Art, Creativity, Living

Lesley Caldwell

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• eBook ISBN: 9780429910975
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: History & Theory in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

This volume in the Winnicott Studies series is dedicated to the life and work of Marion Milner and reflects, in varying ways, her unique use of Winnicott's work to shape her own thinking about art and creativity. Among the papers here are contemporary reviews of Milner's books by both Winnicott and the poet W.H. Auden - the latter providing fascinating insights into his own views on psychoanalysis. Malcolm Bowie discusses Winnicott's legacy to psychoanalysis and art; Adam Phillips writes on 'Winnicott's Hamlet' and John Fielding tackles another Shakepearean theme in examining Othello. The book also contains papers by the distinguished British authors Michael Podro and Ken Wright, several appreciations of Marion Milner by those who knew and worked with her, and an illuminating introduction by Lesley Caldwell drawing together the book's themes. The papers in this volume are united by a very Winnicottian concern with aliveness, and with art. They are both a fitting tribute to Marion Milner and a testimony to the range and depth of work taking place under the aegis of The Squiggle Foundation.

Chapter One
Psychoanalysis and art: the Winnicott legacy

Malcolm Bowie

At first glance, Winnicott may seem to have a good deal less than, say, Freud or Lacan to offer students and practitioners of literary art. Freud and Lacan wrote at great and glorious length about the powers of language, each provided conceptual models in terms of which the modes of meaning characteristic of literary language in particular could be discussed, each was a rhetorician of the unconscious and a dramatist of the transferential encounter, and each was a powerfully original and complex writer. "Set a thief to catch a thief" is an appropriate workaday slogan in thinking about this relationship: if psychoanalysis is to become an instrument for the analysis of literature, let it face up squarely to its own character as a sequence of literary works and textual effects. Let Freud and Lacan help us to read literature, but also and simultaneously let us call upon literature to help us read Freud and Lacan. One has only to remember the uses to which Shakespeare's Hamlet and quotations from Goethe, Schiller, and Heine are put in The Interpretation of Dreams (Freud, 1900a), or the elaborate allegory of the psychoanalytic encounter that Lacan derives from his reading of Edgar Allan Poe's The Purloined Letter, to see how deep the complicity lies between certain kinds of psychoanalytic theory and certain kinds of creative writing.

Winnicott, on the other hand, offers few of these inducements to anyone visiting psychoanalysis from the field of literary studies. It is clear from many of his writings that he enjoys literature, painting, and music, but he seldom seeks to enlist them as corroborative evidence either in his theoretical papers or in his case studies. He writes well, but plainly and without conceit. He writes tentatively, in the manner of one who has tips and suggestions to offer his colleagues, rather than paradigms or doctrines: his rhetoric is one of collaboration between co-equals rather than one of solitary exertion and insight. In writing up his case histories, he attends primarily not to the verbal medium itself in which the dealings between analyst and analysand occur, but to the whole behavioural pattern of their interaction and to the part-real and part-fantasized space and time in which this interaction unfolds. He does not preen himself on his interpretative prowess. He lets his child patients play with their toys. He lets his adult patients re-enter a space of play, and toy with words, with the accidental accoutrements of the consulting-room, and with human time as it passes.

"Play is always exciting", Winnicott said in a talk on "Playing and Culture" given to the Imago Group in March 1968, adding, in a tone of voice that is itself a Winnicott fingerprint:

It is exciting not because of the background of instinct, but because of the precariousness that is inherent in it, since it always deals with the knife-edge between the subjective and that which is objectively perceived. What holds for play also holds for the St. Matthew Passion at which I am almost certain to find colleagues when I go to the Festival Hall in a few week's time. [1968a, pp. 205-206]

Winnicott is content to leave Bach's great work on the margins of his own theory, to note a link between the play situation proper and the play of the artistic imagination and to leave matters there. It would not have seemed appropriate to him to bring the art work back into the world of theoretical reflection and treat it either as an allegory of the analytic dialogue or as a species of higher-order case material on which his very considerable powers of interpretation could go to work. Such things would have seemed to him grandiose and likely to distract the practitioner from the often humdrum clinical business in hand. Although Winnicott's ideas are perfectly extendable into the cultural sphere, as I shall seek to show in what follows, he did not himself extend them very far in that direction. Despite this self-denying ordinance on Winnicott's part, there are intellectual riches in his work for anyone who thinks about art, whether as an artist, a critic, a theorist, or a cultural commentator, and a power of provocation in them too. He takes us back to the great questions "What is art?" and "Why does art matter?" and he does so as a natural dramatist, as a watchful and wise inhabitant of "the knife-edge between the subjective and that which is objectively perceived".

