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ESSAYS
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How psychoanalytic theory frames, and distorts
art and human experience
Psychoanalysis
breaks down
Sarah James
Analogies, it is true, decide nothing, but
they can make one feel more at home.
- Sigmund Freud
Is art in therapy? Psychoanalytical terminology
is now endemic in all genres of art writing – sloppy Lacanianisms
and constant Freudian theoretical slips have become a staple of
art criticism. But does it really mean anything to discuss art in
psychoanalytical terms? When Hal Foster, characteristically quoting
Freud, detects ‘the hallucinatory wish-psychosis of a melancholic’
in Warhol’s Marilyn paintings, what exactly is the point of
such an ambiguous therapeutic analysis? (1) Is the subjectivised
language of psychoanalytically-invested criticism not just a poor
substitute for a now bankrupt subjectivity? The popularised application
of vague psychoanalytical terminology demands critique. There is
more at stake than the harmless growth of a handy lexicon of metaphors
and imagery. Dense psychoanalytical concepts too frequently become
little more than faux-complex textual substitutes, taking the place
of intelligent historical, political or aesthetic insights. This
normalisation of psychoanalytical language in art is part of a reorientation
towards the self and a decline in the sociological imagination,
which results not in the empowerment of subjectivity, but in its
attenuation.
The status of uprooted philosophical concepts
is slippery enough, but the meaning of psychoanalytical categories
is even more uncertain. As Ernesto Laclau has specifically inquired,
what is the status of psychoanalytic categories such as the Oedipus
or castration complex – are they historical products or the
a priori conditions of any possible society? Judith Butler has also
provocatively questioned the politics of psychoanalysis, asking
if an ahistorical recourse to Lacanianism stands as a quasi-transcendental
limitation on all possible subject formation. If so, is it not indifferent
to politics? This brings attention to the sticky relation between
psychoanalytical versions of identification and forms of political
identification. Can psychoanalysis provide a theory for politics,
and if so, which psychoanalysis does so best? (2)
From identity politics to therapy
The psychoanalytical asides in most contemporary
criticism limply echo earlier psychoanalytically invested art practices
and theory of the 1970s and ’80s. While the rise of the performative
and gendered body in art coincided with the turn in cultural theory
and criticism to the bodily and the psychoanalytical, as Terry Eagleton
has quipped, in literary theory sexuality has now become the greatest
Freudian fetish of all; the body has become both the locus for a
deepened radical politics and a pathetic displacement of them. (3)
In a world that grows increasingly abstracted by theory, the body
stands for the concrete and material, articulating, just as psychoanalysis
strives to, the meeting point of culture and nature. Psychoanalytical
theory has been co-opted into a more accessible identity politics,
and while it may trade on its former radicality, much of its draw
for art writing today, however, is simply as a discourse heavy with
poignant but ultimately meaningless analogies.
The omni-presence of psychoanalytical categories
of thought in culture is no longer even questioned . We live in
an increasingly psychology-obsessed age, something close to Richard
Sennett’s ‘tyranny of intimacy’ which thrives on
solipsistic confessionalism. The diagnoses on the deaths of the
subject and author, and the decline of agency, goes hand in hand
with the narrative of emotional vulnerability inherent in our therapy-centred
culture. Sociologist Frank Furedi sees the therapeutic project of
selfhood as one of the most significant developments in contemporary
Western culture and as representing the reconfiguration of a radically
new definition of the human subject. (4) As his recent study of
the powerful influence of the therapeutic imperative in Anglo-American
societies convincingly argues, today’s therapeutic culture
provides the script through which emotional deficits make their
way into a wider cultural vernacular. Furedi suggests that there
is a mutual dependency between the rise of identity politics –
the first movement to internalise the therapeutic ideal – and
the ascendancy of therapy-centred culture, leading to the disorganisation
of the private sphere, the depoliticisation of the public and the
erosion of the boundary between the two. Personal and public responsibility
is rejected, as the enlightenment concept of human choice is abandoned.
The turn to emotionalism, which Furedi diagnoses, is one of the
most significant developments in contemporary Western culture. Emotions
are uncoupled from ideologies or collective identities and are individualised
and a very new conformity is imposed through the management of people’s
emotions.
Any objections to this anatomy of faith?
While psychoanalysis as clinical practice has
received a number of convincing attacks (one of the most recent
and persuasive from Fredrick Crews), the misuses of psychoanalysis
has received none. (5) The infamous Sokal hoax took apart the meaningless
appropriation of scientific jargon by poststructuralism. Their focus,
however, was not on the specific appropriation of psychoanalytical
concepts. (6) Why are there so few serious critiques of the endemic
use of psychoanalysis in the humanities? Ernest Gellner is one of
the few thinkers who sought, in the early ’80s, to attack both
the status of psychoanalysis and its infectious popularity within
academic discourses. Yet his critique focuses more on debunking
the status of psychoanalytical propositions themselves than the
problems that arise in their interpretive function. (7)
In his last text, Adorno briefly warned of
the problems posed by the application of psychoanalysis to artworks.
