Psychoanalysis as Work of Art

I cite from the recent book by the german-korean philosopher Byung-Chul Han “Die Erretung des Schönen”:

Jeff Koons says that the viewer of his works can only respond with a simple “Wow”. Apparently, his art calls for no critic, no interpretation, no hermeneutics, no reflection, no thought. It remains consciously infantile, banal, unshakeably relaxed, disarming, and comforting. It’s empty of any depth, any deepest depth, any deep meaning. Accordingly, its motto is “Embrace the viewer”. Nothing should shock him, hurt him, scare him. Art, Jeff Koons says, is nothing but “beauty”, “joy”, and “communication”. ...

(Koons:) "Balloon Dog is indeed an admirable object. It wants to empower the existence of the viewer. I often work with material that reflects, mirrors because it strengthens the viewer’s self-confidence. Of course it does nothing in a dark space. But, when one stands directly opposite the object, he is mirrored on it and affirms himself.” … The message of his art is: “The core is always the same: Learn to trust yourself and your history. This is what I want to convey to the viewer of my works. He should feel his own zest for life.”...

The art of Jeff Koons demonstrates a soteriological dimension. It promises redemption. The world of smoothness is … a world of pure positivity, where there is no pain, no trauma, no guilt. The sculpture "Balloon Venus" at birth is the Virgin Mary of Jeff Koons.

But, she doesn’t give birth to any savior, no homo doloris with a crown of thorns full of wounds, but to

a bottle of champagne, a Dom Pérignon Rosé Vintage 2003 which is in her abdomen. Jeff Koons depicts himself as the baptist promising redemption. It’s no coincidence that the 1987 series of sculptures is called “Baptism”.

And suddenly, the metaphor of psychoanalysis as art, seems to collapse as a metaphor: Art itself becomes therapy. It “embraces you”. It gives you “confidence” and “zest for life”. It syncs with the modern way of living where the dominant dimension of each activity has become prevention and therapy, care of the physical and mental health: diet, fitness, organic products and environment, shopping therapy, relationships with parents, partners, and our children. The starlight which leads this life espouses, with the words of a psychological slogan, a condition in which "I'm OK, you're OK". Even the negativity of a psychopathological diagnosis has been eliminated. The clients of this “new psychology” are no longer an isolated group of “neurotic” and “psychotic” people but all of us. All of us, who simply need a life coach who will help us discover and unleash the hidden forces within us, to develop our unlimited, as we are told, potential and achieve our goals. People are all good at heart, the new day is great, and our coaches are shining with kindness and the smile of success which they will impart to us:

Why is the slogan “I’m OK, you’re OK” illusory? Because I cannot ensure it. I can plan my vacation so that I’ll be OK in that place with that group of friends. But, whether this actually happens, if, when the time comes and I am there, with that group of friends, if it will be OK, it is completely open. If at the Jeff Koons’ show I will indeed feel his works embracing me and filling me with confidence, it is unknown. A representative of life coaching in Greece, Dr Nancy Mallerou,

writes on her website: “And you? Do you have unrealized dreams?” As with the example of the vacation and Jeff Koons, whether my dreams will be realized through life coaching, remains to be seen. Dreams are not realized as a crop of tomatoes and cucumbers - and even in this case it is not certain if I will actually have tomatoes and cucumbers. Yet, precisely because this pink bubble, this religion of positivity, is a religion, it’s not influenced by the facts of experience. And it will remain powerful, its star will shine till a child appears and exclaims that the king is naked...

Asymmetries

In 1905 Gertrude Stein, american writer and cultural figure, who lived in Paris, posed for Pablo Picasso. 90 sessions. Suddenly Picasso erased the head and said annoyed: “I can’t see you when I look at you”. He finished it next year, without her being physically present, after a trip to Spain where he came into contact with african, roman, and iberian sculpture. When someone commented that Stein doesn’t look like her portrait, Picasso replied: “She will”.

“I can’t see you when I look at you”. This constitutes the peculiarity of the psychoanalytic communication. The psychoanalyst will not see and will not listen as a camera and an audio recorder. Nor as the analysand means his words. He will perceive and communicate the images and the words in another light. There is a divider between them. In painting we can see the clear division between model and painter in many of Picasso’s paintings:

The easel is not simply the required object of the situation. It is emphatically the divider which doesn’t allow a direct connection (this is the reason for “doesn’t look like me”). It allows for a minimum of correlation (likeness), with a maximum of coexistence (“it will”).

