Sunday 24 January 2016

Aesthetic and Object Relations 1:Klein

Melanie Klein

- Austrian-born psychoanalyst who emigrated to Britain and revolutionised the field

- Focussed on much earlier mother-infant relationships than Freud
- Further in and further back
- Much more primitive mental processes
- Founder of object relations theory (+ Fairbairn, Winnicott)
- Moved focus away from drives and towards relationships (with internal/external
objects)

- Pioneer of child analysis, play analysis

- Object relations begin from birth
- Anxiety, envy
- Internal world, internal objects and phantasy Very influential worldwide, especially in
Britain

Child Analysis and the Play Technique

- Depressive position
- Paranoid/schizoid position
- PS <> D. Part/whole objects
- Counter transference and Projective identification
- Envy and Gratitude
Symbol Formation and Phantasy

- Melanie Klein: anxiety and symbol formation

- Hanna Segal: symbolic representation,symbolic equation and mourning
- Importance of symbol formation and phantasy to all forms of art and creativity
- Dependence of creativity on the depressive position

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- Art as a means of reparation, to repair and recreate the lost, damaged and destroyed
object

- Susan Isaacs: unconscious phantasy: 'phantasy is the primary content of

unconscious mental processes

- Internal objects, phantasy, the body and the inner world

- Phantasies underly all mental activity, including the form and content of thinking,
perception, and creativity

Projective Identification

- The analyst feels he is being manipulated into playing a part...in somebody elses
phantasy and there is a need to shake ones self out of the numbing feeling of
reality (Wilfred Bion)

- 1. Phantasy of projecting 'part of oneself into another person of that part taking over
the person from within'

- 2. Pressure exerted via interpersonal interaction for recipient to think, feel, act in
manner congruent with projection

- 3. Projected feelings 'psychologically processed by the recipient', then 'reinternalized

by the projector.' (Ogden 1992)

- Importance of countertransference
- Projective identification and art therapy
Hana Segal: Kleinian Aesthetics

- Form rather than content. Seeks to address the 'central problem of aesthetics'
- What distinguished good art from other human activities, including 'bad' or superficial
art

- Explores what making and experiencing art means to artist and spectator
- Working through the depressive position fundamental basis for creativity. This is the
painful recognition that what was most hated is also part of what one most loves

- The part-objects become a whole object, recognised as separate. Can be mourned

and therefore symbolised

- Believes Klein's depressive position can help 'isolate in the psyche of the artist the
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- factors which enable him to produce a satisfactory work of art' and will 'further our
understanding of the aesthetic value of the work of art, and of the aesthetic experience
of the audience'

- Failure to work through the depressive position results in artistic inhibitions (or bad,
imitative or pretty art)

- True artists dont imitate life but create a whole world of their own as a result of the
need to recreate the world lost/ destroyed in phantasy

- Segal cites Proust as a good example of an artist compelled to create by the need to
recover his lost past

- In Remembrance of Things Past, he describes the process of his own creativity

- All Proust's lost loved objects (parents, grandmother, Albertine) are recaptured,
brought back to life

- Elstir the painter says 'It is only by renouncing that one can re-create what one loves.
Thus for Segal 'creation is really a re-creation of a once loved and once whole, but
now lost and ruined object, a ruined internal world and self

- If depressive position is not fully worked-through, Segal artistic inhibition is likely

resulting in the production of an 'unsuccessful artistic product' (superficially 'pretty',
inauthentic)

- Artistic creativity and sexuality: Creating a work of art is a psychic equivalent of procreation. It is a genital bisexual activity necessitating a good identification with the
father who gives, and the mother who receives and bears the child

- What psychological factor distinguishes a successful artist from an unsuccessful one?

- Segal starts with Freud's claim that the artist finds his way back to reality from his
world of phantasy and moulds his phantasies into another kind of reality

- Segal adds that the artist has an acute reality sense in two ways: towards his own
inner reality, and the reality of his medium

- The artist must become highly sensitive to the nature, needs, limitations and
possibilities of his material

- Neurotic as well as the 'bad' artists, use material in an omnipotent, magic way
- True artists have a greater capacity to tolerate anxiety and depression
- We the audience are gripped by such works...we identify with the authors
confrontation with the pain of his shattered inner world and obtain reassurance from
his ability, through intense psychic work, to overcome it and depict it in his work of art.

