The Annual of Psychoanalysis, V.
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THE ANNUAL
OF PSYCHOANALYSIS
A Publication of the
Institute for Psychoanalysis
Chicago
Volume XIX
~THE ANALYTIC PRESS
1991 Hillsdale, NJ Hove and London
Copyright © 1991 by the Institute for Psychoanalysis, Chicago
All rights reseved. No part of this book may be reproduced in
any form, by photostat, microform, retrieval system, or any other
means without prior written permission of the copyright holder.
Published by the Analytic Press, Hillsdale, NJ.
Typeset in Baskerville
by Lind Graphics, Upper Saddle River, NJ
ISSN 0092-5055
ISBN 0-88163-094-2
Printed in the United States of America
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
The publication of this volume of the The Annual was
supported in part by a generous grant from the Reva and
David Logan Foundation.
Contributors
Barbara R. Almond, M.D., Clinical Assistant Professor of Psychiatry, Stanford
University Medical Center; private practice, Palo Alto, CA.
Lorelei H. Corcoran, Ph.D., Assistant Professor, Department of Art, and Assistant
Director, Institute of Egyptian Art and Archaeology, Memphis State
University.
Barbara Fajardo, Ph.D., Director of Infant Research, Developmental Institute,
Michael Reese Hospital, Chicago; private practice of psychoanalysis and
psychotherapy.
Benjamin Garber, M.D., Training and Supervising Analyst, Institute for Psycho-
analysis, Chicago; Director, Barr-Harris Center for the Study of Loss and
Separation in Childhood.
Jerome Kavka, M.D., Faculty and Training and Supervising Analyst, Institute for
Psychoanalysis, Chicago.
Danielle Knajo, Ph.D., Faculty, New School for Social Research, New York City;
author, Egon Schiele: A Self in Creation (in press, Fairleigh Dickinson
University Press).
Donald Kuspit, Ph.D., Professor of Art History and Philosophy, State University
of New York at Stony Brook; Andrew Dixon White Professor at Large,
Cornell U nivesity.
Mary Newsome, M.D., Faculty, Institute for Psychoanalysis, Chicago; Associate,
Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, Northwestern Univer-
sity Medical School.
Joseph Palombo, M.A., Dean, Institute for Clinical Social Work, Chicago; Faculty
member, Child and Adolescent Psychotherapy Program, Institute for
Psychoanalysis, Chicago.
Morris Sklansky, M.D., Clinical Professor of Psychiatry, University of Chicago;
Training and Supervising Analyst, Institute for Psychoanalysis, Chicago.
David M. Terman, M.D., Training and Supervising Analyst, Institute for
Psychoanalysis, Chicago.
Vll
Vlll
Marian Tolpin, M.D., Training and Supervising Analyst, Institute for Psycho-
analysis, Chicago; Clinical Professor of Psychiatry, Chicago Medical
School.
Stephen Toulmin, Ph.D., Avalon Foundation Professor in the Humanities, College
of Arts and Sciences, Northwestern University; Assistant Director, Center for
Clinical Medical Ethics, Department of Medicine, University of Chicago.
Harry Trosman, M.D., Professor of Psychiatry, University of Chicago; Training
and Supervising Analyst, Institute for Psychoanalysis, Chicago.
Jerome A. Winer, M.D., Professor of Psychiatry, University of Illinois College of
Medicine at Chicago; Training and Supervising Analyst, Institute for
Psychoanalysis, Chicago.
CONTENTS
Contributors VB
Xl
I
PSYCHOANALYSIS AND ART
Visual Art and Art Criticism: The Role of Psychoanalysis 1
DONALD KUSPIT
Freud and Art: An Introduction 17
HARRY TROSMAN
Exploring the Archaeological Metaphor: The Egypt of Freud's Imagination 19
LORELEI H. CORCORAN
LORELEIH.CORCORAN
"She is Perfect .. .... Only She has Lost Her Spear": The Goddess Athene,
Freud, and H.D. 33
MARIAN TOLPIN
The A
Archaeology
rchaeology of the Emotions 51
STEPHEN TOULMIN
Egon Schiele's Self-Portraits: A Psychoanalytic Study in the Creation of a Self 59
DANIELLE KNAFO
A Healing Relationship in Margaret Drabble's Novel The Needle's Eye 91
BARBARA R. ALMOND
II
PSYCHOANALYSIS AND DEVELOPMENT
Analyzability and Resilience in Development 107
BARBARA FAJARDO
The Analysis of a Learning-Disabled Child 127
BENJAMIN GARBER
IX
lX
X Contents
Bridging the Chasm Between Developmental Theory and Clinical Theory.
