Analysis, the Arts and the Well-spoken.

In the room the women come and go
Talking of Michelangelo.

T.S. Eliot

…the resonances of literature and the significations involved in works of art … Freud found his inspiration, ways of thinking, and arsenal of techniques therein.

Jacques Lacan

Let us suppose that one has an interest in psychoanalysis and the unconscious. It might lead to free association in pursuit of a knowledge of the particular, wherein lies a tortuous if not torturing tale. But lead also towards the meaning of words, those spoken in the theatre, written in books, precipitated in poetry, given form in sculpture and re-presented in painting. What an incomplete but exciting list of the ‘Arts’ as manifestations of speech!

Such an interest took Freud, the atheist in chains, to stare all day at the Moses of Michelangelo in a dark Roman church. As it demanded of him in the exposition of his clinical cases and theories a constant reference to the great historical figures of literature and philosophy. As it took him to question the ascent of civilisation and the illusions of the future out of the traditions and texts of mankind’s mythological origins.

As it took Lacan in his own turn, via Hamlet’s neurosis and Antigone’s sacrifice through the love of Socrates to the odyssey of Joyce. To even pose the question of who watches whom in confronting an art work. Why not heresy, to describe the look on the face of Bernini’s Saint Teresa as an expression of the enigma of sexuality?

How could it be otherwise that between these fields structured by the logic and grammar of language, the arts and analysis, that an indispensable intersection is defined. What are the possibilities and the risks of addressing this conjunction which is also a disjunction?
The task is the well-spoken. To hear it, to say it and to recognise it.

The School welcomes the questions and discussion that will follow the presentation of papers by members and analysts at this Annual Homage to Lacan. It opens its work and invites those who share an interest in the manner in which psychoanalysis and the ‘Arts’ inform each other.

Abstracts:

The Enigma of Rose Sélavy
Madeline Andrews

A man can never expect to start from scratch; he must start from readymade things, like even his mother and father.

Marcel Duchamp

The art of Marcel Duchamp has been characterised by his critics as resistant to categorisation, interpretation, systemisation and in effect, a body of work constituting an enigma. The birth of Duchamp’s feminine alter Rose Sélavy, whom according to the critic M. Neumann sprung fully formed from Duchamp’s cerebral faculties in 1920 (like Athena from the head of Zeus) was an extension of that impossible oeuvre. This paper cross examines works by Duchamp, Benjamin, Freud and Lacan, towards questioning the art of the psychoanalyst. Is it a writing of the impossible that traverses the field of the readymade?

Snapped by the Image: The Inverted Art of the Photograph and the Artifice of Psychoanalysis
Peter Gunn

There’s something sphinxlike about these images, as if one were looking at dreams as yet uninterpreted.… The pictures seem to dramatise their muteness.

Caleb Crain in The New York Review, May 1 2008, discussing an exhibition ‘The Art of the American Snapshot, 1888-1978.’

We see that every day, types who recount to you that their first masturbation – they will always remember it – has tremendous presence on the screen. Basically we understand very well why that has great screen presence, because it does not come from inside the screen.

Jacques Lacan, ‘The Third’

The central image in the Wolf Man’s primal dream is composed. It is an everyday family snap; a group sitting, albeit these are wolves in a tree. But there is something more here to disturb the quotidian, something which makes the Wolf Man wake up, screaming. What tells for him is the dramatic muteness of the look. It is by this that he is rivetted as the Wolf-Man. This paper will explore the link between what a photograph tells and what it is that is telling in a psychoanalysis.

Freud and Faust: Sympathy for the Devil
Michael Plastow

Now fills the air so many a haunting shape,
That no one knows how best to escape.

Goethe: Faust, Part II (cited as epigraph to Freud’s The Psychopathology of Everyday Life)

In return for an immortal soul, the Devil has many things to offer which are highly prized by men: wealth, security from danger, power over mankind and the forces of nature, even magical arts, and, above all else, enjoyment—the enjoyment of beautiful women.

Freud: A Seventeenth-Century Demonological Neurosis.

Throughout his work Freud drew heavily on the writings of Goethe, but most particularly that of Faust, Goethe’s account of the pact made with the devil by this learned man. Citations and references to this work are dispersed throughout Freud’s opus. But can we discern a particular direction in Freud’s use of this work? In any case, the reading Freud gives of Goethe’s poem is far from the moral interpretation made by others. We could propose that, from Faust, in different places and in different ways, Freud is able to elaborate something of the very itinerary of psychoanalysis itself.

