Dr John CrossleyHSFC FOUNDATION SEMINAR

#9

ADAM CURTIS Century of the Self

Week 9 - Art and Uncnscious

ADAM CURTIS Century of the Self

As an alternative form of communication Art is often seen as a potential way to access the unconscious. The text below is given to illustrate a common way to think about the relationship between art , therapy, the subconcsious and mental health

http://www.soul-expressions-abuse-recov-ery.com/Art-Therapy.html

First of all, Art-Therapy is the “Soul-Expres-sion” part of recovery. It is “opening up of your soul” and expressing on canvas, or through poetry or whatever medium you choose.

It is my belief that EVERYONE is an artist.

My definition of Art-Therapy is:

The quest to understand the hidden or un-known part or forgotten spirit of yourself, including your abuse.

You are lead by your unconscious (the part of your mind you are not aware of ) mind as the paint flows from your brush pr pen. Realization is when you are left to interpret the images or words you have created on

the canvas or notebook along the way.

I find myself almost in a dream like state at times, allowing my subconscious to guide me..”letting go” and letting the process take control as the imagry takes shape.

It is almost like Art-Therapy is unveiling the the unconscious on canvas or in your note-book.

Why is this important?

Because many times your feelings related to your abuse are repressed into your sub-conscious and you have not felt them or dealt with them at all.

Art-therapy brings them out into the open and on canvas where you can see them and they become real and something you can actually see and begin to understand..which is the beginning of recovery!

Plain and simple, art pulls out your feelings and makes them tangible or real so you can see them and deal with them.

There is no right or wrong about art.

ART THERAPY

JAQUES SCHNIER - 1898-1988 ART SYMBOLISM AND THE UNCOSCIOUS

What originally began as a literary movement in

France during the 1880s, the Symbolist movement in art was not as much an aesthetic style then it was an international ideological trend. This movement was a response against rationalism and materialism that was beginning to have a stronghold over the Western world at the time, and as a result, ideals of this movement carried on elements of the mysticism that can be seen in late Romantic works from Goya and others, and is characterized by fanaticism and dream like imagery. Symbolist philosophy believed that artwork should reflect ideas or emotions rather than the natural world, and ultimately was a step backward from what the Impressionist and Realism painters from just a few years before were trying to achieve. The iconography used in Symbolist paintings were somber and ambiguous images that were very personal to the artist. As a result, the meanings of these painting do not necessarily represent anything that is fully understood by mainstream standards. Though the Symbolist artists worked independently from one another and each had varying aesthetic goals,

broad brushworks, dulled color and flat, abstract forms was a common theme throughout many of the Symbolist works.

The symbolist movement in art paved the way for future art movements like Surrealism and Expressionism, both of which used obscure imagery and entailed vague messages.

Well known artists from this time include Gustave Mareau, (creator of the benchmark Symbolist piece, Oedipus and the Sphinx), Carlos Schwabe, (La Mort du Fossoyeur) and Fernand Khnopff (The Caress). In each of these well known Symbolist paintings, we can see the bizarre and puzzling nature that later became the movement’s trademark.

Freud uses psychoanalysis to explain the hauntingly ambiguous smile of Da Vincis’ Mona Lisa. The previous criticism had explained the elusiveness of that smile but not why had Leonardo rendered his subject that way. Freud asks why was Leonardo so fascinated by that smile to the point of becoming a recurring motif in his paintings. The answer for Freud is that it reminded him of his mother’s smile and the pleasure he felt in that blissful period of his life. This is reinforced by a reference to a memory Leonardo relates of being attacked by a vulture as a child. Freud judges that memory to be nothing but a fantasy suggesting Leonardo’s attachment to his mother in the absence of his father.

by Prof.Emanuel L. Paparella

“We laymen have always wondered greatly—like the cardinal who put the question to Ariosto—how that strange being, the poet, comes by his material. What makes him able to carry us with him in such a way and to arouse emotions in us of which we thought ourselves perhaps not even capable? Our interest in the problem is only stimulated by the circumstance that if we ask poets themselves they give us no explanation of the matter, or at least no satisfactory explanation. The knowledge that not even the clearest insight into the factors conditioning the choice of imaginative material, or into the nature of the ability to fashion that material, will ever make writers of us does not in any way detract from our interest….As far as it goes, this material

is derived from the racial treasure-house of myths, legends, and fairy tales. The study of these creations of racial psychology is in no way complete, but it seems extremely

probable that myths, for example, are distorted vestiges of the wish-phantasies of whole nations—the age old dream of young humanity….I am of the opinion that all the aesthetic

pleasure we gain from the works of imaginative writers is of the same type as this ‘fore-pleasure’, and that the true enjoyment of literature proceeds from the release of tensions in our minds. Perhaps much that brings about this result consists in the writer’s putting us into a position in which we can enjoy our own day-drams without reproach or shame.”

--Sigmund Freud (“The Relation of the Poet to Day-Dreaming)

Sigmund Freud (1856-1939) needs no introductions as the founder of p s y c h o a n a l y s i s except to initially say that besides thinking of it as a way to treat sick people, he also thought of it as providing a general theory of human behavior and indeed cultural history and broad cultural d e v e l o p m e n t s . That trend emerges especially in

Freud’s View of Art as Symptom of the Unconscious

Conscious waking life

is merely the tip of the

iceberg; the unconscious is the huge

hidden mass hidden from

view.

his Civilization and its Discontents which he wrote in 1930. But some twenty years before Freud had published a paper titled “The Relation of the Poet to Day-Dreaming” in which he presents a psychoanalytical conception of literature. Given that literature is also considered art his conception can safely be extended to the whole of art.