Before going any further, we should remind ourselves of the complex content that Winnicott gave to the concept of "transitional phenomena", and of the enlarged range of meanings that he ascribed to the notion of "play". In order to do this convincingly in a short space, we cannot do better than reread these famous and richly implying paragraphs, which occur near the start of his paper on "Transitional Objects and Transitional Phenomena" (1951):

I have introduced the terms "transitional object" and "transitional" phenomena for designation of the intermediate area of experience, between the thumb and the teddy bear, between the oral erotism and true object relationship, between primary creative activity and projection of what has already been introjected, between primary unawareness of indebtedness and the acknowledgement of indebtedness ("Say: ta!"). [p. 230]

By this definition an infant's babbling or the way an older child goes over a repertoire of songs and tunes while preparing for sleep come within the intermediate area as transitional phenomena, along with the use made of objects that are not part of the infant's body yet are not fully recognized as belonging to external reality.

It is generally acknowledged that a statement of human nature is inadequate when given in terms of interpersonal relationships, even when the imaginative elaboration of function, the whole of fantasy both conscious and unconscious, including the repressed unconscious, is allowed for. There is another way of describing persons, which comes out of the researches of the past two decades, that suggests that of every individual who has reached the stage of being a unit (with a limiting membrane and an outside and an inside) it can be said that there is an inner reality to that individual, an inner world that can be rich or poor and can be at peace or in a state of war.

My claim is that if there is a need for this double statement, there is a need for a triple one: there is the third part of the life of a human being, a part that we cannot ignore, an intermediate area of experiencing, to which inner reality and external life both contribute. It is an area that is not challenged, because no claim is made on its behalf except that it shall exist as a resting place for the individual engaged in the perpetual human task of keeping inner and outer reality separate yet inter-related.

It is usual to refer to "reality-testing" and to make a clear distinction between apperception and perception. I am here staking a claim for an intermediate state between a baby's inability and growing ability to recognize and accept reality. I am therefore studying the substance of illusion—that which is allowed to the infant and which, in adult life, is inherent in art and religion (Winnicott, 1975, p. 230).

This is worded with characteristic modesty, but we notice at once how radical a revision of one standard Freudian way at looking at things this is. Rather than think of the unconscious as irrupting into the operations of consciousness and as thereby creating interference patterns in the life of the individual, and rather than think of the return, under appropriate conditions, of repressed materials as being in itself therapeutic, as making a past pain liveable within the present, Winnicott directs our attention to an intermediate zone which is full of promise and danger, and to two realms that border that zone and are "separate yet interrelated". He opens up a potential space between inner and outer and seems often to think of this as the privileged site for psychoanalytic thinking and treatment.

The task of psychoanalysis is to allow the individual to inhabit this transitional or intermediate area without rushing to judgement by seeking premature emotional or intellectual certainties. In practical terms, this meant that the analyst should set great store by his own, and his patient's, toleration of antagonism and undecidability. In the talk on "Playing and Culture", which I have already quoted, Winnicott says:

Undoubtedly the concept of the transitional object and of transitional phenomena brought me to wish to study this intermediate area which is neither dream nor object-relating. At the same time that it is neither the one nor the other of these two it is also both. This is the essential paradox . .. and we need to accept the paradox, not to resolve it. [1968a, p. 204]

"For me the paradox is inherent", he goes on to say. "Aetiologically," he insists within a few sentences, "the paradox must be accepted, not resolved." Winnicott's insistence and repetition in this paper and elsewhere are those of one who is conscious that what he is urging is both exciting and bothersome and runs against the grain of much previous psychoanalytic explanation. The space of potentiality which he opens up in these papers is multidimensional and mobile; it is the time-bound space of living human experience and needs to be protected against theories and analytic practices that would flatten, regularize, and normalize it by removing its paradoxical core.

