Art and Mourning

The role of creativity in healing trauma and loss

Esther Dreifuss-Kattan

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• eBook ISBN: 9781317501107
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Art General

Art and Mourning explores the relationship between creativity and the work of self-mourning in the lives of 20th century artists and thinkers. The role of artistic and creative endeavours is well-known within psychoanalytic circles in helping to heal in the face of personal loss, trauma, and mourning.

In this book, Esther Dreifuss-Kattan, a psychoanalyst, art therapist and artist - analyses the work of major modernist and contemporary artists and thinkers through a psychoanalytic lens. In coming to terms with their own mortality, figures like Albert Einstein, Louise Bourgeois, Paul Klee, Eva Hesse and others were able to access previously unknown reserves of creative energy in their late works, as well as a new healing experience of time outside of the continuous temporality of everyday life.

Dreifuss-Kattan explores what we can learn about using the creative process to face and work through traumatic and painful experiences of loss. Art and Mourning will inspire psychoanalysts and psychotherapists to understand the power of artistic expression in transforming loss and traumas into perseverance, survival and gain.

Art and Mourning offers a new perspective on trauma and will appeal to psychoanalysts and psychotherapists, psychologists, clinical social workers and mental health workers, as well as artists and art historians.

1

ALBERTO GIACOMETTI, RAINER MARIA RILKE, LOUISE BOURGEOIS

Time and timelessness in art and mourning

In this first chapter, I will discuss the concept of time as it relates to art and mourning and place particular emphasis on the change in one’s perception of time brought about by the end stage of life or in trauma. I will argue that the act of creating, in particular through writing and sculpting, can serve as a powerful tool that allows the person facing death and trauma to work through the painful mourning that comes with loss or with the end stage of life. This occurs in large part because one’s perceptions of time can change while being actively involved in artistic expression. Temporalization is no longer measured in a linear way, but becomes transformed by the mystery of death, bringing the movement of time towards transcendence and infinity. This change allows for time to stand still and resemble the eternal, establishing a unique relationship between the subject and his or her future.

I will illustrate this central thesis with a close analysis of vignettes of the life and works of the bishop, writer, and philosopher St. Augustine in late antiquity, and with vignettes from the life and works of the artists Alberto Giacometti and Louise Bourgeois, as well as by discussing a letter and some poems by the German poet Rainer Maria Rilke. These four examples will illustrate various ways to relate to time, demonstrating the desire and attempt to achieve eternity.

Writers such as Marcel Proust (1914–1918), William James (1890), Virginia Woolf (1925), Oscar Wilde (1891), Jorge Luis Borges (1941) and W. G. Sebald (2001), to mention a few, all tried to penetrate time’s secrets as well. Proust (1914–1918) demonstrates that artistic activity always embraces the imaginary and thus is an experience of time regained. Proust addresses a new conception of temporality, “a round-trip journey from past to present and back,” as Julia Kristeva explains (1996, p. 168). In Borges’ short story, “The Garden of Forking Paths” (1941), he tells a suspenseful story that occurs in an absurd world where time is not singular. The narrator must imagine that he has already accomplished a difficult task in the future “as irrevocable past,” even extending this duplication to space and time, “one sinuous spreading labyrinth that would encompass the past and the future” (Bal, 2003, pp. 119–130). The psychological aspects of time have been explored by philosophers such as Immanuel Kant (1781), Edmund Husserl (1905), Søren Kierkegaard (1972), Martin Heidegger (1962), Henri Bergson (1922), Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1962), Paul Ricœur (1983) and others.

One of the first thinkers to explore the intersection of artistic creation and the collapse of time into eternity was St. Augustine (354–430 A.D.), the bishop and writer from the Hippo Regius, located in today’s Algeria. I would like to briefly turn to Augustine’s exploration of time in order to illustrate the ways in which one ancient thinker used the art of writing as a means to overcome time and face his impending death.

Time is discussed separately as physical time and human time, but as Yuval Dolev (2007) points out there is only one time: the discussion of the same present. “The distinction between the past, present and future is merely an illusion,” writes Albert Einstein (Calaprice, 2000, p. 75), addressing the metaphysical question about time posed by Kierkegaard who tells us that “the present moment is that ambiguity in which time and eternity touch each other” (1972, p. 89). Einstein’s special theory of relativity denies the existence of absolute time of the present moment, as two simultaneous events would be seen occurring at different moments when viewed from different reference points. Thus time is not independent of space, but the rate of time and measure of space, is affected by the force of gravity. Therefore, each observer has his own measure of time. Time and its measure involve an interplay between subjective and objective time. Husserl (1905) sees the world necessitating an inner time-consciousness, since he believes that with every conscious experience or action, there exists a subjective time experience, a facet of the experience of the self. Kant in his Critique of Pure Reason (1781) suggests that space and time are not objective realities existing independently of the mind, but rather are created by the mind. The postmodern philosopher Derrida fragments the time experience of a pseudo-continuity of discrete elements. He thinks that the fragmentation of time goes hand in hand with the dismantling of the self as an entity through time (Meissner, 2007).

