Abstract
Applied psychoanalysis has had a rocky history, not unlike psychoanalysis itself. Vilified over the years by such distinguished and not necessarily anti-Freudian scholars as Meyer Schapiro and Leo Steinberg, it has often struggled to reach the nonpsychoanalytic world. It is interdisciplinary in theory but intradisciplinary in practice. Perhaps Albert Lubin’s (1972) psychobiography of Vincent van Gogh, Stranger on the Earth, is the only work of applied psychoanalysis that has had any kind of widespread popularity since Freud’s Leonardo da Vinci and a Memory of His Childhood. Into this fraught realm enters Paola Golinelli with her Psychoanalytic Reflections on Writing, Cinema and the Arts: Facing Beauty and Loss. Elegantly written and deeply informed about film and literature as well as psychoanalytic theory, it should raise the bar on psychoanalytic writing about art.
As her subtitle indicates, Golinelli believes that there is a close relationship between the experience of beauty and loss. Beauty for Golinelli is rooted in the infant’s joyful contact with the mother’s breast, body, and smile. And she finds validation for this not in Freud or Melanie Klein, but in Homer, who said that beauty is “the breast which makes us forget our anguish” (p. 17). But these ecstatic interchanges between mother and infant are always temporary and lead to loss. So beauty and loss are inextricably linked in the “aesthetic conflict” (p 14). Drawing on Bion and Meltzer, she writes, Meltzer (1988) derived from Bion the concept of “aesthetic conflict” reflecting the infant’s conflict between attraction towards the dazzling beauty of the breast and the maternal face and the panic and terror of what is hidden in its inner reality: the premonition of abandonment, of the absence of the object, of the anguish arising from the difficulty to tolerate frustration and the destructive rage that follows. (p. 14)
These ideas were profoundly influenced by Freud’s (1915) short essay “On Transience.” In the essay, Freud recounts a walk in summer through a “smiling countryside” with a friend and a young poet. Despite the beauty of the surroundings, the poet and friend derive no pleasure from it because they are troubled by the thought that it is all “fated to extinction.” They despair because this beauty “would vanish when winter came, like all human beauty and all the beauty and splendor that men have created or may create.” Freud argues, on the contrary, that transience should be no impediment to enjoying beauty—“a flower that blossoms only for a single night does not seem to us on that account less lovely.” What makes the poet and friend incapable of satisfaction is a “revolt in their minds against mourning.” According to Freud, the idea that all this beauty was transient was giving these two sensitive minds a foretaste of mourning over its decease; and since the mind instinctively recoils from anything that is painful they felt their enjoyment of beauty interfered with by thoughts of its transience.
But, for Freud, “mourning . . . however painful it may be, comes to a spontaneous end.” So once the poet and friend have completed the work of mourning, they can once more restore their appreciation of their beautiful surroundings. Ultimately, however, mourning and appreciation can occur simultaneously, and Golinelli remarks that “Freud reminds us that in order to get pleasure from all that is beautiful, it is necessary to tolerate its loss and the psychic rebellion against it” (p. 13).
One famous art work that embodies the combination of beauty and loss is the Venus de Milo, and Golinelli devotes a chapter to it. The obvious mystery of the Venus de Milo is why a sculpture with amputated arms became so popular and well known. The work evokes loss in multiple ways—the loss of the arms, the loss of the ancient Greek culture that gave birth to it, and the loss of the individual’s golden age in childhood with a “perfect” mother like the goddess. Yet Golinelli quotes Umberto Eco (2012) to the effect that “the Venus de Milo enchants its viewers despite its missing arms, or rather precisely thanks to the missing arms.” Why would this be so? Golinelli provides somewhat contradictory answers. The Venus de Milo is both “perfect” and “imperfect” (pp. 14–15). The imperfection of the fragmentary arms makes the sculpture less enviable for the viewer. But they are also “the price spectators had to pay for their feelings of ambivalence and envy when standing before perfection” (p. 15). That is to say, envy and ambivalence can still exist despite the severed arms, but the viewer sees them as the “price he has to pay” for his destructive urges. This analysis would have been helped by specific examples of the ways in which the Venus de Milo is actually “perfect” as opposed to being a work that convention demands us to see as “perfect.”
Golinelli’s interpretation would also have benefited from a discussion of Peter Fuller’s (1980) chapter “The Venus and ‘Internal Objects’” in his Art and Psychoanalysis. Fuller takes a more Kleinian approach to the sculpture. He sees the loss of the arms as fulfilling the paranoid-schizoid phase’s desire to attack the maternal figure. While the attempt to imaginatively reconstruct the work corresponds to the reparative urges of the depressive stage. In Fuller’s words, for the majority [of viewers], the component of mutilation enhances the aesthetic experience—at least as the Kleinians describe it—through the admission of an original destruction and depressive struggle. . . . Hence the broken Venus is, with the admission of “attack,” a deeper and more satisfying work than an intact original which denies it. (pp. 122, 127)
Fuller, moreover, finds the cycle of destruction and reparation in the very history of the Venus de Milo’s discovery on the island of Milos and its reception after entering the Louvre. There were various accounts of a struggle over the sculpture between French and Turkish forces on Milos, which may have damaged the work. This made the urge by scholars to reconstruct the lost original and thereby effect a reparation all the more compelling. And indeed there were many attempts at reconstruction, some of which were so extremely far-fetched that they betrayed an unconscious motivation. As Fuller states, Certainly, the majority of [the reconstructions] were something more than objective, art-historical work. As Furtwangler demonstrated, a high proportion of the reconstructions are simply non-starters. They reflected the phantasies of those who proposed them as much as the material possibilities of the statue. Of course, only a few were totally irrational, but the ambiguities within the original forms of the Venus, exaggerated by mutilation, provided a nucleus for a wide range of reparative elaborations. (p. 125)
The average viewer replaces the art historians’ intricate reconstructions with his own reparative fantasies about restoring the arms.