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- ...the pleasure derived from a work of art is unique in that it can only be obtained
through a work of art ...all aesthetic pleasure includes unconscious reliving of the
artist's experience of creation

- Viewer must complete work internally: our own imagination must bridge the last gap
- Tragedy
- Form, content and the frame
- Beauty and ugliness
- Eros and Thanatos
- the homage to Eros would be formless were the heavier gift from Thanatos excluded
(Adrian Stokes)

- beauty is nothing but the beginning of terror, which we are still just able to
bear (Rilke)

Wilfred Bion: Thinking, Alpha Function, Creativity and 'O'

- PS<>D and the 'selected fact'

- Projective identification and communication
- Schizophrenia and linking. L, H, K and -L, -H, -K
- Alpha function and beta elements
- Container-contained
- Pre-conceptions and conceptions
- Thoughts in search a thinker
- Negative capability (Keats) and reverie Transformations in 'O'. Nameless dread
- Without memory or desire
- Meltzer, geography of phantasy, aesthetic conflict. Psychoanalysis as art
Adrian Stokes: Carving and Modelling

- I find in the clouds today the splendid shapes of T'ang figures

- Because it combines the sense of fusion with the sense of object-otherness, we might
say that art is an emblem of the state of being in love

- Art teacher, poet, painter. 7 year analysis with Klein

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Sunday 24 January 2016

- Modelling' and 'carving' cut across historical boundaries and artistic forms, linking
artworks from a number of different epochs and media

- Carving (D), Modelling (PS)

- Initially celebrated carving' against 'modelling' (D over PS)
- Later came to appreciate the importance of modelling
- Echoing Bion's appreciation of the PS<>D oscillation
- Each kind of art symbolises the benign aspect of the relationship while the darker
aspect of the relationship was not ignored

- Modelling celebrates the oceanic eeling, the 'invitation in art' to merge, but it also finds
a place for the splitting and the attacks that accompany it

- Carving celebrates the self-sufficiency of the whole object, but there is also a place for
depression, the painful recognition of the otherness of objects.

- Invitation in art (pull, enveloping factor). Incantatory process

- Communicative aspect of projective identification
- Merger/fusion <> separation/mourning
Ehrenzweig: The Hidden Order of Art

- something like a true conversation takes place between an artist and his own work.
- Art involves conflict between analytic consciousness and syncretistic
unconsciousness. Three main stages.

- 1. Projection of fragmented parts of self into work (schizoid scattering).

- 2. Unconscious scanning forming arts substructure. Fusion between artwork, artist
and medium and a diffuse, scattered attention comparable to the childs global vision
or analysts free floating attention. (manic-oceanic)

- 3. Secondary revision, partial re-introjection of work back into surface ego.

(depressive)

- Oscillating rhythm and the transformative potential of art

- 'Secondary revision' gradually integrates once chaotic and disturbing art, the shock of
the new. Our conscious minds wish to create good gestalt which appeals to rationality
and order. Unconscious chaos is replaced by surface harmony

- Pollock's action paintings with their 'enormous loops and droplets which dazzled the
eye', a 'sudden eruption of art's unconscious substructure'
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- But after a few years the 'inevitable defensive reaction of the secondary processes set
in', and such painting now seems to be more of a deliberate exercise in the creation of
decorative and pleasing patterns

- Great art can resist being completely encased but can be reinterpreted anew with
each generation

- Great art has its source in the unconscious and our own unconscious reacts readily to
it...The immortality of great art due to inevitable loss of its original surface meaning

- Death and rebirth

- The creative individual is one whose ego is flexible enough to undergo the temporary
dissolution of its surface, rational faculties, to reach deeper levels of unconscious
sensing, which cannot be apprehended on a conscious level

- Far from being mad, the artist must have sufficient ego- strength (adaptability rather
than rigidity) to allow a temporary dissolution of reality.

- Both Ehrenzweig Marion Milner stress the fear accompanying this surrendering to
(what seems to the surface, conscious ego, at least) the chaos of undifferentiation

- Psychotics lack a sufficiently flexible ego to reach down to deeper undifferentiated

levels, constructing rigid (schizoid) defences to protect his fragile ego from the
perceived threat of disintegration and chaos

- 'Psychosis is creativity gone wrong'

- The creative person has sufficient 'trust' (or 'faith' in Bion and Winnicott's sense) in the
unconscious and its processes Importance of medium for frustrating artists conscious
intentions

- 'Creative surrender'
- The 'dying god' (Frazer)
- Birth, death, love (Grave's 'White
- Goddess' of kills her son-lover)