Reflections on the Aesthetic Experience

Psychoanalysis and the uncanny

Gregorio Kohon

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781138795426
• eBook ISBN: 9781317636151
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism Theory

Interest in the relationship between psychoanalysis and art - and other disciplines - is growing. In his new book Reflections on the Aesthetic: Psychoanalysis and the uncanny, Gregorio Kohon examines and reflects upon psychoanalytic understandings of estrangement, the Freudian notions of the uncanny and Nachträglichkeit, exploring how these are evoked in works of literature and art, and are present in our response to such works. Kohon provides close readings of and insights into the works of Franz Kafka, Jorge Luis Borges, Louise Bourgeois, Juan Muñoz, Anish Kapoor, Richard Serra, Edvard Munch, Kurt Schwitters, amongst others; the book also includes a chapter on the Warsaw Ghetto Monument and the counter-monument aesthetic movement in post-war Germany. Kohon shows how some works of art and literature represent something that otherwise eludes representation, and how psychoanalysis and the aesthetic share the task of making a representation of the unrepresentable.

Reflections on the Aesthetic is not an exercise in "applied" psychoanalysis; psychoanalysis and art are considered by the author in their own terms, allowing a new understanding of the aesthetic to emerge. Kohon's book makes compelling reading for psychoanalysts, psychotherapists, art therapists, literary and art critics, academics, students and all those interested in the matter of the aesthetic.

1 Considering “The ‘Uncanny' ”

DOI: 10.4324/9781315758435-1

We ourselves speak a language that is foreign.

Sigmund Freud, “The ‘Uncanny’ ”

… truth cannot be made up of pure facts.

Alain Badiou, The Idea of Communism

Clifford Geertz argued that, if it is to be understood, any form of social activity has to be incorporated into the texture, quality and consistency of a particular mode of life, defined as a specific manner and style of perceiving and thinking. Thus, in order to understand anything that concerns human society, one has to take into consideration the particular intimacies and the specific elements of what Geertz called “local knowledge” (1983). Whether it is a matter of the moral imagination in a society, its cultural and structural system, the question of symbolic power, issues of law, the concept of common sense, works of art or the construction of the self and identity, everything of cultural significance is always a “local matter”, a “way of being-in-the-world”, which those things both promote and exemplify. In the specific case of works of art, they materialise a “way of experiencing, [bringing] a particular cast of mind out into the world of objects” (1983, p. 99).

I regard the realm of aesthetics as a distinctive order that allows us to identify objects that are concerned with art and literature, their specific modes of experience and forms of thought, their visibility and intelligibility (Rancière, 2000, pp. 12–13; 2003, pp. 75–76).¹ This is a broad characterisation – one, among others, that offers enough conceptual ambiguity to be used constructively. But it is not a definition or an explanation of aesthetics.² It does not require the detailed exposition of a specific psychoanalytic framework.

Throughout his life, Freud expressed his admiration for literature and the arts, but not without a certain ambivalence. On the one hand, he thought that the explanation of artistic genius was beyond the reach of psychoanalysis; on the other, he held that psychoanalysis extended its understanding to other endeavours, such as philosophy, religion, anthropology, linguistics, literature and art. Reading some of Freud’s writings on this subject, we could come to believe – mistakenly – that truth in a work of art is only discernible through the application of psychoanalytic theories and interpretation (Kofman, 1970; Kohon, 1999a). This conception gave rise, during the early optimistic, pioneering years of the psychoanalytic movement, to a proliferation of papers and books on the interpretation of artists and their art, as if their creations were comparable to patients’ symptoms or dreams told to a psychoanalyst. Psychoanalytic reductionism prevailed.

The application of psychoanalytic theories to art has always presented serious methodological difficulties. In this book, I do not offer psychoanalytic theories as comprehensive explanations of art and literature nor a psychoanalytic reading of culture; I will not attempt to unravel the creative process, the privileged realm of the artist. I am not concerned with the question of aesthetic values nor am I interested in the unconscious meaning of a specific work of art. Instead, I would like to explore how, in the perception and appreciation of art and literature, the viewer or reader is confronted by an emotional disruption provoked by the object, threatening the natural distinctions by which we normally live. A crucial dimension of uncertainty appears to be demanded by the aesthetic object.

