Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy in Central London

Erasurerevelation (photo) by Aleksander Rodchenko
The title could be interpreted as a command not to see what you are seeing

Art against Stigma

This is the title of an exhibition staged in Krakow, Poland in September 2004 which attempted to dispel the tendency to segregate the art of people with mental disorders from mainstream art.

What initally occurs to me is: who's to say that 'mainstream' artists may not suffer from mental disorders. Think only of Van Gogh. Who could be more mainstream than Vincent Van Gogh, posthumously of course. Well, Van Gogh is known to have been born with a brain lesion, was epileptic and suffered from severe mental instability. His friend Gauguin recounted how Vincent chased him around the room with an open razor during his visit to Arles, and it is well known that he self-harmed, cutting off part of his own ear. Latterly he was admitted to Saint Remy asylum. After he was discharged he shot himself in the chest 'for the good of all' and died of his wound days later. He was 37. It could, of course, be argued that it was his lack of recognition that drove him to desperation and that had he achieved fame in his lifetime it might have been a different story.

Less well know is Louis Wain (died 1939). His paintings of cats tracked the course of his schizophrenic illness. The German expressionist painter Ludwig Meidner claimed that some of his work, those fascinating and disturbing canvasses of his, were painted by a power other than himself while he stood aside and watched it happening. Chagall who knew Meidner said he was talented, but mad. And what do Egon Schiele's contorted and emaciated figures communicate?

Then again the category mainstream could be said to include only those who have arrived at their artistic creativity spontaneously and that the practice of their art was for them the primary mode of communicating a truth, that could not be adequately arrived at by reason, put into words nor find a possible expression through human relationships. This in itself might argue for the presence of a psychic difficulty which might result in a state of creative isolation.

The problem of using the criterion of unaided development as grounds for a fundamental distinction between mainstream and outsider art (in the sense of products that come out of being subjected to a process of art therapy) is that it would exclude any mainstream artists who had been mentored to discover their true creative expression by other artists, friends, entrepreneurs or by parents possessing a capacity for 'anticipatory identification'. And indeed did not begin to take up drawing until he was twenty-eight at the persuasion of his brother Theo and only started to paint at the suggestion of his cousin-in-law Anton Mauve, himself a painter in the following year.

Perhaps the only material consideration to differentiate the two categories is the training and technique which the mainstream artist possesses and has to overcome and modify to arrive at making his own mark, while, for weel or woe, the artist-as-patient, (or should that be patient-as-artist?) with no such leg-up starts with a clean slate. Once again Van Gogh is a notable exception to this rule. He was self-taught and had no formal trraining. This, of course, is a sign of the strength of his motivation. At any rate, this distinction with reference to the tools has no bearing on whether or not the outome may be considered art.

The un-named picture below shares with the majority (52/62) of the works in the exhibition its origin in projects to provide people who have difficulties expressing their feelings and troubled thoughts with an alternative means of expression. Who is to say it may not their primary means of expression. Thomas McMahon then a third year medical student at Dublin visited the exhibition Art against Stigma. Pawel Kaminski's picture that stuck in his mind from among all the freshness and vividness of the exhibits. It is a disturbing painting, as powerful a communication as Edvald Munch's famous The Scream, Louis Wain's ultimate cat paintings, or the nightmarish masked throngs that are the hallmark of James Ensor?

Perhaps you won't like this picture, but what criteria would you use to establish that it is not art?

The real distinction as to whether an object be art or not can be illustrated with reference to Louis Wain's career. Wain painted cats, sentimentalised kittens, fat cats. He was extremely accomplished at it. He also went in for anthropomorphic fantasies you'd imagine would hang well in nurseries, the homes of elderly ladies of taste, alongside their Beatrix Potters, or even, and perhaps more likely, on the staircases of gentlemen's clubs.

This rather begs the question as to whether it was art. This is a far cry from the universal sensibility of Van Gogh - The Potato Eaters, his spring orchards and summer cornfields of the south, the sunlit rooms and enchanted night skies, whereas Louis Wain was locked into an obsession which gradually incapably of holding at bay his true disturbance. His cat-motif began to disintegrate and transmute into florid and disturbing hallucinatory patterns still derivative of the hypnotic stare of the cat.

Where the 'artistic' communication is no more than a replica of an internal illness it is more aptly considered an illustration of a symptom, or a symptom itself, than a symbol of of a creative apprension of life, which communicates universally, and this is a yardstick by which to appraise, not only the creations of mental patients in art therapy, but those of 'mainstream artists' as well.

Turning to the body of Van Gogh's creative work, it is clear from the context, the selection of subject and the devotion to beauty and humanity that his vision, despite his personal slant in which a turbulence and a sadness can be detected, is always in relation to the external reality of folk, land and space, inside and out.