Part I. The Chasm 151
JOSEPH PALOMBO
Bridging the Chasm Betwen Developmental Theory and Clinical Theory.
Part II. The Bridge. 175
JOSEPH PALOMBO
III
PSYCHOANALYSIS AND EMPATHY
Toward a Definition of Terms 195
MARY NEWSOME
with a discussion by DAVID M. TERMAN 204
Varieties of Empathic Response 209
JEROME A. WINER
IV
PSYCHOANALYSIS AND N. LIONEL BLITZSTEN
N. Lionel Blitzsten, M.D. (1893-1952): The Theories of a Pioneer
American Psychoanalyst 213
JEROME KA VKA
with a discussion by MORRIS SKLANSKY 230
Author Index 235
Subject Index 241
THE ANNUAL
OF
PSYCHOANALYSIS
I
PSYCHOANALYSIS
AND ART
Visual Art and Art Criticism: The Role of
Psychoanalysis
DONALD KUSPIT
So much has been written about the psychoanalytic interpretation- call it
re-cognition- of visual art, so many psychoanalytic insights about artist,
art work, and art audience have become incorporated in art discourse, if
often as unwitting assumptions, that it seems redundant to review the
various modes of psychoanalytic understanding of art. Such a review
would entail an account of the growing sophistication, sensitivity, and
self-reflection of psychoanalysis itself, for the sensibility and subtlety
psychoanalysis brings to art depend to a large extent on its own nuanced
response to its concepts. To lift these concepts out of clinical context and
bring them to bear on such a complex, varied subject as art is an
intellectually dangerous adventure. Among artists, it has often been
suspect to the point of arousing nihilistic skepticism- a no doubt
defensive, self-preservative response, perhaps necessary to creativity in
the circumstances, if at the same time a reductio ad absurdum of
resistance, not to mention its anti-intellectualism.
The psychoanalysis of art- of any cultural phenomenon- can be
carried out in a responsible manner only with the ironic, self-conscious,
self-questioning ego that is the optimum result of self-analysis. Such a
self-analytic ego, secure in its self-doubt, is necessarily aware of
psychoanalysis's own critical, conflict-ridden, varied, even pluralistic
history- what is increasingly regarded as its postmodernist character, in
which each theory is regarded as a signifier with no comprehensive power
of signification and so as a perpetually heuristic gambit in a Sisyphean
situation with respect to the psychological truth. Such a self-critical ego is
all the more necessary for a psychoanalyst of art, for the notion of a
2 Visual Art and Art Criticism: The Role of Psychoanalysis
hierarchy of works of art, each having a fixed value- the assumption of
criteria that permit the absolutizing of one at the expense of the other-
has collapsed. Such a notion has been recognized both as an epistemo-
logical fallacy and as ideologically motivated. The collapse of the idea of
a hierarchy of artistic- and generally cultural- values is no doubt in part
due to psychoanalysis itself, that is, to its leveling of art by way of its
implication that every example of art is of more or less equal psycholog-
ical value, equally useful as a demonstration of deep psychological truth.
Because of this cultural situation, and its own history, the psychoanalysis
of art has many theoretical options and must take advantage of them all.
This openness is deceptive, for none are completely satisfactory and none
privileged over the others, unconditionally secure in its priority.
Thus, much as art criticism (as Baudelaire wrote in "The Salon of
1846") should be "passionate, partisan, and political" while utilizing the
widest possible horizon of understanding, so psychoanalytic interpreta-
tion of art can be regarded as passionate, partisan, and political, however
unwittingly. It often involves unconscious advocacy of an artist or kind of
art, as well as conscious advocacy of a theory. This was the case with
Freud, who preferred Renaissance to modern art and who had greater
affinity for literature than visual art but made undoubtedly important
analyses of painting and sculpture. His affinity has haunted the psycho-
analysis of art ever since, leading to the treatment of visual art as a form
of literature. This overlooks the different effects possible in and seem-
ingly proper to each medium, a preoccupation of art criticism since
Lessing's Laocoon. The tendency to reduce visual works of art to
literature- to automatically assume their readability- is not helped by
the semiotic belief that the visual work of art is a kind of writing.