As Freud sees it, dreams, fantasies, and even slips of the tongue (now called Freudian slips) are among the phenomena that give us access to deep truth about our nature. They expose the

working of the unconscious and as such they are revelatory of our mental life of which the unconscious is an important component. Conscious waking life is merely the tip of the iceberg; the unconscious is the huge hidden mass hidden from view. The goal of psychoanalysis is to bring the hidden mass into the light.

And this brings us to Freud’s view on dreams. Dreams, for Freud are nothing else than camouflaged wishes. Why the camouflage? Because the content of a dream if expressed as a conscious

thought (for example, “I wish my father were dead”) would be immediately repudiated by the person having the dream if he were awake. Those techniques of distortions and disguise allow the pent-up thought to emerge thus providing satisfaction to the dreamer. Most dreams, according to Freud, express wishes which are either of a sexual or self-aggrandizing nature.

At this point the reader may ask: and what does this have to do with art? The fact, as Freud argues, that the artist’s unconscious is less repressed and hidden than that of others. When the artist feels a need to express an unconscious thought or emotion he creates a work of art which functions like a dream. So the work of art is the fulfillment of a concealed wish.

Psychoanalysis in Art CriticismCampbell Crockett

http://www.jstor.org/discover/10.2307/428008?uid=3738032&uid=2129&uid=2&uid=70&uid=4&s

Poem by Munch on the frame, which talks of the inspiration behind the series of works.

“I was walking along a path with two friends - the sun was setting - suddenly the sky turned blood red - I paused, feeling exhausted, and leaned on the fence - there was blood and tongues of fire above the blue-black fjord and the city.

“My friends walked on, and I stood there trembling with anxiety - and I sensed an infinite scream passing through nature.”

Van Gogh's dedication to articulating the inner spirituality of man and nature led to a unique fusion of style and con-tent that resulted in dramatic, imaginative, rhythmic, and emotional canvases that convey far more than the mere appearance of the subject matter.Van Gogh's unstable personal temperament became syn-onymous with the romantic image of the tortured artist. He was an icon of self-destructive talent that was echoed in the lives of many artists in the twentieth century and beyond.Although the source of much upset during his life, Van Gogh's mental instability provided the frenzied source for the emotional renderings of his surroundings and imbued each image with a deeper psychological reflection and resonance.Van Gogh used an impulsive, gestural application of paint and symbolic colors to express subjective emotions. These methods and practice came to define many subsequent modern movements from Fauvism to Abstract Expression-ism.

THE SOFT WATCHES

The main theme of the limp watches is the contrast between the hard outside and the soft inside. We expect and our experience tells us that a watch is hard. In Dali’s images the watch looses that shape. For the limp watches Dali has been inspired while he was eating French Camenbert cheese. It’s like the watch is running out of the clock. A real clock gives us the exact time...the watches of Dali are timeless.By making the clock soft it becomes impos-sible to function and so it refers to eternity. Dali said that when he was with Gala or when was painting time had no influence on him.

THE BURNING GIRAFFE

The burning giraffe is the male cosmic monster of the Apocalypse. He got this idea when he was in Vienna in 1937. He felt the catastrophe that Hitler was going to create.

THE ELEPHANTS

Dali’s elephants have skinny, fragile, long legs. They symbolise men shackled to the earth by gravity but always reaching for the higher. Because of that the legs get longer and longer but the feet stay attached to the ground.

THE DRAWERS

In the drawers that Dali cuts out of the surface all sins and complexes of men are stored. Dali said: ‘Freud’s theory is like an allegory that illustrates and helps us to un-derstand the countless narcistic smells that are released from the drawers. A story has been told about the young Dali having a friend from a workersfamily. The boy always wore clothes with several sewn pockets on. They say that that is where Dali got his pas-sion from for pockets and drawers.

THE CRUTCHES

For decades crutches were elements in the work of Dali. They symbolise our handicaps and weaknesses but were also an instru-ment of art and intelligence that give the user the possibility to make superhuman performances.

THE EGG

The egg is a Dalinian image that symbolises

What is a television apparatus to man, who has only to shut his eyes to see the most inaccessible regions of the seen and the never seen, who has only to imagine in order to pierce through walls and cause all the planetary Baghdads of his dreams to rise from the dust.

Surrealism is destructive, but it de-stroys only what it considers to be shackles limiting our vision.

Salvador Dali

“

hope and love.

THE ANTS

Ants symbolise death, de-cay and an immense sexual desire.

THE SNAIL

The snail is connected with the head of a human.The first time Dali met Freud he saw a snail on a bike near the house of Freud.

THE GRASSHOPPER

Dali was very scared of grasshoppers. They symbol-ise ‘fear’...he painted them to get rid ofhis fear.

THE BUTTERFLY

Butterflies were Dali’s fa-vourite symbol since the 50’ . In old Greek the word ’psyche’ meant soul and but-terfly. We only need to think about the transformation op the pop into a butterfly to understand why Dali was

fascinated by the enormous amount of variety, colours and lightness of the butter-fly .

THE SILHOUETTES

Silhouettes are the psy-chological shadows, spirits and apparitions. They stand for the good, supernatural being, inner dialogue and motivational power as well as for the evil, inner conflicts and inhibitions. They also stand for imagination, fan-tasy and dreams.