The extraordinary thing about Winnicott's account of play is that it connects the world of infantile experience with the world of sophisticated cultural production in a way that, although modestly phrased, is in fact radical and far-reaching. "In order to give a place to playing I postulated a potential space between the baby and the mother", he wrote in "Playing: A Theoretical Statement" (1971b, p. 47). This space was adjacent to, and drew its energy from, what Winnicott had termed "primary psychic creativity" (1953, p. 34). This creativity, to which he paid tribute on a number of occasions, was the element that differentiated his views on the earliest stages of infant development from those of Klein and Fairbairn. Later forms of playfulness found their earliest prototype in a play of mind, a shape-changing capacity, a relish for antagonism, a future-directed, speculative power of invention, that seem to belong to infant experience from the beginning. But if Winnicott's "potential space" looks back to the primitive condition of minds, it looks forward too to minds in their most elaborately cultivated forms. "It is play that is the universal. . . the natural thing is playing" (1971b, p. 48). Psychoanalysis itself is "a highly specialized form of playing in the service of communication with oneself and others" (p. 48). What could be claimed for psychoanalysis—that it was a highly sophisticated form of something that belonged first of all to childhood—could be claimed for artistic activity too. What could be claimed for the mother-baby relationship—that it involved a perpetual "to and fro" (p. 55), a lasting playground of in-between ness—could be claimed also for the art work in production and for the art work being read, or looked at, or heard. At both ends of the individual age spectrum, Winnicott takes his distance from Freud's own teaching, placing a seemingly un-Freudian emphasis both on a pre-sexual creativity in children and on the independent dignity, as it were, of cultural experience.

Paying tribute to the newly completed Standard Edition of Freud's works in 1966, Winnicott said:

Freud did not have a place in his topography of the mind for things cultural. He gave new value to inner psychic reality, and from this came a new value for things that are actual and truly external. Freud used the word "sublimation" to point the way to a place where cultural experience is meaningful, but perhaps he did not get so far as to tell us where in the mind cultural experience is. [1967, p. 95]

Winnicott himself, on the other hand, does tell us "where in the mind cultural experience is", or rather he tells us that it is both in the mind and not in the mind, in a dangerous and thrilling border territory. The work of art belongs in no man's land, in the realm of push and pull, to and fro; it reaches towards the complex, the subtle-minded, integration of divergent and heterogeneous raw materials yet reaches backwards, too, to something primordial and pre-sexual. As Winnicott said in a celebrated footnote to his "Primitive Emotional Development" (1945): "Through artistic expression we can hope to keep in touch with our primitive selves whence the most intense feelings and even fearfully acute sensations derive, and we are poor indeed if we are only sane" (1975, p. 150). The work of art, well made in accordance with this prescription, would inhabit a supremely paradoxical locale: it would represent a triumph for the integrative and reparative capacities of the creative mind, yet at the same time take us to the threshold of a necessary madness; it would be the instrument both of closure and of a fearful new openness; it would take us back into the remote past and forward, defiantly, into a new future. Cultural experience would find its place, at last, within the psychoanalytic view of things, in restlessness, mobility, and an unceasing passage between fear and joy.

In what follows I shall test these propositions against a number of real works of art, and not just against their general effect, or the benign all-purpose phenomenology of artistic experience to which they might be thought to conduce, but against their local textures and the traces of the artist's labour that his or her works still bear. I shall suggest that Winnicott's account of creativity has much to tell us not simply about the uses to which we put artistic objects, but about the workshop practices amid which such objects are born. I shall speak about writers for the most part, and in particular about three great European writers belonging to the generation immediately before Winnicott's own: Rilke, born in 1875, Virginia Woolf, born in 1882, and Proust, born in 1871.