This is the distinction the famous saying of Picasso refers to: “I don't search, I find.” Searching goes forward looking for connections. It is a cognitive function, such as e.g. a Freudian interpretation. “Finding” is not the result of “searching”, it’s something different.

Such anticipatory words on the part of the therapist sometimes come promptly, sometimes need time. In fortunate cases one will “look” like them, he will see himself in a new light. This happens because through the mouth of the analyst it is the analysand who speaks, but in a way that he has never spoken before, and this exactly is what makes it therapeutic. A freshness, things are being re-baptised, the world returns to its beginnings.

“She will look like it”. How does the artist know? And, in his way, the psychoanalyst? It’s said that in Paris, during the Second World War, at Picasso’s apartment, a German officer saw a picture of Guernica. “Did you do this?”, he asked. Picasso’s answer was: “No, you did.”

The artist lets things draw themselves. Cézanne, in his known conversation with Gaske, says about the painter:

His entire will must be silenced. He must mute all the voices of prejudice, he must forget, forget, be silent, become echo entirely.

And the psychoanalyst? His words and his silences? It is through his mouth that the analysand speaks and remains silent. The psychoanalyst is his echo. Echo of words, the analysand's words, yet words which, like I said, were never spoken by him. But he will look like them. According to Martin Heidegger we could speak of "vorerunning care" (vorspringende Fürsorge).

Stein’s demand might be a portrait that looks likes her. This is what happens with the so-called “demand” of the people who turn to psychotherapy. They have an image of themselves, of what they know, or what they want to become, freed of any distress. Along the way things change, usually without even realizing it.

First and last time

Thrasybulos Georgiades was an historian of music, and a musician himself who lived in Germany for the most part of his life. In a book published after his death, he writes about the act of the musician, the musical performance:

Since music knows only Now to be stable, all...can happen only as an act. Yet this act, music par excellence, is time. Time forces me, on its tightrope, on which I move unavoidably, to balance on my current position, in Now, like a tightrope walker. But, by doing so I find myself in the domain of the practical, of decision, of ethics, of responsibility: you must, must dare. I constantly decide for the next Now, and I shape it.

These could also be the words of a psychoanalyst. It belongs to the rhythm of the conversation, where each correspondence to what is being said and silenced, everything that needs to be said, needs to be said now. Shortly before, shortly after - the chance is gone. This is what Georgiadis’ “tightrope walking” refers to. “You must dare”, we’ve heard. This Must is not imposed by someone or required by a principle. In this case “Must” is impersonal. It means something like “it’s appropriate”, an appropriateness that exists in things themselves, such as e,g, the “must” in Maria Nefeli by the poet Odysseas Elytis:

True bravery

must be baptised in the open sea

and bring something from the north wind

on the eighth floor of the apartment houses

“You must dare”. Here daring does not constitute a heroic act. It’s more about trusting the moment, without a safety net. As in musical performance, or in psychoanalysis, where a phrase cannot be postponed, leaves no room for second thoughts, where what is to be done, will be done now or never.

At the moment of action everything ends: references to the past and the future, judgements, comparisons, self-observation. Acting is the real Now. In acting the bridges with before and after are broken. It’s like a broken flower, concentrated on Now, shining thanks to its transience. It is from this point that the art of Ikebana starts.

The japanese philosopher Keiji Nishitani

wrote a short essay on Ikebana.

When someone cuts off a flower from the root of its life, in some way he cuts it off from its soul. It is thus depleted of the instinctive drive, the appetitus. For the flower this cutting off brings on death. It makes it die deliberately. This death is different from decay which for the flower would be a sort of natural death. One brings on death for the flower before it lives to the end. [...]

The broken flower, which no longer desires anything, abides its time. It lives entirely in the present with no regard for before and after. It becomes entirely time with no resistance against it. Wherever it goes with time, reconciled with it, time doesn’t pass. [...] A peculiar duration arises in the midst of time, a duration without continuity, which doesn’t represent a timeless vastness, no stopped time. It is a manifestation of that finitude which is calm in itself, bears itself, doesn’t stray towards "infinity", which in a way has forgotten itself. [...] Ikebana literally means: "enlivening the flower". This is a unique way of keeping it alive. One keeps the flower alive, assisting it towards a deeper vitality by bringing death on it. Ikebana makes the finite shine without the light of infinity. Nice here is the reconciled, tranquil finitude, calm in itself, a finitude shining without looking beyond itself. [...]