When I visited the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam one thing that struck me, looking at his almost monochrome paintings from 1885, was the force of the brush strokes. By 'force' I mean 'intention'. What I seemed to be noticing was the intriguing way in which the smeared paint both revealed and concealed at one and the same time. Those scales of paint which carried the image, suggested there was something behind them; they screened an invisible yet palpable world from which, I thought, the painter felt alienated. Here was the clue. He had turned what could not be lived into great art.

The fact that he died - shot in the chest with a revolver in a room in L’Auberge Ravoux at Auvers-sur-Oise - in 1890, aged 37, eight years after starting to paint, is a measure of the fierce intensity of his creative oeuvre. I am dimly aware of the aura of a myth over which the figure of an haruspex, or voice of destiny, presides, but can get no further myself than a wistful glance at the view from the window of an inn, and to be able to say that for Van Gogh to paint was life, 'for the good of all'.

An Awakened Symbol

The phrase is derived from the penultimate stanza of the tenth and last of Rilke’s Duino Elegies in an online translation by A.S.Kline.

But if the endless dead woke a symbol in us
see they would point perhaps to the catkins
hanging from bare hazels or they would intend the rain,
falling on dark soil in spring-time.

Another translator: Albert Ernest Flemming has it as

But were these timeless dead to awaken an image for us,
see, they might be pointing to the catkins, hanging
from the leafless hazels, or else they might mean
the rain that falls upon the dark earth in early Spring.

To me ‘endless dead’ has the sense of finality, a condition that does not change. Also it carries both the cumulative and retrospective aspect – the dead vastly outnumbering the living no matter how far back you go in imagination. And this mirrors Rilke’s priority as I shall show. By comparison ‘timeless’ seems to yield less meaning. In Flemming’s translation ‘mean’ implies that the dead are the object of thought (they ‘signify’) and removes initiative from his ‘pointing’ and makes it an index, whereas ‘intend’ in the first translation defines ‘point’ as an action of the dead, in line with the ambiguity of ‘dead woke’ compared with the more literal ‘awaken in us’. I like both ‘dark earth’ and ‘dark soil’. I think I marginally prefer ‘soil’ not because of the connotation of contamination, but that it is out and out, ironically more pure while ‘earth’ is somehow more conceptual. All the quotations from the Duino Elegies that follow are from the Flemming version.

Some time ago I was writing down some thoughts on photography when these lines came to mind. In particular I was interested to explore why it was that darkness appealed to me in photographs – the darkness, for instance, in some of the shots from a Japanese film called Eureka I saw almost by accident – a train all but invisible passing in the night. Scenes like that have stayed with me – you hear the sound, there’s a stray light, and the enveloping dark. I was wondering why – why a picture like the one I took in a village harbour in Cornwall on an October night in 2005 when conspiring gale force south east onshore winds and full spring tides reached a peak – so appealed to me. Was it to do with death, ‘going into the dark’ as Eliot puts it in East Coker, ‘Oh dark dark dark. They all go into the dark.’ And with that thought came the words from the tenth:

So then, more recently, searching for a title for a photographic assignment I came up with Awakened Symbol. I realised then that I was far from clear what it meant. It was of course linked in my mind with the notion of the unconscious where a symbol is the only way of knowing what is unknowable. Illumination, in the sense of an understanding of myself comes not from what is already in the light (my personality, intellect or received wisdom) but what the psychoanalyst W.R.Bion called ‘a beam of intense darkness’. In his book Attention and Interpretation Bion refers to this as follows: ‘This is the dark spot that must be illuminated by blindness. Memory and desire are illuminations that destroy the value of the analyst’s capacity for observation as a leakage of light into a camera might destroy the value of the film being exposed.’ The idea I had for a photographic assignment had an obscurity about it; in the darkroom of the camera’s interior something was to form symbolic of what otherwise could not be referred to. The old old question: ‘is photography art?’ was being asked again. Perhaps only if it was itself an awakened symbol Under the terms of the title, if I see something and want to photograph it it must be because I am confronted by something ineffable and then the product must find an analogical title which goes only some small way to referring to what is symbolised. Here is an example of my son’s work from that assignment:

How does this qualify for inclusion? The image seems to be a figurehead. But stop! This is not simply a photograph of an established symbol; the photograph is itself a symbol. Look how it is lit. See how it seems to emerge from the background darkness, the fields of death, where, it is suggested, it belongs and from which it appears only briefly – like a symbol which cannot be grasped and held. Notice how the appearance of a religious ikon is only illusory; there is the breast in the frayed vest and the hint of the Scottish clan warrior in the plaid and buckler, a sexually ambivalent figure. Notice the petulant aggressive expression and the eyes which could be those of a blind person or concentrated on reckoning. Does the photographer sense a connection with something in himself which is as yet unformed or in process of becoming, something of the mystery of sexuality and collective identity. Is it like an initiation motif where boy become man through a testing rite? Well, any of these things to me make it a brilliant interpretation of an ‘An Awakened Symbol’.

