The arts and psychosis

These days the arts are no longer thought of in the simplistic terms of early Freudian tradition as ‘material’ for the display of psychotic or neurotic processes to be interpreted or diagnosed by an outside person. Instead the creation and appreciation of artworks is looked to as a model for a developmental process which has rich analogies to all of the therapeutic and counselling situations in which the way out of some psychic or developmental crisis makes constructive use of the transference between two minds. The two minds – or it may be more – engage in a live series of projections and introjections which may or may not re-member past conflicts but certainly are not merely re-enacting them in a nostalgic or repetitive way. This live engagement, in which the arts invite us to partake, employs the psychic mechanisms of ‘aesthetic conflict’ (in Donald Meltzer’s formulation) and ‘catastrophic change’ (as formulated by Wilfred Bion), concepts which define the root of our human capacity to create symbols for our emotional experience. Hence the title of this talk, and I shall shortly be describing these terms in more detail, with the help also of the Kleinian aesthete and art critic Adrian Stokes. Our focus here is on the special facilitation of this process by means of the outward forms achieved through the arts – a process which Stokes calls the ‘working-out’ of inner feelings. I would like first to say a few words about the sculptor Louise Bourgeois, whose work provides an example especially relevant to this topic. Many people will be familiar with the special and autobiographical quality of Bourgeois’ work, which is based on the reviewing of childhood experience in terms of phantasy and the drama of part-objects, in the Kleinian sense of representations of internal parental or family figures in the form of parts of the body. Probably her most famous work is the giant sculpture of a metal spider, named ‘Maman’, that was exhibited at Tate Modern some years ago, part of an iconic series. Perhaps less well known, though, is the fact that at the same time as producing her artworks, she underwent many years of psychoanalysis and in parallel with this, wrote daily diaries reflecting on her analysis, her dreams, her moment to moment emotional states, and the ways in which these provided inspiration for her work. Her Diary she said embodied her ‘relationship with an unknown’ and this reflected the way she approached her art. ‘I am passionately going somewhere, but I’m not sure where.’, she wrote; and, ‘Confine what is known to libraries and computers ... I work in the unknown, in the lost.’ Her function as an artist, she insisted, was not to convince anyone of anything, but to symbolize the reality of particular emotional conflicts and anxieties: