Psychoanalytic Studies of Creativity, Greed, and Fine Art

Making Contact with the Self

David P Levine

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• eBook ISBN: 9781317505334
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Art Theory & Criticism

Throughout the history of psychoanalysis, the study of creativity and fine art has been a special concern. Psychoanalytic Studies of Creativity, Greed and Fine Art: Making Contact with the Self makes a distinct contribution to the psychoanalytic study of art by focusing attention on the relationship between creativity and greed. This book also focuses attention on factors in the personality that block creativity, and examines the matter of the self and its ability to be present and exist as the essential element in creativity.

Using examples primarily from visual art David Levine explores the subjects of creativity, empathy, interpretation and thinking through a series of case studies of artists, including Robert Irwin, Ad Reinhardt, Susan Burnstine, and Mark Rothko. Psychoanalytic Studies of Creativity, Greed and Fine Art explores the highly ambivalent attitude of artists toward making their presence known, an ambivalence that is evident in their hostility toward interpretation as a way of knowing. This is discussed with special reference to Susan Sontag's essay on the subject of interpretation.

Psychoanalytic Studies of Creativity, Greed and Fine Art contributes to a long tradition of psychoanalytically influenced writing on creativity including the work of Deri, Kohut, Meltzer, Miller and Winnicott among others. It will be of interest to psychoanalysts, psychoanalytic psychotherapists, historians and theorists of art.

1

Appearance

For some people, the way things appear is the way they must be. For others, things could be different, and the form in which they happen to appear is not inevitable. For some people, appearance is reality; for others, appearance hides reality rather than revealing it. Insisting that the way things appear to us is the way they are and must be is, I think, the enemy of creativity. After all, it is difficult to see how we can be creative if things simply are what they are. To fix ideas, consider the following story of two pictures created of a woman I will refer to as Jane.¹ One is done by a portrait photographer she pays to create a picture she can use for a professional website. The second is done by a painter who has asked Jane to pose for her.

The photographer has a specific goal for his photograph of Jane. She must look professional, but she must also have some allure. This is no boring, unattractive woman, but someone with drama in her, though not too much. With this end in mind, he begins by selecting angle and position. He then adjusts his studio lights so that the areas of light and shadow work well to create the desired effect. He chooses background and lens to complement the effect of the lighting. After taking her photograph, the photographer opens the image in his photo-editing software and begins work on it. He makes further adjustments in light, shadow, and color. He removes wrinkles and blemishes, rendering her image younger and more attractive while eliminating any hint that she might be in some way imperfect. He adjusts skin tone with the same end in mind.

The photographer wants the image he produces to be both the image of Jane and something else; perhaps we could say the image of someone else. To this end, he makes fine adjustments in facial structure, ensuring more attractive proportions where the face Jane brought into the studio suggested something slightly off-balance. The result is the face she hoped she had when she hired the photographer but worried she did not: alluring, but not too alluring; intelligent and competent, but not intimidating. She looks at the picture and thinks: I am better-looking than I ever thought I was.

The next day, Jane visits the studio of a professional painter for whom she has agreed to pose. After a week of sessions, the painter shows Jane the portrait she has made of her. What Jane sees differs radically from her photograph. The face in the painting has no clearly delineated features, no sharply defined boundaries. You are not certain that the part of the image you think is a face really is a face. Are those markings toward the center eyes or just stray marks on the canvas? If they are eyes, they are not eyes in the normal sense. One is larger and higher on the canvas than the other. They are different colors. Neither is really shaped like an eye, although that is what it brings to mind. Her head is also an odd shape and larger than her torso. We are not sure of the figure’s gender. Jane thinks it is probably female, but there is something oddly male about it. The painting seems to shift in and out of focus as we look at it; the image holds together while always seeming on the verge of coming apart.

The lines in the image are dynamic. They are little inhibited by a conscious intent to reproduce what Jane assumes the artist saw when she viewed her model. The artist seemed to follow some inner urge in making the lines, as if for a moment she suspended conscious control over the hand holding the paintbrush. While the dynamics of the brush strokes suggest something disorganized if not chaotic, and some of the distortions seem to make the image at first glance a bit grotesque, Jane finds it somehow appealing. She would like to take it home with her.

Both images convey powerful messages. In the first, the message is that Jane really is the woman she wishes she were. This is pleasing, but also troubling, because on some level she knows that the image is wrong; the way she appears in it is not the way she really is. Rather than conveying the message that she is the woman she wishes she were, the alienness of the image emphasizes the difference between her ideal and real selves. Using this image, she seeks to direct the viewer toward a made-up version of herself so that she will be desired by the viewer and perhaps offered a job. The painting also conveys a powerful image, and she wonders if it is hers or not. Because she wants to take it home with her, she clearly identifies with it, but she is not sure why. On some level, she suspects the image captures not who she wishes she were, but who she really is, not the appearance but the reality hidden behind the appearance. There are wishes attached to the two images. For the first there is the wished-for self depicted in the image; for the second there is the wish that the unseen self will be allowed to appear.