In any case, the choice of one psychoanalytic theory over another is a
heroic intellectual- and political- act, but piety toward one theory is
likely to foreclose some area of understanding of art. Moreover, without
ironic self-consciousness the psychoanalyst of art lacks intellectual con-
science and can become simultaneously all too speculative and all too
dogmatic. He or she can advocate one theory as the royal road to
understanding of art, unexpectedly reducing art to less than royal
status- simplifying it into a plebeian example. Moreover, self-irony
alone can preclude the naivete that comes of self-righteous extension of
theory to an object that by romantic self-definition is infinite in its
implications. In its modern self-definition the art object actively resists
efforts at comprehension: it establishes itself as paradoxical.
But psychoanalysis can no longer be regarded as intellectually prob-
lematic. Its insights have validity, if not' always testable by naively
conceived scientific standards. However, fear of its seemingly over-
DONALD KUSPIT 3
whelming reductive power-its power to reduce the object of its investi-
gation so completely to the terms of its theory of material subjectivity that
the object seems nothing but an epiphenomenon of that theory, insub-
stantial and meaningless apart from it- remains among art lovers. One
must heed their objections, especially when made in intellectually cogent
form- however much such form may mask narcissistic distress at the
sight of a precious object being "slandered" by psychoanalytic reduction.
Indeed, it is well known that for all Freud's protestations to the
contrary- they have been shown to be tongue-in-cheek, strategic re-
sponses to anticipated rejection- his psychoanalysis of art undermines its
sublimity, deconstructing that sublimity in a way that makes it seem
impossible to reconstruct. It could be said that the critics of psychoana-
lytic interpretation of art I will discuss mean to restore this sublimity,
which no doubt seems like hollow defiance in view of what psychoanalysis
has taught us exists in the basement, as Freud called it, of sublime
structures. But these critics are concerned with something more crucial
than the mysterious sublimity of art, if related to it.
I want to examine the criticism of the role of psychoanalysis as a form
of dialectical comprehension in visual art and art criticism by aesthete-
aestheticians who have spent much of their existence and consciousness
on art. Privileging art in the belief that investment in it is the one
expenditure most worth making in life- especially because all other
depth commitments seem to fail and frustrate one, as the best art never
does- they have come to question a psychoanalytic understanding of art
they once believed in. But they do not so much reject psychoanalysis out
of hand as an unwittingly malevolent intrusion in the process of artistic
production and critical art contemplation- the latest, most elegant kind
of murder of art, ostensibly carried out to facilitate the appreciative
dissection of its life. Rather, they have come to believe that the logic of
psychoanalysis itself leads to transcendence of its understanding of art
and, with that transcendence, a fresh sense of its aesthetic importance.
They have worked their way through psychoanalytic theory to a suppos-
edly postpsychoanalytic understanding of art and art appreciation- to a
new aestheticism, informed by psychoanalytic thinking, in fact necessi-
tated by it, but indicating something about art psychoanalysis is appar-
ently blind to. Psychoanalysis supposedly misses the very essence of
authentic art: its transcendence of all interpretations of it, inseparable
from its transcendence of the desire it manifests, and its dialectical,
critical relation to human suffering and society. More particularly, these
aesthete-aestheticians do not want to blindly worship at the altar of art,
as those of old supposedly did, but they do see art- at its best- as both
peculiarly ("perversely"?) and deliberately unanalyzable or uninter-
4 Visual Art and Art Criticism: The Role of Psychoanalysis
pretable ("obscure"), and as having a profound nonsubjective import that
psychoanalysis is blind to, perhaps as a result of its insistent emphasis on
the depth psychological factor in art- the tendentious primacy it gives the
profoundly subjective, however that might be conceptualized.
These neo-aesthetes regard psychoanalysis's two blind spots to art as
serious shortcomings. Blind to "true" art's impenetrability and density-
its determination to be impenetrable and opaque (which psychoanalysis
reads away as narcissistic "mysticism")- psychoanalysis destroys its spec-
ificity as art, in effect locating it in a zone of subjectivity in which it has
no weight of its own- no self-identity. And blind to art's dialectical
character, psychoanalysis undermines its objective social power. To see
the role of psychoanalysis in art- ultimately visual art- through the eyes
of friendly critics is to understand that role in a clearer- or at least less
self-congratulatory, narcissistic- way. You tend to look more realistic in
your critic's eyes than in your own. Or at least you can understand your
power and effect better by analyzing your critic's response to you than by
looking in your own mirror, especially when your critic has an ambiva-
lent affection for you.
