Is Freud still interesting?

Art, obsession and possession: Is Freud is still interesting?

A review of:

Hans Bellmer: The Anatomy of Anxiety
by Sue Taylor
MIT Press: Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA, 2000
310 pages, Illus. b/w & col. ISBN 0-262-20130-5

and

Myth and Metamorphosis: Picasso's Classical Prints of the 1930s
by Lisa Florman
MIT Press: Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA, 2000
243 pages, Illus. b/w. ISBN 0-262-06213-5

by Robert Pepperell

An abbreviated version of this article appears on the Leonardo Digital Reviews site.

Hans Bellmer and Pablo Picasso are artists who have been characterised, in professional and personal terms, as both possessive and obsessive. If 'possession' and 'obsession' have a suitably Freudian ring it is because they chime with much contemporary scholarship seeking to treat artistic works as objects through which to construct a psychoanalytic analysis of the (absent) artist as subject. The two examples of such methodology considered here, by Sue Taylor and Lisa Florman, both attempt to reassert the explanatory power of Freudian theory at a time when it seems in wider decline (Freud was barely mentioned at the recent 'Toward a Science of Consciousness 2001' conference in Sweden. William James, however, was liberally mentioned). Given doubts about the efficacy of the 'talking cure' and scepticism over some of the cases studies offered as evidence by Freud and his colleagues in support of their theories, one could be forgiven for thinking that orthodox psychoanalysis had retreated from medical science into the highly subjective realm of art criticism. The advantages of such a move are obvious: a lower standard of proof and subjects who can't answer back. After all, there are few serious consequences in misinterpreting a painting. So, what can psychoanalytic theories contribute to our appreciation of art and our understanding of artists?

Hans Bellmer devoted nearly all his personal and professional life to a singular and absolute obsession. Exiled from his native Poland and then from Nazi Germany to France just before the outbreak of war, he gravitated from an early career in graphic design toward the Surrealist group in Paris and became a regular contributor to their various publications. Throughout his career Bellmer created work in a range of media -- prints, drawings, photographs, paintings, sculptures, collages and writing -- relentlessly studying the theme of contorted female sexuality and, by association, his own morbid desires. The images for which he is best known, and the first to be widely disseminated, are those photographs of the girl-like doll he constructed in 1933 and its successor built in 1935. The dolls were posed in a series of provocative scenarios suggestive of punishment, violation or mutilation and repeatedly photographed, often in harsh artificial light. Taylor recounts that the dolls, and more importantly the anxieties they represented, became the central concern of the artist's mental and physical existence, to the extent that near death he asked to be buried with one. And in many ways it is the mental condition of the artist, as much as and perhaps even more than, the artistic content of his work that 'Anatomy of Anxiety' investigates.

For Taylor the art of Hans Bellmer is a psychoanalytic goldmine yielding rich nuggets of classic Freudianism: the oedipal complex, the castration complex, the trauma of the primal scene, fetishism and narcissism are apparently all vividly (almost diagrammatically) presented in Bellmer's oeuvre. Much is made, for example, of the artist's relationship (or lack of) with his distant and authoritarian father, the compensatory over-affection for his mother and the problematic attachment to his young female cousin. Using available biographical data and the artist's works as evidence, Taylor probes deep into the psyche of this complex, paranoid and highly articulate man in order to make a number of claims about his unconscious motives and desires. One such claim is made fairly tentatively early in the introduction: "I propose here that [Bellmer's] impassioned expressions of father hatred might work to cover over a repressed homosexual attachment, an hypothesis that runs counter to other psychoanalytic accounts of his oeuvre." (p. 13). To some this would seem an extravagant assertion since there is very little evidence of homoeroticism in Bellmer's art; yet by the end of the book it has become an almost indisputable fact: " . . . Bellmer sought punishment for his own deeply repressed homoerotic desires and murderous oedipal wishes through fantasmatic violence displaced onto the female body." (p. 198). This diagnosis may be consistent with Freudian theory but less convincing to anyone neutral, under-informed or critical about orthodox psychoanalytic doctrines.