I suggest that the different and multiple meanings contained in and brought to mind by the artistic and the literary object, the mixture of past and present experiences of the subject evoked by the encounter with the object, the elements of irrationality which probe and challenge the rational efforts of our perceptions, all provoke in us a feeling of strangeness. The recognition of something familiar goes hand in hand with the perception of something unknown, new, something other.

In his article on the uncanny, Freud suggested this: Freud’s interpretation may or may not be correct, but I would like to take the structure of his statement for the consideration of the dynamics of the familiar (heimisch)/unfamiliar (unheimlich). From this point of view, I would argue that, in the “way of experiencing” the aesthetic, the sense of the present, what makes us feel real and there, in the here and now, coexists with the reactivation of what George Eliot defined as our “powerful imagination”: “… far reaching memories and stored residues of passion, bringing into new light the less obvious relations of human existence” (Eliot, 1879, chap. 13, p. 197). Fantasies, needs and desires that belong to another scene, to another time in the past, defy the sense of comfortable familiarity that we assume in everyday life. This constitutes a condition of the aesthetic experience, where the self of the individual is not fully in charge.

It often happens that neurotic men declare that they feel there is something uncanny about the female genital organs. This unheimlich place, however, is the entrance to the former Heim [home] of all human beings, to the place where each one of us lived once upon a time and in the beginning … the unheimlich is what was once heimisch, familiar…

(Freud, 1919, p. 245)

Art, history, literature and psychoanalysis have each a distinct, meaningful place in the wider repertoire of interrelated and mutually influential cultural creations. They are all part of the same cultural world but they do not constitute a harmonious unity nor do they share a common structure. They embody different modes of experience: each of these modes demands from the subject what Edward Said, in a different context, described as “… a knowing and unafraid attitude toward exploring the world we live in” (1998, p. 109).³

This is clearly different from a “theory of beauty” that would account for the existence of art or a philosophical reference that would demarcate the limits of its presence in the world. I would suggest that there is no general concept of art, which “ceaselessly redefined itself” (Rancière, 2011, p. xi). The aesthetic experience can never be conceived as essential or universal; rather, it may best be understood through the recognition and acceptance of its very ambiguity. It resists not only definition but also exclusive interpretation; attempting to define what it is meant by the concept of aesthetic experience is not easy.⁴

The experience of contemporary art, as discussed in these pages, offers itself as the object of multiple interpretations. There is a constant dynamic shifting of meaning that varies and fluctuates within the individual, from one individual to another, from one culture to another.

Contemporary art, in particular, demands from the spectator an active participation. Freud’s reference to the philosophers’ definition of the aesthetic attitude as that in which “… we are not trying to get anything from things or do anything with them … but … we are content with contemplating them …” (Freud, 1905, p. 94) does not help us here. We may not ask anything from it but the object demands something from us. Lucien Freud declared, The spectator has to be willing to engage with this challenge, this invitation that comes from the work of art. It is not just a matter of passive contemplation; the aesthetic object does not allow us to be distant; it insists on the subject being involved and implicated.

What do I ask from a painting? I ask it to astonish, disturb, seduce, convince… .

(quoted in L. Freud, 2012)

In the short story “Like Life”, Lorrie Moore offers a description of how one of her characters, dashing around an art gallery, would stop for a long while in front of a work that she liked; she would feel that it was pulling her in, dancing with her for a while, and then letting her go (1990, p. 168). The spectator is, indeed, pulled in, drawn by the aesthetic object, brought in to be part of a dance, even if for a little while, and then set free. The encounter with the object may be a playful occasion – playful but nevertheless serious, where there are no guarantees. For each of us, the engagement entails a complex participation, full of potential ambiguity, irony, pain, memories, logical relations, emotions, revelations, anxieties and confusion.

Traditionally, many psychoanalytic authors have tended to link the aesthetic experience with the vicissitudes of the encounter with the primary object. Nevertheless, it may be something more mysterious and complex than this. There is an excess in the experience itself that defies simple definitions. It is conceivable that the existential memory present in aesthetic jouissance takes place in the context of experiences other than that mythical primary encounter. Its significance may have started somewhere else, in a psychic place other than with the mother, and progressively moved back and forth along different paths. Possibly only later on in life would its meaning have emerged retrospectively.

While definitions are problematic, the aesthetic moment and its jouissance require interpretations. But such interpretations are not to do with the revelation of underlying meaning, a hidden truth, or through the employment of a preconceived, psychoanalytic or any other kind of theory. This is not a negative reference to psychoanalytic theory per se; in fact, I cannot think of any other theory that would better account for the complexity of the human mind. Nevertheless, in general terms, interpretations here should not be understood by reference to the intention or motivation of the one who produces the painting or the sculpture. In this book, interpretations are presented as a way of “thickening the plot”, of engaging more fully with the object of enquiry, of entering into a dialogue. They require “a moment of dynamic creation rather than passive discovery” (Egginton, 2007, p. 3). The approach should be dynamic but not intrusive – imaginative and yet never complete. Geertz claims that, in contrast to a paranoid’s delusion or a swindler’s story, interpretations cannot be fully coherent (1973, p. 18). In any case, as most psychoanalysts are aware, interpretations do not require or even represent a consensus. They make things more interesting; they complicate matters. At best, they resemble the translation from one language into another.

It is in and through the very process of the translation of a poem, for example, that we discover the original text. There is always something unprecedented and unexpected in a translation: something in the original text demands an interpretation that may recover for the reader the uniqueness of that text. But no single version establishes the “truth” of a poem; this would need to be re-discovered or perhaps even created. Furthermore, each new version may add original and creative insights. Contained in the dialogue between the translator and the translated (as, in the analytic dialogue, between the analyst and the patient), more than one way of carrying out the task will be discovered. As Umberto Eco has argued, the translator will have to be sufficiently ruthless: “… only by being literally unfaithful can a translator succeed in being truly faithful to the source text” (Eco, 2003, p. 5, italics in original; see also Rockhill, 2000).

Comparable to the analytic situation of transference or the daily occurrence of dreams, the experience of the aesthetic (whether for the writer/artist or the reader/spectator) will always be autobiographical – and it will always be suffused with saudade.⁵

The aesthetic experience can never be considered finished nor complete; there will always be the possibility of future development and change. In every new experience of an aesthetic object, there will be further opportunities for new narratives. A painting might not be seen in the same way each time it is viewed. The same short story offers different meanings, new descriptions of its characters, additional accounts of the plot. The conscious and unconscious memory of previous aesthetic experiences increases the possibility of new perceptual responses. When I refer to “the memory of previous aesthetic experiences”, I do not mean a nostalgic longing, originating in maternal primitive experiences. The responses might make their presence known via unexpected emotional eruptions, which may include disturbing and poignant sentiments. It might be a reaction not easily discernible by the subject: it may be experienced and yet not consciously noticed; even if noticed, it might not be susceptible to being thought about. It might denote something unknown but this does not necessarily make it new.

For this to occur, the subject has to be ready and willing to undergo some form of depersonalisation, to experience some sense of unreality; the subject must risk, however briefly, losing the boundaries that keep the self safe and sound. This may involve anxiety, the fear of which may inhibit the capacity for aesthetic experience; trepidation and apprehension may do away with joy. The subject might suffer a genuine estrangement from the self, which, as Freud specifies in “The ‘Uncanny’ ” (1919), is elicited by the reappearance of something familiar that has been repressed.

I refer to Freud’s work concerning estrangement and the uncann...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle Page
• The New Library of Psychoanalysis
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Illustrations
• Foreword
• Acknowledgements
• No symphony was ever written by a committee
• 1 Considering “The ‘Uncanny’”
• 2 Louise Bourgeois and Franz Kafka: Of lairs and burrows
• 3 Kafka meets Borges: From geography to temporality
• 4 Juan Muñoz and Anish Kapoor: Of drums, double binds and non-objects
• 5 From churches to sculptures: The Matter of Time and the work of Richard Serra
• 6 Edvard Munch’s vampires: The effects of Nachträglichkeit
• 7 Monuments and counter-monuments: Willy Brandt in front of the past in Warsaw
• 8 The broken sequence of the aesthetic: The work of the negative
• References
• Names Index
• Subject Index