In general, every advance in psychoanalytic conceptualization has led
to a new application to art, if application is the right word. As Sarah
Kofman (1988) writes in The Childhood of Art, An Interpretation of Freud's
Aesthetics, Freud does not so much "apply to art, from the outside, a
method belonging to a supposedly alien sphere" as show that, on the
inside, art is "but a different repetition of the same. For Freud, works of
art are like all other psychic productions insofar as they are compromises
and constitute 'riddles' to be solved" (Kofman, 1988, p. 4). Applying
psychoanalysis to art, then, amounts to demystifying and unmasking it-
detheologizing and demetaphysicalizing it, as Kofman says. This result
might be called its psycho-secularization. For Freud, the work of art is a
kind of dream- if a social one- and the poet and the artist daydreamers.
Art cannot sustain its sublimity in the face of the psychoanalytic stare that
turns it into a symptom. Its roots are in common psychic phenomena,
and it skirts, if ultimately outwits, psychopathology- neurosis.
Dare one even say psychosis? Freud (1924a) described it as the
"outcome of a ... disturbance in the relation between the ego and its
environment (outer world)," noting that in some cases of psychosis "the
ego creates for itself in a lordly manner a new outer and inner world"
while in other cases it "lose(s) all interest in the [real] outer world" (pp.
149, 151). Both aspects of psychosis seem to occur simultaneously in
every work of art of consequence, for a certain loss of interest in the real
world allows the lordly artist- that imperial infant- to create an intrigu-
ing new world. In art, reality is lost, only to be regained-"remodelled,"
DONALD KUSPIT 5
to use Freud's word- which is why it generates the illusion of omnipo-
tence, especially for the artist (Freud, 1924b, p. 185). Indeed, art's
tendency to psychosis is a basic reason for its fascination and seductive-
ness. It tempts us with a forbidden freedom from reality in the very act
of seeming to mediate it.
But I am not interested in offering yet another psychoanalytic
interpretation of art- a narcissistic interpretation that makes it some-
thing other than substitute gratification or ego mastery through form.
Rather, I want to suggest the great flexibility of psychoanalytic interpre-
tation- especially in situations of uncertain evidence, such as art, which,
as has been said, cannot be put on the couch. While seeming to bring art
into subjective focus, psychoanalysis may be an elegant way of losing
sight of it- as art. This is certainly one reason for neo-aestheticist
disaffection with psychoanalysis. Moreover, as practiced, the psycho-
analysis of art has tended to view art as an exemplification of theory, as
though the more psychoanalysis can turn the object of its inquiry into an
exemplification of its theory, the more the object proves that theory's
universality, or at least generalizes it. For Freud, Sophocles's Oedipus
and Shakespeare's Hamlet are intuitive, awkward anticipations of psy-
choanalytic theory, not invented characters existing in their own artistic
space. In other words, psychoanalysis subverts the vaunted uniqueness of
art. Indeed, a peculiar effect of psychoanalytic theory is that whatever it
touches comes to seem "thin" without its supplement of subjectivity.
Thus, psychoanalysis of art privileges and elevates psychoanalysis while
sharply delimiting and diminishing art. From its start, there was a tension
between psychoanalysis, determined to prove itself a science, and art,
which, as Freud said, spontaneously anticipated its insights without
clinical labor (Kuspit, 1988, pp. 559-69). This tension is not yet resolved,
and may never be.
As I have said, the neo-aesthete-aestheticians are not the old-style ones
Freud outsmarted and dismissed (Kofman, 1988, pp. 6-7)-Freud's
aesthete is, in fact, a straw man invented for polemical purposes- but
appreciative interpreters of art attuned to both psychoanalysis and art.
Their aestheticism emerges from a sense of the reciprocity of, or fit
between, psychoanalytic sensibility-attunement-and that necessary for
appreciation of art. For one kind of neo-aesthete-aesthetician, the
psychoanalytic idea that the work of art is a kind of dream and thus has
a latent meaning rooted in an ultimately irrepressible, eternally recurring
primitive wish implies the irreducible density of desire in it. This density
of desire is by its nature beyond interpretation, being a fundament and
ultimate of existence. For another kind of neo-aesthete-aesthetician, the
psychoanalytic ideas that the work of art is as distorted as a dream- that,
6 Visual Art and Art Criticism: The Role of Psychoanalysis
like a dream, it is in part a product of primary process activity-and that
its manifest content is thus publicly enigmatic and provocative suggest
that it functions as a form of public scandal and transgression (which is
what the Surrealists explicitly wanted it to be) and, as such, is evocative
and critical of social ideology, of, in Rosemary Jackson's ( 1981) words,
"the imaginary ways in which men experience the real world, those ways
in which men's relation to the world is lived through various systems of
meaning such as religion, family, law, moral codes, education, culture"
(p. 61). Art becomes a means of making these profoundly unconscious
ideologies disruptively conscious and, in the process, implying that they
are not unconditionally constitutive of the human subject. The way is
opened to criticism of them and, however indirectly, to social change.