(8) Psychoanalytic theories of art are obviously superior to idealist
aesthetics, for Adorno, helping to liberate art from absolutism,
and deciphering the social character of artwork. Adorno also argued
that:
Psychoanalysis too casts a spell related
to idealism, that of an absolutely subjective sign system denoting
subjective instinctual impulses. It unlocks phenomena, but falls
short of the phenomenon of art. Psychoanalysis treats artworks
as nothing but facts, yet neglects their own objectivity, their
inner consistency, their level of form, their critical impulse,
their relation to non-physical reality, and finally their idea
of truth. (9)
Adorno sees Freudian psychoanalysis as both
antithetical to Kantian aesthetics and simultaneously sharing some
deep similarities with it. Both the Kantian construction of the
transcendental subject and the Freudian recourse to the empirically
psychological are subjectively orientated by the power of desire.
For both, Adorno asserts, artworks exist only in relation to their
observer or maker. Adorno sees art, even on psychological grounds
alone, as more legitimate than psychology acknowledges. Faithful
to art’s potentially utopian function and critical capacity,
Adorno argues that if art has psychoanalytical roots then they are
the roots of a fantasy of omnipotence, which incorporates the wish
to bring about a better world. A merely subjective language of the
unconscious does not even touch it. (10)
Finding meaning in the confusion, what is
your diagnosis?
Art history has too often been satisfied simply
to find in psychoanalysis a set of interpretative keys. That art
intervenes in theoretical discourse – that art theorises –
is still too infrequently recognised. (11) For psychoanalysis to
be used productively in the reading of art, should it not be entirely
crucial that the artwork is itself invested in psychoanalytical
ideas or obviously resonant in such a context? What happens when
the art isn’t theorising? What about those practices that are
fervently anti-theoretical such as the Chapman brothers, who have
made a household, art-student knowledge of Freudian thought sarcastically
literal, but whose work has been constantly written about with earnest
references to psychoanalysis and long quotations of Laplanche and
Bataille. For example, for Mark Sladen, the Chapmans’s fuck
face mannequins manage to ‘adopt a specifically Freudian model,
throwing the process of symbol formation into reverse… in an
amazing and monstrous hybrid in which stereotypes coexist with the
fantasies of polymorphous desire.’ (12) In all of the arguments
that were wagered over the post-theoretical or philistine positioning
of art in the ’90s, the specific position or problem of psychoanalytical
theory in art practice and criticism wasn’t satisfactorily
addressed. (13) In the practice of psychoanalysis, the silence of
the analyst is fundamental to the analytical session. Once reluctant
art is theoretically psychoanalysed the opposite occurs, whereby
the lunatic art writer – dragging symptoms from the art object
or filling readings with psychoanalytical jargon – is closer
to the patient, and the artwork becomes more analogous to the silent
analyst.
There are different strategies of psychoanalytical
engagement with art practice and they often blur. There is, for
example, an important distinction to be made between the reading
of an artwork in terms of the artist’s unconscious – as
in Freud’s founding text on Leonardo, or Robert Liebert’s
reading of Michelangelo – and the elucidation of art practices
that actively engage in psychoanalytical ideas or their critique,
such as Margaret Iversen on Mary Kelly or, more sophisticatedly,
Mignon Nixon on Louise Bourgeois. Then there is art writing that
quotes psychoanalytical concepts as a way of importing legitimating
theoretical and authoritative language into the interpretation.
For one of the many examples that display such a vapid psychoanalysing
of art, Sarah Kent’s writing comes to mind. Over the years
Kent has managed to detect ‘the terror of disintegration identified
by Freud as the “mini death”’ in John Greenwood’s
paintings, ‘the Freudian sublimation of the infantile desire
to smear the walls with excrement’ in Marcus Harvey’s,
and Irigary’s ‘thinking on feminine duality and phallic
unity as given form’ in Jane Simpson’s installations.
(14)
Rosalind Krauss’s diagnosis of the medium
of video art in Freudian terms as inherently narcissistic is dubious
because it uses psychoanalytic terms generically. In relation to
Acconci’s work Centres (1971), she declared ‘a narcissism
so endemic to works of video that I find myself wanting to generalise
it as the condition of the entire genre. Yet what would it mean
to say, “The medium of video is narcissism?”’ (15)
The very notion of claiming that all video is inherently narcissistic
is ridiculous, and while this may have made sense in relation to
early performative video, it is not true of video as a medium, and
is especially incongruous with documentary video. Similarly, Hal
Foster reads the whole of the ‘neo-avant-garde’ in terms
of Freudian trauma, (16) and Benjamin Buchloh interprets Gerhard
Richter’s oeuvre in terms of its psychoanalytical double identity,
historical consciousness and repression. (17)
The more successful attempts to read art psycho-analytically
are those that employ specific psychoanalytical theories in the
exploration of complex issues related to representation, gender,
performance and agency. This approach is typified by the efforts
of Peggy Phelan and is most successful in the work of Judith Butler.