If we show the photograph to someone who knows Jane, that person will likely respond: “That’s Jane, isn’t it? She certainly looks very good in that picture.” If we then show the painting to the same person, the reply is likely to be anything but “This is a painting of Jane.” The photograph thus passes the test of “appearing to be” Jane, while the painting does not. The painting does not appear to be Jane at all, but Jane’s close identification with it suggests that appearances can be deceiving. In the painting she is not this stranger who looks like her only better along a dimension that is both pleasing and alien. If nothing else, the painting conveys something about the vitality, the awkwardness, the disorder and disproportions of the human condition that is also very much Jane’s condition.

This story can, I think, help us focus some important questions about creativity and its relationship to the interplay of appearance and reality. There is a sense in which the work put into producing both images of Jane can be considered creative. But if both artist and painter are creative, they are creative in different ways. The photographer is creative in the way he makes the image deviate from reality in the direction of a wished-for self. The purpose of creativity here is to produce an appearance at odds with reality, then to replace reality with the new form of appearance. In this, creativity is linked to fantasy. By contrast, the painting is creative in the way it deviates from appearance, insisting by implication that appearance is not reality. The painting “looks” very little like the model used to produce it. And yet Jane’s desire to take the painting home with her suggests that there is something real about it that is lost in the photograph. The painting has captured something real by putting the appearance aside.

An important difference is that while the photographer’s goal was to make Jane look “good” by removing signs of imperfection, the painter tended to seek out elements of disproportion and disorder. The photographer sought to assist Jane in her desire to escape into the fantasy of a perfect world while the painter insisted that Jane make a connection with what is imperfect, what is not yet fully formed, what cannot be fully integrated into a pleasing whole. The painter sought to make this connection not simply to celebrate imperfection, but also because of her insight into the connection between imperfection and vitality. The gestures that composed the piece could never create something that came close to an ideal of perfection. The perfect image has no life in it, but this painting does.

While it can be said that there is creativity in the work of both photographer and painter, there is something suspect about the creativity of the photographer who adjusts Jane’s image away from who she really is by seeking to substitute perfection for vitality. In doing so, the photographer seeks to assist Jane in creating a persona that is not her but can stand in for her. The photographer colludes with Jane in the effort to make her disappear into a standard-issue image of the successful female professional. Her image, how she appears to others, is adjusted in the direction of an ideal alien to her.

The production of the photograph is part of Jane’s effort to occupy a false self in whose being and in whose life her presence is not felt because there is nothing that would distinguish the constructed self from the ideal image of any number of other women pursuing the same goal. In other words, the element of a difference produced by a factor internal and unique to Jane is excluded. To this extent, what the photographer attempted to do was make Jane’s image a copy of a predetermined ideal having nothing to do with her. In doing so, he applied a series of standard techniques whose use ensured a standard result. And it can be argued that activity in pursuit of this end, because it seeks to reproduce in Jane an ideal that is preformed and external to her, is the antithesis of creativity. Thought about in this way, if the photographer’s work to produce Jane’s image involved creativity, it was creativity put in service of an alien goal.

But is this not what the painter also attempted to do: to paint not the unique presence of Jane but human qualities she shares with others? One way of responding to this, and the one that takes us along the path of the studies in this book, is to focus attention on the way the image in the painting differs from the reality of the already-formed person that others recognize as Jane, and does so in order to depict the reality in her of possibilities not yet determined. This reality is what she feels is alive in her. In this sense, the painting captures the difference between what is and what might be without treating the latter as something already determined for Jane. Because it operates in this space of the not-yet-formed, the painting can be said to be the result of a creative act. Understood in this way, creativity is the activity that emerges out of a state of formlessness, of things yet to appear.

Both painting and photograph operate in the space defined by the interplay of appearance and reality, but they do so differently. This difference can be captured by reference to different ways in which the term “appearance” is used. One use of the term emphasizes the active side, appearance as the process through which an object comes into view. The appearance of an object is its emergence. The other use of the term emphasizes the passive side. Appearance is the object’s given form. Understood in this way, appearance is something one takes on.

Concern about the complex relationship between appearance and reality begins with curiosity about ourselves and about the people who are important to us. These are the original objects in our world and our relationship with them is therefore the place in which we first encounter the shifting ground between appearance and reality as that takes form in questions such as: What am I? Am I what I appear (to others and to myself) to be? Must I be what I appear to be? Is there a different “real” me, and if so how do I find him or her and make him or her appear? Is the space between appearance and reality a space where something important can happen? Will something important happen if I can discover the real me hidden by the appearance?