Postpsychoanalytic yet psychoanalytically grounded aestheticism gives
the subjective understanding of art new hyper-subjective import on one
hand and new objective import on the other. This neo-aestheticist
reconceptualization of psychoanalytic subjectivity is of special import for
visual art.
From either neo-aestheticist position psychoanalytic interpretation of
art seems both inadequate to and far from completely constitutive of its
object, to use Joseph Margolis's distinction between two kinds of
interpretation (Margolis, 1989, pp. 237-39). But psychoanalytic inter-
pretation is more adequate to and constitutive of the literary than the
visual work of art, for it cannot come to terms-or at least has not, as it
has been practiced- with the power of visuality in the best works of visual
art. This power is untranslatable into literary terms, at least not directly.
It is inseparable from the special erotic character of seeing, defined by
Freud as the major vehicle, after touch, of libidinous excitation (Freud,
1905, p. 156). One should also recall, in this context, Freud's assertion
(1923, p. 21) that "thinking in pictures is ... only a very incomplete form
of being conscious. In some way ... it stands nearer to unconscious
processes than does thinking in words, and it is unquestionably older than
the latter both ontogenetically and phylogenetically." The density of the
unconscious has to do with its nondiscursive character as a mode of
picturing-the model, as it were, for all conscious modes of picturing.
Anzieu (1989) remarks that "an original mode of functioning of the
psychical apparatus exists, pictogrammatic in nature, which is more
archaic than its primary and secondary functioning" (p. 38). Psychoan-
alytic interpretation may constitute literary art by interpretive act, but its
interpretations cannot coastitute visual art because of visual art's almost
unmanageable power of sensuous/erotic excitation. I believe this is why
there have been more psycho-iconographic than psycho-stylistic studies
of visual art, for stylistic form encodes- that is, simultaneously masters
DONALD KUSPIT 7
and heightens, brings under more or less systematic control, and makes
more or less excruciating and poignant, that is, threateningly uncontrol-
lable- the exciting sensuous/erotic power of art, most evident in the best
visual art. In my opinion iconographic studies tend to repress or deny the
sensuous/erotic power of visual art, which is what ultimately moves-
gives art power over- the spectator. Art's sensuousness subverts or
breaks the frame of the work's conventions and norms of meaning, the
narrative readability iconography is interested in, implying the secondary
significance of narrative, indeed, of conventional readability. As it has
been practiced, psychoanalytic interpretation of visual art has not dealt
satisfactorily with art's spontaneous appeal to the sensuality of seeing,
instantaneously overcoming all repressive barriers. Unexpectedly, this
sensuous/erotic transgression, evoking bodiliness, is a major source of the
visual work of art's disturbing, critical social power. This deep sensuous/
erotic appeal both precedes and outlasts the more superficial psychic
influence of the work of art's narrative and ideological meaning struc-
tures.
Two literati, Leo Bersani and Richard Poirier, exemplify the "density
of art" position. T. W. Adorno, a major figure of the Frankfurt Critical
School and a major music theorist and aesthetician- his Aesthetic Theory
(1984) is, in my opinion, the most important book on aesthetics and art
written in the 20th century-exemplifies the dialectical position. These
individuals are perhaps the best spokesmen for the two sides of the subtly
defensive neo-aestheticism, both of which, regarded as complementary,
afford a unique avenue of approach for understanding the role of
psychoanalysis in visual art and art criticism. For Bersani, Mallarme is
the exemplary dense artist. (I myself think that density is most unequiv-
ocally realized in abstract visual art, especially that of Malevich,
Kandinsky, and Mondrian, and to a certain extent that of Pollock,
Rothko, and Ryman.) Mallarme's subversion and demonstration of
immediacy as "an ontological error" ushers in "the moving sense of a
thought continuously proposing supplements to the objects abolished by
its attention." He particularly exemplifies Poirier's notion of "a kind of
writing whose clarities bring on precipitations of density." Poirier, as
Bersani says, "distinguishes between density and the more familiar and
comfortable notion of difficulty," which, in Poirier's words, "gives the
critic a chance . . . to treat literature as if it were a communication of
knowledge" rather than, as Bersani says, "an enigmatic display of being"
(Bersani, 1986, p. 26). Visual art, I would argue-especially abstract
visual art, which aims to liberate seeing from meaning, if not unequiv-
ocally succeeding- is even less of a communication of knowledge than
literature and more of an enigmatic display of being, for its meanings are