(18) Phelan’s task is not an easy one, namely, to ‘find
a theory of value for that which is not “really” there,
that which cannot be surveyed within the boundaries of the putative
real’. (19) This paradoxical aim echoes the discourse’s
own fundamentally contradictory status: if language is what opens
up desire, desire is what silences language. This paradox is equally
true of the discourse itself, as it can only operate in the place
between unconsciousness and its impossible symbolisation, which
always threatens to disrupt its theoretical coherence.
Radicalised subjectivity or bankrupt subjectivity?
The poor application of psychoanalytical categories
as mere metaphor perpetuates the worst sort of criticism which hides
under the discourse’s seductive idioms and radical intellectual
heritage. Unlike most other borrowed theories, psychoanalysis suggests
an authority beyond the abstract, with its scientific claims to
truth and its dual status between theory and therapy. In Krauss,
combining poststructuralism with psychoanalysis, the work of art,
reduced to a semiotic text, is reinvested with the subjective through
psychoanalysis, theoretically grafting a subconsciousness back onto
the supposedly split subject of the artwork and its interpretation.
Ironically, then, while the subjectivity of formalist art criticism
is condemned, another kind of excessive subjectivity and individualism
re-emerges in the interpretation of art practices.
If the stable subject has been disbanded by
poststructuralists and replaced by a plurality of subjectivities,
there is also a profound persistence of the rhetoric of the humanist
subject. (20) As Slavoj Zizek’s compelling restaging of the
centred subject suggests, the spectre of the Cartesian subject haunts
the polymorphous multiple subjectivities of postmodernist theories,
which, he claims, have simply misunderstood the supposedly centred
subject which was always polymorphous and unstable as a result of
the turbulent excessive imagination. (21) In a similar manner, the
language of psychoanalysis has replaced the subjective judgment
of the critic, or the presence of the autobiographical, with an
altered and more acceptable textual and supposedly radical subjectivisation.
In fact, what the psychoanalysing of art practices achieves is not
the radicalisation of subjectivity, but its weakening and eventual
bankruptcy.
The turn to the individual in intellectual
and more popular cultural discourses has profound consequences.
Furedi has questioned the widely held belief that the cultural turn
to the individual is enlightened, arguing that far from this, our
new emotional culture involves a radical redefinition of personhood
and the human condition, imposing a new conformity through the management
of people’s emotions. Dominique LeCourt has similarly criticised
this inward turn to the sphere of private life and a similar rise
of depoliticised individualism. (22) He condemns the group of thinkers
labelled the ‘nouveau philosophes’ and their most prominent
exponents – Luc Ferry, Alain Renaut and Andre Glucksmann –
whom he casts as mediocre thinkers that seek neither to interpret
nor change the world, but instead passively legitimise globally
hegemonic neo-liberalism. (23) For LeCourt, the post-1968 European
intelligentsia inhabits an archaic subset of contemporary American
Society. The subject of (modern) classical philosophy, whether psychological
or transcendental, suffered onslaughts from generations of Nietzscheans,
Freudians, Marxists and Freudo-Marxists, and consequently the ‘nouveau
philosophes’ set about trying to reinstate the individual to
the foreground, steeped in notions of spirituality. LeCourt refers
to this process as ‘a system of permanent recuperation’,
which enables imperialists to exploit the crisis of their own imperialism
and the crisis of Communism, in the name of democracy. The philosophical
exploitation of totalitarianism enables such theorists to counter
the influence of Marxism on new philosophy, depoliticising the intelligentsia
as a compliment to the demobilisation of the masses.
The recourse to psychoanalysis does not have
to depoliticise subjectivity, and the work of theorists such as
Butler and Zizek highlights the relative paucity of most psychoanalysing
in art criticism and art history. While Zizek’s theorising
of the subject may, as John Roberts has suggested, result in an
abstraction of the social agency of the subject, his application
of a very political Lacanianism in the reading of a vast assortment
of cultural objects shows how vigorously and brilliantly psychoanalysis
can be applied to the everyday. (24) Indeed, he has stated that
he is convinced of his proper grasp of Lacanian concepts only when
he can translate them successfully into the inherent imbecility
of popular culture. This lesson has much resonance for the application
of psychoanalysis to contemporary visual art.