In Augustine’s Confessions, as he lay on what he believed would be his deathbed, he looked back and memorialized his life. By writing down the memories of his life, Augustine captured his past in a physical book, which he hoped would survive him and both teach and influence many religious men in the future. In this process of recording his past, Augustine placed particular emphasis on Book 13, the philosophical and religious reflection of time and eternity.

“What is this time?” wrote Augustine, “If no one asks me, I know; if I want to explain it to a questioner, I do not know. But at any rate this much I dare affirm I know: that if nothing passed there would be no past time; if nothing were approaching, there would be no future time; if nothing were there, there would be no present time. . . . On the other hand, if the present were always present and never flowed away into the past, it would not be time at all, but eternity. . . . Thus we can affirm that time is only that it tends towards not being” (letter 11.14).

Augustine, a man of 43 years at the time of his writing, was confined to his bed due to debilitating inflammations. “As for my spirit,” he wrote to a friend, “I am well through the Lord’s good pleasure . . . pray for me, that I may not waste my days and that I may bear my nights with patience” (letter 38.1). When Augustine came close to death during this time, he wrote that he walked “in the valley of the shadow of death” (letter 38.1). In fact, however, he continued to live for another 30 years. At the time of his death, he had written a total of 93 books; Confessions was number 33 (Brown, 1993).

In the passage quoted above, Augustine struggles with the measurement of time, and the paradox of the being and non-being aspects of time. Later he places past and future within the present by adding the idea of memory and expectation, the idea of the fantasy of a long future and a long past.

How then does Augustine perceive eternity? He combines the mourning of the finite with the celebration of the absolute. He counteracts the fear or threat of the end of time with its images of exile, vanity, darkness and night with the opposite templates of home, living a full life, light and eternity (Ricœur, 1983).

Eternity, Augustine said, is “forever still, nothing moves into the past: all is present at once” (letter 11.13). “It is eternity which is supreme over time, because it is never ending present that you are at once before all past time and after all future time. Your years are completely present to you all at once, because they are at a permanent standstill” (letter 13.16).

Augustine’s elaborations of eternity lead us to an understanding of the experience of time and timelessness in art and mourning. While absorbed with writing his autobiography at the precise period when he felt threatened by a devastating illness and close to death, Augustine counteracted the flux of time by engaging in the creative and time-extending act of writing. Through this act, he was able to reach a sense of being one with the world and to counter his fear of being abandoned through death.

I will differentiate between two different experiences of time within the artistic process. First, I will discuss the Greek concept of chronos, representing chronological, measured time, as a countable duration that can be perceived objectively. Kairos, on the other hand, is the Greek concept of time as due measure, representing fulfilled time in the timeless atmosphere of the creative encounter itself. The coexistence of these two different temporalities offers exciting insights, addressing a feeling of enlightenment, a fusion with the object and a touching of the eternal. Both of these time concepts are part of art-making and any creative process, but are especially meaningful for artists mourning the threat of death caused by illness, old age or trauma, who attempt to unconsciously overcome the limits of time and with it the fear of death. The rhythmic involvement and full absorption within the creative process can then lead to the attainment of kairos time, a state of fusion with the universe, allowing for an illusion of the standstill of time.

Sigmund Freud (1925) suggested the “mystic writing-pad” as a metaphor for the self and its perception of time. In his illustration, the conscious and unconscious surfaces are divided but yet are still interrelated parts of one system. “It is as though the unconscious stretches out feelers through the preconscious towards the external world and hastily withdraws them, as soon as they have sampled the excitations coming from them,” wrote Freud (1925, p. 231). The unconscious links past time, the place where unconscious memories are stored in a pictorial archive, to present time, where these visual memories intermingle with thoughts in the present. The artist retrieves images linked to memories from his and her pictorial archive of the past, but she also uses material and associations to mold its content into a form in the present time. Freud (1900), in The Interpretation of Dreams, explored the timeless properties of the unconscious. Time in the dream and in art with its affects and wishes is always experienced in the present, even though it is often based on experiences and feelings from another time (Bonaparte, 1940). Marie Bonaparte wrote: “This flight of tyranny of time which we are able to review each night seems . . . to represent one of the greatest wish fulfillment accomplished by the dream for the benefit of human beings who remain harnessed to time’s chariot while day lasts” (Bonaparte, 1940, pp. 461–462).

