Dali: Freud 1939
Dali's drawing of Freud points to his almost mythic status amongst the Surrealists who believed that Freud opened the door to the unconscious and thus to a way of making images that tapped directly into dreams and a collective unconscious that not only legitimised the work that they were doing, it gave it a theoretical foundation. Dali makes Freud almost cloud like, his soft forms drift into being as if arriving from a dream. But Freud could also draw quite well himself, his accurate representations of the nervous system of the sea lamprey meticulously document spinal nerve cells, reflecting an excellent command of traditional drawing techniques and an eye for the clarification of what are very difficult forms to observe under the microscope.
Freud: The nervous system of the the sea lamprey
As an artist looking to visualise tinnitus, the phrase 'ear of the other in your head' has begun to feel like a title for all of the images that have been produced so far. Takemoto is also speaking from what in Japan is called a Nacalian perspective. Nacal is Lacan backwards, and Nacalian refers to the fact that Lacan's theories explain Japanese behaviour quite well if they are turned upside down or back to front. This is I believe a proper way to treat most psychoanalytic theory as it releases theory back into the story ocean and allows those of us who are artists free reign to follow whichever current seems to be taking us in the direction we want to go in.
But Freud has other diagrams. A Harvard university exhibition devoted to the origins of psychoanalysis explained how Freud used diagrams in detail:
But Freud has other diagrams. A Harvard university exhibition devoted to the origins of psychoanalysis explained how Freud used diagrams in detail:
Emma Eckstein, one of Freud’s early patients and the first female psychoanalyst, was pivotal to Freud’s development of the “seduction theory,” which located the roots of hysteria and the neuroses in early experiences of sexual trauma. Freud used Emma’s neurosis as the example to illustrate how a childhood sexual trauma could reemerge in adulthood in the form of neurotic symptoms. The diagram, from an 1895 letter, conflates the two temporalities (past and present) and maps out the triggering elements for Eckstein’s illness. The black circles stand for conscious events, while the empty circles represent unconscious and repressed memories. As Freud wrote to Fliess the next year, memory-traces in the past were subject to rearrangement and revision in the present—a process known as nachträglichkeit or “deferred action.”
Freud's original diagram for the triggering elements for Eckstein’s illness.
Freud also made diagrams to visualise the architecture of hysteria and melancholia.
The architecture of hysteria
Melancholia
From Klee's The Pedagogical Sketchbook
Diagram from 'On Transformations of Instinct in Anal Erotism'
Freud often wrote about the “anal personality,” who he argued had the traits of “orderliness, parsimony and obstinacy.” He stated this was most probably due to childhood faeces retention. As was explained in the Harvard University exhibition of Freud's drawings, 'The child wishes to retain the most primary gift (a faeces), resisting its loss; later, the trait is mostly manifested through a desire for cleanliness. The drawing demarcates the process of substitution among the various signifiers along two main axes, one running diagonally between faeces (Lumpf) and baby (Kind), and the other running horizontally between baby and penis'.
Diagrams were a way for Freud to clarify his ideas, but they also gave his ideas a physical presence and therefore more gravitas and added weight to his theoretical ideas.
His earlier work exploring neurons
Freud's drawings could also be looked at as totally abstract images, if we compare his drawing of neurons above to a drawing by Hans Arp below, both drawings could be explained as being explorations of how basic forms could be organised.
Hans Arp
Freud's drawings also reflect the various journeys his mind was taking at the time. Which is perhaps all we can ask of any drawings.
Freud's freehand drawn diagram of the unconscious above can also be read as a mind roughing out an idea. Freud was very interested in how the body might be 'seen' in the mind. He stated that the brain’s fibres and cells
“contain the body periphery in the same way as a poem contains the alphabet, in a complete
rearrangement” and that “the body periphery is not projected onto the cortex in a simple and direct fashion ... but
rather it is represented there”. He believed that the mind represented the body abstractly and
symbolically. Mental functions are dynamic and exist over time, and they
involve processes that cannot be seen and cannot easily be drawn. This was why Freud gave up observational drawings and began to use diagrams. Freud's drawing above is a record of an event, which is another reason why it is so interesting. Perhaps you might try and represent other types of events that have happened in your own life. For instance how you came to realise something, or how a process of thinking that you use could be understood. These are good ways of exploring drawing as a way to understand things beyond the observational. Events make up processes that are themselves entangled into other processes and different types of drawing can be aligned with different types of events, for instance a diagrammatic representation is different to a map of where things are, which is different to a sketch outlining what the situation might look like, but all use the potential of drawing to carry concepts. Drawings are of course normally static, compressed translations of events, and it is interesting to think of these static consolidations of dynamic processes as batteries and how drawings can release the energy of 'trapped' events to be read as types of narratives.
At the same time that Freud was speculating on the unconscious, other people who are now forgotten were doing the same thing, one of my favourites was Edwin Babbitt, who's book 'Principles of light and colour', contains some fascinating insights into how others were trying to get to grip with visualising invisible forces. If the unconscious seems now a normal part of our everyday conceptual framework, a hundred years ago there were several other theoretical competitors around, and light itself often seemed central to their gestation. A few pages from 'The Principles of Light and Colour' should I hope be enough to whet your appetites for further investigation of concepts such as 'chromo-mentalism' and the various radiating rays that penetrate and emerge from our bodies.
The angel of innocence and Psycho-magnetic curves emanating from the temple
Psychic lights and colours
The general form of an atom
Odic lights and flames
Babbitt introduces us to Odic lights and his diagram of the atom is an amazingly beautiful construction of pure poetic fiction believing itself to be a depiction of what lies beneath reality. Babbitt would have believed in these theories just as much as Freud believed his, and interestingly many psychologists have been trying to debunk Freud over the last few years, his theories being regarded as yet more examples of middle class white males, turning their idiosyncratic views of the world into theories that explain everything from their privileged position.
As an artist who draws a lot I am much more interested in the power of images to hold our attention, not as proofs or understandings, but as magical encounters, doorways into ways of thinking that we would not normally have, and as such I can look at Babbitt's drawing of the general form of an atom and see hearts pumping, bees swarming and yes atoms vibrating, all entangled into the same fluid image, an image that for myself is as much about the future as the past.
See also:
No comments:
Post a Comment