If psychoanalytical ideas are to be used as
more than just insipid analogies or just cut and pasted like theoretical
collage, either the art under discussion must be making psychoanalytical
interventions that both demand and deserve detailed extrapolation,
or art practices must be completely thought through psychoanalytically.
Psychoanalytical theory reduced to indulgent theoretical word play
becomes entirely absorbed into the excessive discourse theory that
has dominated the reading of cultural artefacts since the rise of
poststructuralism. Used in this way, psychoanalysis is a symptom
of the mentality of an age of the inward looking, isolated, self-obsessed
individual, for whom truth is neither collective nor political but,
at best, personal and, at worst, simply immaterial. Since the rise
of modernity, the exercise of human subjectivity has been associated
with the potential for altering and transforming external reality;
with the rise of therapeutic culture, the active sense of the subject
has given way to a passive one. Yesterdays social determinism is
replaced by an even cruder, and presumptive, emotional determinism.
Notes
1 Hal Foster, ‘Death in America’, October: The Second
Decade, 1986-1996, ed., Rosalind Krauss et al, MIT Press, Cambridge,
Mass., London 1997, p.345
2 See Laclau and Butler’s comments in Contingency, Hegemony,
Universality: Contemporary Dialogues on the Left, Judith Butler,
Ernesto Laclau and Slavoj Zizek, Verso, London 2000.
3 See Terry Eagleton, ‘Peter Brookes on Bodies’ in Figures
of Dissent: Critical Essays on Fish, Spivak, Zizek and Others, Verso,
London 2003, pp.129-135.
4 See Frank Furedi, Therapy Culture: Cultivating Vulnerability in
An Uncertain Age, Routledge, London 2004.
5 See Fredrick Crews and Harold P. Blum, The Memory Wars: Freud's
Legacy in Dispute, Granta, London 1997.
6 See Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont, Intellectual Impostures: Postmodern
Philosophers' Abuse of Science, Profile Books, London 1998.
7 See Ernest Gellner, The Psychoanalytical Movement: The Cunning
of Unreason, 2nd Ed., Fontana Press, London 1985.
8 See Theodor W. Adorno, ‘ Art, Society, Aesthetics’,
in Aesthetic Theory, Gretel Adorno and Rolf Tiedemann Eds., Trans.,
and Intro Robert Hullot-Kentor, The Athlone Press, London 1997,
pp.1-15.
9 Ibid., p.9.
10 Ibid., p.9.
11 This important point was argued by Mignon Nixon in ‘Psycho-Phallus
(Qu’est-ceque c’est?)’ in A Companion to Art Theory,
ed., Paul Smith and Carolyn Wilde, Blackwell, London 2002, pp.397-408.
12 Mark Sladen, ‘The Body in question’, Art Monthly, no.191,
Nov 1995, p.5.
13 See John Roberts and Dave Beech, The Philistine Controversy,
Verso, London 2002.
14 Sarah Kent, Shark Infested Waters: The Saatchi Collection of
British Art in the 90s, Zwemmer, London 1994.
15 See Krauss, ‘Video: the Aesthetics of Narcissism’,
in Hanhardt, John G. ed., Video Culture: A Critical Investigation,
Gibbs M Smith, Inc., Peregrine Smith Books in association with Visual
Studies Workshop Press, New York 1986. p.50.
16 See Hal Foster The Return of the Real, MIT Press, Cambridge,
Mass., London 1996.
17 See Benjamin Buchloh, Gerhard Richter: Painting After the Subject
of History, PhD Dissertation, Ann Arbour, Michigan 1994.
18 See Judith Butler, Gender Trouble, Routledge, London 1999.
19 See Peggy Phelan Unmarked: the Politics of Performance, Routledge,
London 1993, p.1.
20 For example see Joan Scott, ‘Multiculturalism and the Politics
of Identity’ in The Identity in Question, ed. John Rajchman,
Routledge, New York 1995, pp.3-11.
21 See Slavoj Zizek, The Ticklish Subject, Verso, London 2000.
22 Dominique Lecourt, trans., by Gregory Elliott, The Mediocracy:
French Philosophy since the mid 1970s, Verso, London 2002.
23 See Luc Ferry and Alain Renaut, French Philosophy of the Sixties:
An Essay on Antihumanism, trans., Mary H. S. Cattini, University
of Massachusetts Press, Amherst 1990 and Andre Glucksmann, The Master
Thinkers, trans., Brian Pearce, Harvester, Brighton 1980.
24 See John Roberts, ‘The Labour of Subjectivity, The Subjectivity
of Labour: Reflections on Contemporary Political Theory and Culture’,
Third Text, Vol.16, Issue 4, 2002, p.377.
Sarah James is currently researching her Phd on the photographic
condition of German art at the Courtauld Institute of Art.
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