Taylor's obvious enthusiasm for Freudian analysis tends to obscure the fact that it offers only a theory of the mind rather than, as one is led to believe, a precise and reliable explanation, and I believe this is a great weakness in the book. It must be said immediately that the standard of scholarship in 'The Anatomy of Anxiety' is not in question. Taylor draws skilfully on a wide range of pertinent sources and has uncovered some new and startling connections between Bellmer's ideas and those of other writers, thinkers and artists. For example, she examines the fascinating influence of the psychiatrist Paul Schilder (p. 104) and exposes the close similarities between some of Bellmer's posed photographs and the late work of Marcel Duchamp (p. 271 n 25). Yet a few of her more contentious declarations suffer (for me at least) from being theories which cite other theories as supporting evidence. If one is sceptical about, say, the applicability of the oedipal complex or the relevance of castration anxiety, then many of Taylor's propositions will remain at best conditional. In her defence she might respond, with some justification, that uncovering Freudian neuroses in Bellmer's art is not merely a projective fantasy since, like most other active surrealists, he was acquainted with Freud's ideas and conscious of the psychoanalytic implications of his own sexually discomposing images (p. 243 n5). Neither does Taylor's attachment to the ideas of the "father of psychoanalysis" diminish the subtly of her readings of Bellmer's art. She is able to offer genuinely illuminating exegeses which are, in nearly all cases, clear, consistent and credible within their own terms (see particularly the criticism of the 1935 doll photographs in chapter 4).

But if the standard Freudian explanations of Bellmer's images remain dependent on questionable theories, Taylor's excavation of less familiar Freudian territory throws up more productive ideas. Our current tendency to derogate belief in animism, omnipotent thought and magic as 'child-like' or 'primitive' can to some extent be traced back to Freud himself who, in books like 'Totem and Taboo (1913)', compares the social behaviours of "savages" and "primitive races" to the pre-mature and developing "civilised" adult. Yet in the sections of 'The Anatomy of Anxiety' dealing with the sensation of the "uncanny" (a feeling truly engendered by seeing Bellmer's doll 'in the flesh') a passage of Freud is quoted that draws magic back into the realm of civilisation through the agency of art: "In only a single field of our civilisation has the omnipotence of thoughts been retained, and that is in the field of art. . . People speak with justice of the 'magic of art' and compare artists to magicians. But the comparison is perhaps more significant than it claims to be" (Freud quoted p. 54). Perhaps Freud's familiarity with non-western beliefs (particularly through J. G. Frazer's 'Golden Bough', 1890) left open in his mind the possibility that occult phenomena may exert real force, at least through art. Certainly the suggestions of occultism in Bellmer's work are pronounced, although Taylor does not mention them explicitly. Take, for example, the mystical belief in the power of effigies (dolls, masks and fetishes) containing living forces or the figure of the Androgyne, a staple of occult ideas and a recurrent image in Bellmer.

The Androgyne, both male and female, symbolised a concept apparently alien to western empiricist logic -- the co-presence of opposites without contradiction or cancellation. Yet psychoanalysis is itself full of such paradoxes, and Taylor marshals several examples in her favour. She quotes Donald Kuspit's post-Freudian definition of the fetish as "the illusory comfort of union with the mother and simultaneous disengagement, detachment, disidentification from her", in other words an "economic condensation of the mother's body" (p. 60). The paradox of separation and unification is amplified in a later section on Bataille (whose 'Histoire de l'oeil' was anonymously illustrated by Bellmer in 1947): "Bataille believed that the individual's fundamental isolation and separation from the world, his or her "discontinuity," gave rise to a longing for primal continuity with the rest of existence, which can be achieved only in death" (p. 144). This idea of ascension toward a cosmic unity is a cornerstone of much occult belief, and is linked to the assumption of continuous intelligence between mind and body (and ultimately the cosmos). Bellmer, in one of his poetic texts, advocated the concept of "physical intelligence", a kind of mentality of the body whereby: "he invokes Georg-Christoph Lichtenberg's suggestion that one's conviction about the validity of an algebraic equation resides in the brain, but also to a certain degree in the thumb." (p. 102). It is these passages in "The Anatomy of Anxiety' that I find most exciting and which I believe offer the most original interpretation of Bellmer's work, indeed much surrealist art and perhaps even the 'magical' evocations of art in general. Here the enigmatic suggestions of Freud in 'Totem and Taboo' combine with some elementary occult ideas and Bellmer's obsessive libido to concoct a heady brew of art, magic and desire. Bellmer's overriding need to possess in graphical form something of the female which always remains elusive, and thereby ever more desirable, leads him into a state of demonic possession -- possessed and repulsed by that which he wants to own, and through owning to become part of. To my mind this makes a far more gripping story than any amount imaginary lost penises or speculative homosexual attachments.