In artistic expression, time can unfold within a session or a working period, but the working session also allows for the storing of psychical memory for future construction.

Most likely, the Greek concept of time as chronos is related to the Greek god Cronus, or Kronos, in classical antiquity. Cronus is the youngest of the Titans, a divine descendent of the earth goddess Gaia and the sky god Ouranus. Cronus is the harvest deity represented by a sickle. He oversees agriculture and measures the progression of the crops, that is, time in relation to nature’s cycles.

The time concept of chronos relates to the setting, namely the framework in which art-making can take place. It both fosters and limits time, due to the fact that it functions within the metric system. Progress in the creative activity is associated with the time concept of chronos, too, as the artist tries to use creatively the subjective times of the present with the past and its realm of memory, to secure a future. Chronos is related to Freud’s concept of Nachtraglichkeit, translated in the Standard Edition as “deferred action” but literally translated as “afterwardsness,” describing a dimension of the psyche that brings back an active transforming memory from the past, often beyond conscious recollection, addressing two directions of the temporal experience both backwards and forward (Lacan, 1975). This time concept is not necessarily linear, as it raises the possibility that what comes afterwards may give meaning and form to what came before (Freud, 1918).

This concept of time is also true for the creative, artistic process whereby we often experience time as circular or as a spiral, as we integrate experiences from different time periods into a sculpture or piece of writing in the here and now. Said differently, the writing in the here and now re-informs memories of the past as well. For Freud, the past is not only alive in the present, but the present also revives the past, through transference; thus memory is not only an inscription but also a force, constantly reconstructing the past and giving consistently new meaning to the present (Cournut, 1999).

The Greek god Kairos, on the other hand, is depicted as a young man with short hair at the back and a lock on his forehead. The lock is said to represent the opportunity to seize the appropriate moment, a way to understand the truth. Citing the art of weaving, kairos would explain the perfect balance and harmony of correct timing, the parting of the threads on a loom allowing for another thread to be woven in the space. This timing cannot be understood in measurable, chronos time, but rather in kairos time. Kairos describes the exact moment, the perfect timing of an interpretation or an insight, measuring the fulfillment of time. It seems that in the time concept of kairos, chronos is actually dissolved (Meerwein, 1988). The scholastic philosophers call it “nunc stans,” the standing still of present time. In kairos the flux and duration of time seems suspended, and the tenses are superseded. Freud (1930), citing Romain Rolland, the French novelist, called the emotional experience going along with this sense of time, a feeling of “eternity,” of something limitless and unbounded, as it were, or “oceanic” (p. 64): in 1930 Rolland had quoted the Indian philosopher Ramakrishna, who said, “the spirit is an ocean . . . boundless, dazzling, with great luminous waves” (Fisher, 1988, p. 12). In 1927, Rolland added in a letter to Freud that he always found this particular experience of time, what I refer to as kairos time, as a “source of vital renewal . . . a spontaneous religious sensation . . . a prolonged intuitive feeling . . . surpassing traditional categories of time, space, and causality” (Fisher, 1988, p. 10). He believed that this particular experience and the sensation of its time concept offers imaginative potential, allowing the artist to access his unconscious and creative inspiration. It is an experience of the unity of the extreme feelings of sadness and happiness or bliss and despair. Kairos as well as chronos also seems to be related to Kristeva’s concept of “women’s time,” time from the unconscious point of view of motherhood and reproduction, which is both cyclical and eternal. This refers on the one hand to the chronological time of the cycle of menstruation, and to the cycles of generation, but it addresses also kairos time, the all encompassing cosmic cycles, and to the “out-of-ordinary-time-and-space sense of pregnancy and involvement with baby” (Chodorow, 2003, p. 1189).

This sense of suspended reality fosters a...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Art and Mourning
• Praise
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Art and Mourning
• 1 Alberto Giacometti, Rainer Maria Rilke, Louise Bourgeois: Time and Timelessness in Art and Mourning
• 2 Paul Klee: Psychic Improvisations in the Shadow of Death–Some Thoughts on Creativity and the Oceanic Experience
• 3 Dina Gottliebova Babbitt: Painting Trauma, Painting History–Gypsy Portraits in Auschwitz
• 4 Ferdinand Hodler: From the Vertical of Life to the Horizontal of Death–Ferdinand Hodler and Valentine Godé-Dorel, 1908–1915
• 5 Eva Hesse: Eva Hesse’s Hang Up (1966)–a Transition from the Edge of Loss to the Containment of Emptiness
• 6 Lucian Freud: The Permeable Membrane–Mourning the Transience of Beauty and Life Itself
• 7 René Magritte: Attempting the Impossible–Tracing the Lost Object
• 8 Albert Einstein: Creativity and Intimacy
• Illustrations
• Index
• Plates