But Golinelli can deploy her formidable interpretive skills on more than a well-known monument of classical antiquity. One of her great strengths is her sensitive approach to film. She is catholic in her tastes, which range from box-office hits to obscure independent films to documentaries. She treats movies like dreams in the sense that every detail from landscape to architecture is open to interpretation as the product of unconscious forces. We can see this in her remarks on Cast Away, in which Tom Hanks plays a FedEx manager who is stranded on a Pacific island after a company plane crashes. For Golinelli, the atoll on which Hanks languishes represents “the retreated area of the self” (p. 22). And the jagged coral reef that blocks Hanks’ escape by raft is not a physical, but a “psychological obstacle” that he must surmount (p. 21). Wilson, the volleyball that Hanks paints a face on and treats as an imaginary companion, would seem to be the perfect example of a transitional object. It is a real object that becomes an illusory friend, but is not a hallucination. Surprisingly, Golinelli regards Wilson much differently. According to Golinelli, Hanks projects onto Wilson “all the anger he felt toward himself and others in order not to be destroyed. It is the mortally wounded part of the self, almost annihilated by the trauma, that must be angrily kicked” (pp. 20–21).
The film considered by Golinelli that involves the most complex set of relationships is the documentary My Architect. It was made by Nathaniel Kahn (2003), the son of the revered architect Louis Kahn, and it is the son’s attempt to uncover truths about his father’s life. This is an urgent task for Nathaniel because much about his father was hidden and unknown. The search was also motivated by the trauma Nathaniel suffered with the sudden loss of his father when he was 11 years old. This loss was exacerbated by the strange circumstances surrounding his father’s death. Kahn died in a men’s room in Penn Station without identifying papers and was only recognized as the famous architect three days later. Because of Louis’s very complicated family life, Nathanial was not allowed to attend the funeral.
To call Louis Kahn’s family arrangement “complicated” is an extreme understatement. He essentially had three wives and three sets of children. The official wife whom he had married was Esther Israel, a neurologist who had financially supported Kahn for many years. He had a daughter, Sue Ann, by Esther. The two unofficial wives, Anne Tyng and Harriet Pattison, were colleagues and collaborators. Kahn had a daughter, Alexandra, by Tyng and Nathaniel by Pattison. Esther was kept unaware of the other “wives” and children. And the children themselves did not know about one another. Before dying Kahn had promised Nathaniel’s mother that he would finally divorce Esther and marry her.
Nathaniel reconstructs his father’s life in several ways. He shows footage of Louis as a young man and as a professor at the University of Pennsylvania. He interviews his mother and Anne Tyng as well as Kahn’s architectural peers, such as Philip Johnson, I.M. Pei, and Frank Gehry. He also revisits the sites of his father’s greatest accomplishments. This leads to the bizarre spectacle of Nathaniel roller skating through the vast plazas of Kahn’s Salk Institute in La Jolla, California. Such an image might seem merely ridiculous. But it is surprisingly effective at evoking a unique architectural place. According to Golinelli, “we experience with [the skating Nathaniel] the recovered symbolic dimension of the meaning of his father’s absence. His father makes himself present and alive through the spaciousness, the geometrical forms, the light, shadow, water, and sky” (p. 42).
For Golinelli, Nathaniel’s film is an attempt to work through his mourning for his father. This is fraught with difficulties. On one hand, mourning can paralyze creativity. According to Golinelli, mourning “can represent a formidable obstacle to the development of the capacity to fantasize, removing libidinal energy and vigor from spontaneity and curiosity, and inhibiting the expression of emotionality” (p. 35). Yet at the same time, the pain of mourning can act as a spur to creativity. In the process of making the film, Nathaniel can recover the lost father and thereby master his trauma. But he must struggle constantly with the intense ambivalence toward a figure who abandoned him by dying.
In Golinelli’s first chapter, “Why Do We Write? Psychoanalytic Writing and Fiction,” she tells an affecting story about her youth. As a teenager she went into the mountains with her classmates in early spring to witness a total eclipse of the sun. She is particularly good at capturing the hothouse atmosphere of a school trip in which teenagers create a “hormonal storm” (p. 7). The story is full of metaphors of transition—light into dark, dark into light, winter into spring, adolescence into adulthood. It describes a moment of “immense change or of insight, an oscillation between something extraordinary and the anxiety of something terrible” (p. 5). She ends the chapter by arguing for the affinities between writing and psychoanalysis. Both, according to Golinelli, “dare to seek an expression for what used to seem uncanny, ineffable and unspeakable” (p. 8). An analyst equating herself with a writer might seem presumptuous in most circumstances. But Golinelli in her extraordinary book proves the exception.