To a far greater extent than Bellmer, the obsessions of Pablo Picasso have been the subject of detailed documentation and he needs no biographical introduction here. As with Sue Taylor's book, Lisa Florman's revaluation of Picasso's classicist prints of the 1930s is deeply indebted to the concepts of Freud. Frequent reference is made to the notion of 'overdetermination', originally expounded in the 'The Interpretation of Dreams (1900)', which identifies a kind of simultaneous condensation and extension of connected images or thoughts, particularly prevalent in dreams. An overdetermined sign (or figure) is one that has compressed within it a complex of further ideas and associations any of which can invoke the other and which, by extension, become part of that sign (p. 179 -- 185). Florman uses this in her discussion of Picasso' s etchings to map out the matrix of inter-linked symbols and references that bind together pictorial elements in the 'Vollard Suite' and the 'Minotauromachy' (p. 181). For Florman this gives the apparently diverse series of prints, produced over some seven years an "astonishing coherence" and intimate inter-relatedness which adds to the richness of possible associations and interpretations.

She goes so far as to suggest that the some plates of the 'Vollard Suite' in particular: "offer themselves as a kind of structural analogue of the Freudian unconscious, and that the patterns of viewing they encourage likewise resembles the desire-driven operations of the primary process." (p. 136). Whilst one set of plates is closely identified with the technical Freudian concept of the primary process, another is identified with its complement -- the secondary process. One section of the hundred or so prints produced by Picasso for the dealer and publisher Ambroise Vollard is titled the 'Sculptor's Studio' and depicts classical gods and nymphs, sculptors and models, in Elysian interiors gazing seductively at each other, or sculptures of each other, from reclining postures. For Florman this series is exceptional within the Suite as a whole in that it is made of images: "whose subject itself concerns the repression or sublimation of desire in the quiescent contemplation of art" (p. 137). Technically speaking, repression here is the mechanism whereby the primary process: "is directed towards securing the free discharge of quantities of excitation, while the second system, by means of the cathexes emanating from it, succeeds in inhibiting this discharge and in transforming the cathexis into a quiescent one" (Freud quoted p. 137). For me such close correlation between a technical medical theory and the interpretation of a series of etchings does offer something that enriches our appreciation of the images themselves. As Florman wishes to suggest, the view that classical art is somehow free-floating, disembodied and desire-less is successfully challenged by Picasso's skilful inscriptions of sublime erotic presence in "quiescent contemplation". The tension between desire exposed and restrained is certainly present in the "Sculptor's Studio' series. Art serves here, both in the prints themselves and in the sculptural relations they depict, as a permanent vehicle for the concentration and distillation of the tensions induced by transient human appetites. As with Bellmer, it is through art that one can try to possess the intangible and the elusive. And by possessing, or owning, in this way it becomes one's 'own'; that is, part of one, so that some sense of unity is achieved.

The word 'cathexis', which Freud uses with reference to concentrations of psychic energy, derives from the Greek to hold fast or possess, and is also an attempt to render the German 'Bezetzung', as in to occupy or possess a building or place. Fascinatingly, in what seems to be a fortuitous case of overdetermination, the notion of possession raised earlier in respect of Bellmer finds resonance in Florman's citation of the critic Leo Steinberg who argued that: "to Picasso drawing was a form of "possession" or "inhabitation""(p. 116). Picasso himself claimed art was, both in conception and reception, "actual lovemaking" and Florman proposes that his multi-viewed distortions of the female form are: "the visual equivalent of an embrace" (p. 116) -- an attempt to consume, enter into, or become continuous with the object in view. This is one way in which, as Florman says in the preface, these images: "force the recognition that we can no longer separate subject and object. . .in quite the way we might have once thought we could. The 'Vollard Suite' in turn suggests that all such negotiations between subject and object, self and something external, are intimately associated with the workings of desire" (p. XVII). This proposed continuity between subject and object is a fundamentally mystical proposition and returns us to the occultism we spoke of in relation to Bellmer.

Much more could be said of the suggestions made here, but what is clear already is that orthodox Freudian analysis of art objects can offer useful insights into their creation and subsequent meaning. To project further into the artist's deepest psyche, I would argue, carries great risks and Florman's book wins out over Taylor's to the extent that the former limits her focus to the picture plane whilst avoiding excessive reliance on disputed theories. But what I think emerges from these two studies is a more interesting occult resonance of Freud's ideas, perhaps less easily digested by his orthodox subscribers. The close analyses of two oeuvres, Bellmer's fetishistic constructions and Picasso's deceptively simple line drawings, has exposed, for me at least, the inherently magical operation of art and the sorcerous powers of the artists.