In the light of Ikebana the act mentioned here, reveals another dimension. It’s not an act led by the “instinctive drive”, the appetitus, it’s not an act led by desire, striving to satisfy it. Regarding the psychoanalytic session Freud states the “principle of abstinence”: analysand and analyst are asked to abstain from any satisfaction of their desires: their conversation is warded off from what Aristotle calls orexis (ὄρεξις), the appetitus. Initially this often sounds as prohibition, but with time it becomes a way of communication - and sometimes a way of life. A conversation without intentionality, that is without nostalgia and desire. Thus, it acquires more the character of Ikebana. It becomes a residence in transience.

Nature

In 1673 the french philosopher René Descartes

published a study titled Discours de la méthode, ("A Discourse on the Method") in which he writes the following:

… I perceived it to be possible to arrive at knowledge highly useful in life; and ... by means of which, knowing the force and action of fire, water, air, the stars, the heavens, and all the other bodies that surround us, ... also apply them in the same way to all the uses to which they are adapted, and thus render ourselves the lords and possessors of nature.

These words constitute a manifesto of science. Science pursues the taming of nature. Science places nature at the service of man. Because nature itself doesn’t care about man. If e.g. a pneumococcus enters my bronchi, it is very "natural" to get pneumonia, and it’s very "natural" that sometimes it goes away, while others times it can lead to respiratory failure and death.

As I was processing today's speech the following picture popped up:

A nurse at Dromokaitio Psychiatric Hospital showed it to one of the inmates and they talked about it. At some point the inmate says:

The earth belongs to no one. People didn’t give land to this kid to walk on but earth gave him a spot to die. Earth doesn’t discriminate. It accepts everyone. White, black, yellow...everyone.

Science looks for ways to tame this "natural" course, e.g. of pneumonia with the use of antibiotics. Of daily life, e.g. with a better immigration policy. Or with barbed wire at the borders and locks on our homes. We don’t want nature to proceed in its course "naturally". We will attempt to tame it in our interest.

Art has an entirely different relation to nature. This is because art, like poetry, philosophy, like psychoanalysis breathes in what ancient philosophers called scholè (σχολή), ease: a freedom from the pressure of the needs of everyday living, in the narrow and broader sense (and this is not at all identified with wealth). Our life is dominated by uneasiness, it doesn’t have the ease of scholè. It has worries, questions, and problems. Each time looking for a different way to occupy and dominate nature. Art is friendly to nature. Cézanne says:

Art has an harmony parallel to that of nature. Those who say that the artist is always inferior to art are foolish. He is parallel to it. Unless of course he deliberately interferes. All his intention must be silence. He must silence all the voices of prejudice within him, he must forget… And then the whole landscape will be engraved on the sensitive plate of his Being.

Here “must forget” could mean: to be freed from occupation, for scholè. The German composer Wilhelm Killmayer says about the comparison of scholè to occupation:

The neighboring, and actually the coexistence of forms of thought which deviate from one another and seemingly exclude one another, so to speak the constantly insoluble contradiction, corresponds to the nature of life, but not to that of pursuit, and conventional thinking always seeks to find the one solution that rules out all others, the winning solution.

To the "nature of life" belong divergent, contradictory things, which nevertheless come together in a rich, friendly coexistence. Scholè is in tune with nature as to carelessness, indifference to usability, usefulness, best interest. There is no "pursuit" which thanks to the "winning solution" excludes what it regards as "negative" and ends up operating in a Waste Land. In a work of art the "nature of life" celebrates. In the program of a concert in 1987 in Frankfurt, Killmayer writes about his works:

As my associations are dear to me, the aesthetically repulsive is stimulating for me. The melodrama, the cute, the messy, the trivial, the brazen, the gentle, the nasty, the unpredictable, from which the thunder comes, or the trampy.

5 Romanzen, Scherzo lento - trimmed

And Rimbaud:

I loved idiotic images, the paintings over the doors, stage scenes, clowns’ panels, posters, public illuminations, unfashionable literature, church Latin, erotic books with poor spelling, novels of our grandmother’s day, fairy tales, children’s books, old operas, empty refrains, botchy rhythms.