I want to go on to think about the idea of an awakened symbol in the light of the tenth Elegy. In this great poem a reversal takes place. What is assumed to be the living reality of nature is treated as a symbol while the reality which it symbolises by nature is death. Death wakens a symbol. Endless death wakens. Natural beauty is the symbol, shot through with the dark – dark earth (la terre foncée), the rain or the ambiguity of light fresh green hazel catkins hanging from bare branches. Silent death is what is symbolised. The spirit of Lament...

Shows him the tall trees of tears,
the fields of flowering sadness,
(the living know them only as softest foliage);
show him the beasts of mourning, grazing-
and sometimes a startled bird, flying straight through
their field of vision, far away traces the image of its
solitary cry.

The so-called lover of natural beauty, according to Rilke, does not suspect either the sorrow that drenches it or the terror it masks. In the first Elegy he says

For beauty is nothing but the beginning of terror
which we are barely able to endure and are awed
because it serenely disdains to annihilate us.

An ‘awakened symbol’ then bears something of the dark and terror that is missing in a more lyrical voice.
In thinking about this I realise that the meaning of these well known lines from the opening of Rilke’s Duino Elegies has always eluded me just as, right from my youth Wordsworth’s statement from Tintern Abbey has and is one reason why I have never forgotten it –

For I have learned To look on nature, not as in the hour Of thoughtless youth; but hearing oftentimes The still sad music of humanity, Nor harsh nor grating, though of ample power To chasten and subdue.

But in the light of reading Rilke I think I do: Wordsworth saw nature as a symbol of ‘something far more deeply interfused’ related to what might be called ancestral tears.
What Rilke looks in the face is what I would call a consummation of regret. And it is as if that were central to intimacy with another human being. In his great tenth Elegy

Oh, how will you then, nights of suffering, be remembered
with love. Why did I not kneel more fervently, disconsolate
sisters, more bendingly kneel to receive you, more loosely
surrender myself to your loosened hair? We, squanderers of
gazing beyond them to judge the end of their duration.
They are only our winter's foliage, our sombre evergreen,
one of the seasons of our interior year, -not only season,
but place, settlement, camp, soil and dwelling.

The key seems to be in the phrase: ‘We squanderers of gazing beyond them to judge the end of their duration’ This is not mourning. Rather it is an attachment to the idea of a time when what is believed to be the desired state will be over – while it is still happening. This may not be particularly conscious, in fact something the lover is fairly oblivious of, may sense in wistful moments, or it stands behind a love of melancholy music, or the fact that things grave are experienced as more profound than gaiety. And this attachment heightens the intensity of the relationship. To put that another way, a fantasy of an ideal happiness in the meeting of souls persists which serves to obscure a substitute wish for the sorrow of things being over, and which serves to cover over how that wish itself brings about a destruction of a moment by moment consummation. This obscure priority Rilke makes clear in the final stanza of the tenth.

And we, who always think
of happiness as rising feel the emotion
that almost overwhelms us
whenever a happy thing falls.

There is an echo here in these lines of those in Act 1 of Twelfth Night

If music be the food of love, play on;
Give me excess of it; that, surfeiting,
The appetite may sicken, and so die. —
That strain again; it had a dying fall:
O, it came oer my ear, like the sweet sound
That breathes upon a bank of violets,
Stealing, and giving odour! Enough! No more.
'Tis not so sweet now as it was before.

What weaves through the Duino Elegies is a death wish.

My notion of an ‘awakened symbol’ has much in common with lines from literature that have arrested me, not because I have grasped their meaning, but because they have grasped me as containing a symbolising of something in me that could not be spoken of except in just that way, something ‘deeply interfused’, something dark and possessing an unbearable beauty. For the photograph to act symbolically in that way it has to carry something ineffable which may not be able to be unpacked further and which the photographer may not have been aware of when he took the picture. It is a communication at a deep level between the photographer and the viewer driven by the force of that which in both parties –maker and viewer – seeks a symbol. The rabbit seems transfixed as though wrapped in silver foil. Is it terror he experiences or an apprehension of beauty?

Rilke’s ‘youth’ led by the beautiful Lament, touched by her gentle bearing, her shoulders, her neck, the hint of noble ancestry, follows her into the shadows until, weeping, she bids him farewell. ‘Alone, he climbs the mountains of primeval pain. Not even his footsteps ring from the soundless fate.'