Hamlet’s Act and the 'Fury of the Feminine Soul'
Sarah Jones

For Lacan Hamlet's prevarication before the act he is destined to complete refers us not only to a particular situation of desire, but also to the nature of desire. Affected by the absence of sufficient rites of mourning, Hamlet finally accedes to his act, but only after firstly himself receiving a fatal blow. We consider how Lacan presents this fatality of desire in his reading of Hamlet.

Notes from Beyond the Sonata of the Unconscious
Michael Currie

‘What is the art of the improvising musician? Whilst music can provide a colouration of the symbolic or an exaggeration of the drama of the imaginary, music itself is not an affair of representation – nothing in speaking about music is music itself. Yet much emphasis is laid on the spontaneous production of a ‘solo’ within jazz and other improvising traditions, and this occurs within a highly structured set of musical rules and conventions. I will discuss where, beyond the craft of the manipulation of the materials of music, the art of the jazz musician can be located in psychoanalytic terms.’

For the love of a story: psychoanalysis and creative writing
Alicia Evans

Creative writers and the field of literature have offered much to psychoanalysis, as illustrated by the stories associated with the psychoanalytic concepts of the Oedipus complex and narcissism, and with Freud’s references to Goethe’s work, amongst others. However, one might wonder what it is that psychoanalysis has to offer creative writers and their readers. What is offered by this paper is an analysis of the love of stories; a love that can both be brought to a creative writing piece and further produced by it. In this paper, there will be an exploration of this love of stories, from a psychoanalytic perspective.

The Ob-scene
David Pereira

Obscenity is our name for the uneasiness which upsets the physical state associated with self-possession; with the possession of a recognized and stable individuality.

Bataille

The poet must become a seer … by a long, immense and reasoned disordering of all his senses.

Rimbaud

… the voice is free to be something other than substance.

Lacan

Why, in the course of an analysis, though not unheard of in life’s general course, do some words, sounded in particular ways, and in certain moments, carry an exceptional weight not exhausted by their meaning?

Such a question will be taken up with reference to the notion of obscenity as implying a return to a particular function and field of speech and language in psychoanalysis; an ob-scene which appears as propitious with respect to a disturbance, a dis-ease, within the body of language.

The Word and the Thing in Psychotic Art
Christiane Weller

In the Ethics-Seminar Lacan contends "'Die Sache ist das Wort des Dinges.' Or in French. "L'affaire est le mot de la chose ('The affair is the word of the thing.')"

The thing has a limit function, it anchors the signifying chain. The thing functions as an eternal promise of something more in reference to the object by conjuring up a truth. We might translate the thing into the Name-of-the-Father, the law, or the Other. The signifier therefore is presupposing the thing as its vanishing point. The lack of this phallic signifier is according to Lacan responsible for the occurrence of psychosis.

What happens when the truth of the thing is lacking, when there is nothing left to represent it in its truth, when for example the register of the father defaults?

Lacan Psychoses.

The paper will investigate the notions of word and thing and how they are represented in psychotic art.

The jouissance of The Gambler
Linda Clifton

I cannot understand how you can gamble while travelling with a woman with whom you are in love.

A failure to understand, an implied contradiction between love and gambling. These words were written to Fyodor Dostoevsky in 1862 by his brother and surely continue to be rewritten in countless variations by those affected by the passion of the gambler – a passion that forgets love.

Freud’s Dostoevsky and Parricide with its albeit controversial analysis of Dostoevsky’s mania for gambling records once again the debt of psychoanalysis to literature. Freud places his bet squarely in the field of sexual meaning: the ‘vice’ of masturbation is replaced by addiction to gambling; the passion for play is an equivalent of the old compulsion to masturbate.

In making a reading of Dostoevsky’s The Gambler - while attempting to avoid the psychobiographical sins of the father - I will highlight Dostoevsky’s brilliant rendition of the gambler’s passion and its incompatibility with love. In bringing into play Lacan’s propositions regarding jouissance as that which is good for nothing, the sexual relation which is not one and the limits of love, I will propose that an analysis of The Gambler invokes an Other jouissance that resists interpretation within the field of sexual meaning.

"Mere Air, these words, but delicious to hear"
Malcolm Morgan

"Mere Air, these words, but delicious to hear" (Sappho)

W.H. Auden, in his poem, In Memory of Sigmund Freud, says that psychoanalysis, for the analysand at least, is "like a poetry lesson." What is the nature of the nexus between psychoanalysis and poetry? This paper explores the relationship between poetry and psychoanalysis, bringing into relief the reverence paid to poetry by Freud, and investigating the links and differences between poetry and the well spoken word in psychoanalysis.