One response to these questions appeals to the process of recognition. Insistence that the individual is what he or she appears to be follows from the conviction that reality is created by recognition, in other words by the activity of finding in an object the presence of something already known, seeing again what we have already seen before. Operating on the basis of recognition, the parent treats his or her child as someone the parent knew before. This method of knowing engages the parent’s projection of his or her own qualities, his or her ideal self, or possibly denigrated self, onto the child.² Whatever specific form this projection takes, through it the parent recognizes the child, and this act of recognition has much to do with how the child comes to negotiate the interplay between appearance and reality. The more ubiquitous across generations is this relating through recognition, the more each generation reproduces the previous one, and the more each individual will experience him- or herself as the repository of past lives. Here, the form we take on, our appearance, is predetermined for us and provided fully formed.

When the child seeks to conform to the qualities the parent sees in him, what the child does is work to ensure that reality (the way he is) will conform to appearance (the way he is recognized to be). Indeed, affirming the parent’s perception of the child’s reality becomes the child’s life’s work. The more this strategy succeeds, the less space remains for any reality of the person different from the predetermined form in which he or she is meant to appear. The need to narrow and, so far as possible, eliminate this space expresses the need to preserve the relationship with the parent that is based on it. This is the path of repetition rather than creativity.

The more the child conforms to the template imposed on him or her in the act of recognition by the parent, the more the child experiences him or herself as something predetermined: a fixed and unalterable form. And the more the child grows into an adult who comes to relate to him- or herself in this way, the more the conviction sets in that all things in the world must follow the same pattern: they must be as they appear (are recognized) to be. Insistence that things must be as they appear not only refers to the individual’s inability to see them otherwise, but also to an active effort to secure their identity.

An important consequence of our being made up of projections is that, in an important sense, we do not exist. Or, more precisely, the factor in our personality that makes us the origin of what we do and who we are does not exist. This is the factor I will refer to here by the term “self.” For the self to exist, it must hold its position against the pressure to adapt to the needs of others as expressed most notably in their use of projection to determine who we are. To exist means to be something definite, determinate, and real. To create the self as an object of this kind is our way of saying: “I am real. I am not just a figment of my parents’ imagination. I am not whatever others see in me and need me to be. I am something distinct from what is seen in me, something that endures through and against the way it is seen.”

What applies to the parent’s way of seeing the child also applies to the way the child sees the parent. When the parent insists that the child conform to a predetermined template so that he or she will be what he or she is seen to be, the parent also insists that the child see the parent as conforming to a template of being a parent. In this world, it is not just the reality of the child that is what it is seen (recognized) to be; it is also that of the parent. One becomes a parent not by successfully undertaking the work of parenting, but by being recognized by others as a parent, by imposing on family members a conviction regarding identity between reality and an appearance imposed on our perception of it.

The goal of this imposition is to ensure that our “mother” must really be a mother and our “father” a real father. Yet the creature standing before us who claims to be, and looks very much like, our mother while failing to provide the nurturing that defines what it is to be our mother both is and is not our mother. And it matters how we cope with this. Do we decide that because she looks like and claims to be our mother, she must be our mother; or do we decide that reality and appearance are at odds? In the second case, there is an opening, however small it may be, for creativity. The assumption that appearance and reality are not, and cannot be, at odds holds only so long as we avoid those processes whose goal is in some way to create an image of the other that is more real than the one imposed on us.

Simple notions about the reality of things have their origin in our convictions about the reality of the earliest objects to which we related: our parents. And these convictions have their origins in our dependence on and attachment to those objects. We fear that were we to find the reality hidden behind the appearance, we might find ourselves in a world without a mother. The more we feel is at risk in the act of discovering that reality is at odds with appearance, the more firmly we attach ourselves to the identity of the two. It is in this fear that obstacles to creativity originate. Appearance is meant to keep reality from appearing. This necessity leads to the static construction of appearance, which is here meant to prevent emergence. In a world formed this way, history and biology are destiny; repetition is the rule. This is not a world of many possibilities including those “yet undetermined” (Erikson 1964: 161–2). This is a world of the predetermined and already known.

Were the fear attached to any significant deviation in the child from the template provided for him to ease, however, another possibility might emerge. This is the possibility that the parent does not already know who the child will become, because the parent has not known this child before. When this happens, what the child is and becomes will not be the result of recognition (seeing again what has already been seen before) but of a process of self-development. Indeed, we can consider a process of self-development one in which development takes place in the absence of recognition. Whatever happen...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• Introduction
• 1 Appearance
• 2 Presence
• 3 Absence
• 4 Destruction
• 5 The hidden self
• 6 The emotional landscape
• 7 Emotional communication
• 8 Empathy and interpretation
• 9 Creativity and greed
• 10 Creating a world
• Index