As it is known, the basic rule of psychoanalysis is also called "method of free association". The analysand, Freud writes,

shouldn’t announce to us only what he says intentionally and willingly [...] but also anything else that is provided by his self-observation, anything that comes to his mind, even if it unpleasant for him to say it, even if it seems trivial or even foolish,

Of course Freud speaks of a “method”, which has the element of "pursuit". e.g. the revelation and the interpretation of the unconscious with the aim of the "winning solution". I will not discuss this further, I will only point out that in that in the climate of scholè, the calling for "free associations" could be a calling for the friendliness which is characteristic of nature, in which all the incongruous concerns of someone can freely coexist. And this friendly, free coexistence, to the extent to which one will familiarize himself with it, is therapeutic, too.

The uninterpreted

Art, at least the art that moves me, as I said, seeks nothing. Thus, for the work of art itself, the Why and How, interpretations are meaningless. They are not applicable. The musician John Cage:

… I love sounds exactly as they are. I don't need them to be anything more than what they are. I don’t want them to be psychological. I don’t want a sound to be a bin, or president, or in love with another sound. I want it to be simply sound.

When things are what they are, the concern that wants them to hide something else disappears, to refer to something else, to be judged as good or bad, useful or useless etc. Then, each thing, even a sound, becomes an abode.

Moki

is a german visual artist who lives in Hamburg. In 2009 her series titled "How to Disappear"

was exhibited in San Francisco. In an interview there she says:

I work with intuition because this is more interesting to me than illustrating an idea. There is no message that can be expressed in words, and no need to interpret ...

When things are as they are, then the gaps remain as they are, gaps. They are not concealed, they are not bridged, they are not interpreted. Andro Wekua,

is a Georgian refugee who lives in Berlin and New York. In an interview of 2014, on the occasion of the exhibition Dark Matter in London, he speaks of Sukhumi, the city he abandoned as a child, and which he depicts in a structure from the series Pink Wave Hunter:

He says:

Today in Sukhumi, due to lack of resources, they renovate only the front of these empty, crumbling buildings. Actually this was one of the first starting points of the project. Another starting point is that ever since I left Sukhumi I see the city in my dreams. In my dreams I always look for ways to leave. So one day I started painting the streets, just to check how much I remembered. Anything I couldn’t remember and couldn’t find in photos, remained empty. You can see this in the sculptures too.

So if “thinking” means that driven by some intention, some pursuit I judge, compare, connect, calculate, then the artist doesn’t think. In the interview mentioned above the journalist asks Wekua:

Your new sculpture is of a girl riding a wolf

How did you come up with that idea?

Wekua:

I don’t have a clear reason. I feel it’s good to do it. In a way it’s something open. If I knew what I was doing, I wouldn’t do it.

When you don’t know, when you don’t think, when you don’t interpret, when things are left to be as they are, then a work of art might emerge. But then, in fortunate times, the psychoanalytic conversation itself might acquire a similar character. It would remain attribution, description of what is being said and silenced, but description through a magnifying glass. And such times, subtly, over time, can render the vision sharper, and this in turn can change a whole life.

Then also the things concerning someone might come to completely new correlations and appear in a totally new light. And here psychoanalysis is not alone. The poet T. S. Eliot writes about the composition of a work of poetry:

The poet's mind is in fact a receptacle for seizing and storing up numberless feelings, phrases, images, which remain there until all the particles which can unite to form a new compound are present together.

The relation to Collage is impressive. Wekua says in an interview:

...Collage for me is more about that someone today, from a great time distance, with so much information, can create something contemporary. He can collect different things and bring some form of order. They come loose from their context and come together otherwise, so that something entirely different emerges.

A snapshot from a psychoanalysis, an example of how things "can unite to form a new compound" (Eliot), "come loose from their context and come together otherwise, so that something entirely different emerges" (Wekua):

[A man speaks with restrained despair:] - I almost can’t bear it. - And if the time comes that you can’t bear it indeed, how would you see it then? - I will kill myself. How? Have you thought about it at all? - I have. Either with the motorcycle, at a turn in Varkiza, which I like, or jumping off a rock. - What do these ways have, which appeal to you more than others? - The acceleration. It’s what I like the best, especially on the plane, when it takes off. - What is it about the acceleration; - It presses you at your seat...you can’t do anything. - So if you could break loose from the fairy tale, that you could and should do something everywhere, you could have such experiences while alive. - Lately I experienced this a couple of times… How nice that things can be stronger sometimes!

