and poets are in touch with this.
Updated By:   Dr. Dipl. Psych. Eléana Mylona
Updated On:   2020-03-01 10:16 PM
Reply
Posted by:   Lic. Silvia Wajnbuch
Posted on:   2020-02-25 12:21 PM
Comments:   Dear all,
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Reply
Posted by:   Dr. Emily Bilman
Posted on:   2020-02-26 16:28 PM
Comments:   To Mr. Jean-Claude Rolland:
Having established that repression is a given condition of any creative endeavor, I had asked you how this link functions and you answered "through memory". Bur memory is a multi-faceted mental faculty. Do you think that it is the synthesis of specific mnemonic functions that are involved in the creative act that combines emotional with long-term and short-term memories? Yet, even if so the objectification of emotions put down on paper or sculpted or in any other form of art provides a partial resolution of the oedipal condition. I would like to know your thoughts on my comment which is also liked to epistemology and our relation to knowledge, its interpretation, and application in general. dr. Emily Bilman
Reply
Posted by:   Dr. Emily Bilman
Posted on:   2020-02-26 16:27 PM
Comments:   To Mr. Jean-Claude Rolland:
Having established that repression is a given condition of any creative endeavor, I had asked you how this link functions and you answered "through memory". Bur memory is a multi-faceted mental faculty. Do you think that it is the synthesis of specific mnemonic functions that are involved in the creative act that combines emotional with long-term and short-term memories? Yet, even if so the objectification of emotions put down on paper or sculpted or in any other form of art provides a partial resolution of the oedipal condition. I would like to know your thoughts on my comment which is also liked to epistemology and our relation to knowledge, its interpretation, and application in general. dr. Emily Bilman
Reply
Posted by:   Meg Harris Williams
Posted on:   2020-03-01 11:29 AM
Comments:   I meant to add, about the poet and pre-verbal relation to the mother - this is what the poets mean by inspiration and listening to the words of the Muse (internal mother/object). Because poetry, though in words, is a presentational form not a discursive form (Susanne Langer's distinction), it goes all the way back to the origins of language in pre-verbal musical communication, and its meaning exists on complex levels. Symbol formation is rooted in the first relation with the mother or maternal object, not the paternal object, and poets are in touch with this.
Posted by:   Meg Harris Williams
Posted on:   2020-03-01 08:07 AM
Comments:   I shall try write a response that covers various of the original points raised. I think the poet has a special power of perception rather than projection; projection-introjection is the usual mechanism. The capacity to perceive external reality is founded on the degree to which we are in touch with internal reality. The poet’s pain derives from perception of the beauty of the world (including human and psychic beauty) and the attacks upon it, and he writes poetry basically because he has that particular talent and feels the need to use it to try to restore or repair the damaged beauty. He may well have personal life-pains, but these are absorbed in the general pain from heightened perception, which is both sharpened and relieved by the process of work (poetry). Shifting personae are like shifting vertices - they are ways of perception, from different angles, getting at the heart of the pain. But the poet does often feel his personal time is being used on behalf of humanity as a whole, and is of more benefit to others than to himself.

About the aesthetic dimension in psychoanalysis – this appears in later Bion, though it is Meltzer who elaborates on it, first in The Psychoanalytic Process when he notices an aesthetic feeling mutually in analyst and patient towards the end of an analysis; later in the idea of aesthetic conflict underlying all developmental crises. Meltzer and others think of psychoanalysis as an art-science, that is, a mixture not as alternatives: the method is artistic, owing to reliance on reverie and transference intuition, and the results gradually add up to a scientific quest for knowledge. But since both depend on the capacity for observation and perception there’s not much difference. The main problem is pseudo-scientific pretensions, which interferes perception.
(My own interest in Keats goes back a very long time to my doctoral dissertation on Inspiration in Milton and Keats – which was rejected by Oxford University for being heretical! – though all my subsequent work is based on this.)

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