In talking about Rilke first of all, my cue comes from Winnicott himself, and from Clare Winnicott (1989), who begins her memoir "D.W.W.: A Reflection" (p. 1) with a quotation from Rilke's fourth Duino Elegy. Here the poet speaks of being "im Zwischenraume zwischen Welt und Spielzeug" [within a gap left between world and toy]. In one of the sequence of afterthoughts to his seminal late paper on "The Use of an Object", to which I shall return, Winnicott writes about two kinds of being-in-the-world encapsulated in two of Rilke's characteristic notions:

it seems likely that Rilke, by using Raum and Welt, gives this same idea in environmental terms. Raum is an infinite space in which the individual can operate without passing through the risky experience of destruction and survival of the object; Welt is by contrast the world in so far as it has, by survival, become objectified by the individual, and to be used. [1969, p. 240]

The play between Raum and Welt, between "space" and "world", seems both to represent an essential Rilkean tension and to re-articulate compellingly one of Winnicott's own themes: the difference between object-relating and object-use, between, on the one hand, the would-be omnipotence of the human individual, sustained by an insistent power of illusion, by the unstoppable sequence of his or her projections and identifications, and, on the other, the late-coming recognition by that individual that a real world exists beyond him or her, objectively there, shareable, the

object of common knowledge, and unsubduable to his or her wishful fantasies. This is the difference between a world that is deliciously compliant and another world that has hard edges, obstacles, and impossibilities inside it.

The poem I have chosen to look at briefly is one in which these two worlds and these two styles or intensities of feeling are grandly counterposed, and in which the performative energies of the poetic text itself are called upon to create Winnicott's third space of paradox and potentiality. It is the poem without title, dating from the eve of the First World War, which is sometimes known as "the Weltinnenraum poem" after the splendid coinage to be found in Rilke's fourth quatrain:

Es winkt zu Fühlung fast aus allen Dingen,
aus jeder Wendung weht es her: Gedenk!
Ein Tag, an dem wir fremd vorübergingen,
Entschließt im künftigen sich zum Geschenk.
Wer rechnet unseren Ertrag? Wer trennt
uns von den alten, den vergangnen Jahren?
Was haben wir seit Anbeginn erfahren,
als daß sich eins im anderen erkennt?
Als daß an uns Gleichgültiges erwarmt?
O Haus, O Wiesenhang, O Abendlicht,
auf einmal bringst du's beinah zum Gesicht
und stehst an uns, umarmend und umarmt.
Durch alle Wesen reicht der eine Raum:
Weltinnenraum. Die Vögel fliegen still
durch uns hindurch. O, der ich wachsen will,
ich seh hinaus, und in mir wächst der Baum.
Ich sorge mich, und in mir steht das Haus.
Ich hüte mich, und in mir ist die Hut.
Geliebter, der ich wurde: an mir ruht
der schönen Schöpfung Bild und weint sich aus.

[1966, p. 81]

EVERYTHING beckons to us to perceive it,
murmurs at every turn "Remember me!"
A day we passed, too busy to receive it,
will yet unlock us all its treasury.

Who shall compute our harvest? Who shall bar
us from the former years, the long-departed?
What have we learnt from living since we started,
except to find in others what we are?
Except to re-enkindle commonplace?
O house, O sloping field, O setting sun!
Your features form into a face, you run,
you cling to us, returning our embrace!
One space spreads through all creatures equally—
inner-world-space. Birds quietly flying go
flying through us. Oh, I that want to grow,
the tree I look outside at grows in me!
It stands in me, that house I look for still,
in me that shelter I have riot possessed,
I, the now well-beloved: on my breast
this fair world's image clings and weeps her fill.

[1960]

If we look at the concept Weltinnenraum simply in the local context of its quatrain, we seem to be in Winnicott's "infinite space", where the individual can operate without risk, neither unleashing his ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• CONTRIBUTORS
• Introduction
• CHAPTER ONE Psychoanalysis and art: the Winnicott legacy
• CHAPTER TWO Winnicott's Hamlet
• CHAPTER THREE "I thought so then": Othello and the unthought known
• CHAPTER FOUR On imaginary presence
• CHAPTER FIVE To make experience sing
• CHAPTER SIX Creativity, playing, dreaming: overlapping circles in the work of Marion Milner and D. W. Winnicott
• CHAPTER SEVEN To unravel unhappiness
• CHAPTER EIGHT Critical notice of On Not Being Able to Paint
• CHAPTER NINE On Robinson Crusoe's island
• CHAPTER TEN Appreciations of Marion Milner
• REFERENCES
• INDEX