Residing in sounds and images

It’s not so simple to let things be as they are. They cannot be represented e.g by sensory perception and the camera. There is a vision in which you don’t see with your eyes and a hearing in which you don’t hear with your ears. Plato already knew this.

How does one see?

The composer Wilhelm Killmayer says in a welcoming speech for the freshman students in Musicology at the University of Munich:

… try to find a sound for the blue of the sky ...

He encourages them to see a color not by sight but by hearing. Once, Killmayer set to music many of the late poems of Friedrich Hölderlin. In two of them we hear about the blue of the sky:

Der Winter

In lieblicher Bläue...

How does one see? Alberto Giacometti:

Whether it comes out wrong, or comes out right - eventually is of no importance: I certainly make one step ahead. Whether I go forward failing, or succeeding, anyway for me it is of benefit. Perhaps no work emerges, pity. But, having learned to see a bit better: I would have benefitted and the world around me will be richer.

Vision not as a function, as an instrument for moving around the world, but as a way of living, residing in things. I reside in sounds, I reside in images, I reside in names. Freud described the manner in which the analyst listens as "free-floating attention". He means it rather by exclusion, i.e. he speaks of an attention which is not focused, like e.g. that of the doctor who has to make a diagnosis and recommend a course of treatment. Yet now the "free-floating attention" could be an attention in which sounds and images open up someday, and actually become abodes, places of residence to which the artist and the poet move in their way, the psychoanalyst in his way, but also the analysand in his way, and wander in them. So for example the word "I like". I heard once:

- I like this … You don’t know how the word resounds in my body … It reaches my toes … I felt that I had no right ...

Absence

A painting of Picasso from 1969.

I would like to highlight an element which is certainly present in many of his paintings: the abolishment of the dimension of face and profile, front and back. All views are displayed in the forefront. In these paintings Picasso has no sense for absence. His painting shows all; it is, if I may say so, pornographic - and this is not just about his prostitutes and his nudes.

Perhaps so are his eyes too - intense and wide open.

Exaggerating to some degree I would imagine that they wouldn’t shut even in his sleep. To this extent, it’s close to traditional psychoanalysis which discovers the unconscious in order to - reveal it, in theory, completely. The freudian interpretation, if taken to extremes, is like a Picasso painting - it displays everything: Leaves nothing hidden.

The alternative to pornographic, panoptical presence is not abstract art, because it remains in reference to the naturalistic, as its abstraction. It’s clearly seen in Picasso’s drawings of a bull:

The alternative to this panoptical presence is neither the abstract art which distills and isolates feelings. In 1913, Kasimir Malevich presented his well-known Black Square:

He writes about it:

When, in the year 1913, in my desperate attempt to free art from the ballast of objectivity, I took refuge in the square form and exhibited a picture which consisted of nothing more than a black square on a white field. The critics and, along with them, the public sighed, "Everything which we loved was lost. We are in a desert...Before us is nothing but a black square on a white background! But the desert is filled with the spirit of non-objective feeling.

Now when I speak of absence I am not within the range from the panoptic to the abstract. Let us hear of absence as an absence of substance. The poet Giorgos Seferis writes about a sculptor:

who saw the sky red

and struggled with the voracious space

who gritted the sculpture in his hands

small and even smaller and thinner

till nothing.

“Nothing” in Alberto Giacometti’s figures is the nothing of substance. Because "substance", already from the time of Plato and Aristotle, names the permanent, the stable, the emphatically focused on itself. This is what is missing here.

Figures of absence. They come when the artist himself, in this sense, is absent. He is absent when he doesn’t hold on to his own substance but is consumed in the gaze, is consumed in the work. Giacometti, in his essay My reality from 1957, writes:

I make paintings and sculptures … attempting - with the means that currently respond better to me - to see and better understand what surrounds me, to understand things better, so that I can be as free as possible and ardent to consume myself, to consume myself in what I do as strongly as possible

I remind you of the words of Cézanne about the painter:

All his will must be silenced. He must become echo entirely.

The Greek word for "image", “eikon” (icon) comes from the ancient verb eiko (εἴκω), which means to give way, yield up, allow. Only when the gaze recedes, i.e. it doesn’t see in reference to itself, e.g. its experiences, its interests, comparisons with its own, when the gaze is stripped from its substance and becomes absent, then things appear in their own glow. Cézanne: Still life with apples, towel and milk jug:

And Andro Wekua:

(2014 Untitled)