Art

From No Subject - Encyclopedia of Psychoanalysis
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Freud valued art as one of humanity's great cultural institutions,

      and dedicated many papers to discussing both the process of artistic creation in

general and certain works of art in particular. He explained artistic creation by

reference to the concept of SUBLIMATION, a process in which sexual libido is

redirected towards non-sexual aims. Freud also dedicated a number of papers

to analysing particular works of art, especially works of literature, which he

argued could be useful to psychoanalysis in two main ways. Firstly, these

works often express in poetic form truths about the psyche, which implies that

creative writers can intuit directly the truths which psychoanalysts only dis-

cover later by more laborious means. Secondly, Freud also argued that a close

psychoanalytic reading of works of literature could uncover elements of the

author's psyche. While most of Freud's papers on particular works of art

concern works of literature, he did not entirely neglect other art forms; for

example he devoted one paper to discussing Michelangelo's statue of Moses

(Freud, 1914b).

     Lacan's works also abound in discussions of particular works of art. Like

Freud, Lacan devotes most of his attention to works of literature of all genres:

prose (e.g. the discussion of The Purloined Letter by Edgar Allan Poe in S2,

ch. 16, and Lacan, 1955a), drama (e.g. the discussions of Shakespeare's

Hamlet in Lacan, 1958-9, and of Sophocles' Antigone in S7, chs 19-21)

and poetry (e.g. the discussion of Booz endormi by Victor Hugo in S3, 218-

25; S4, 377-8; E, 156-8; S8, 158-9). However, Lacan also discusses the visual

arts, devoting several lectures in his 1964 seminar to discussing painting,

particularly anamorphotic art (Sll, chs 7-9, where he discusses Holbein's

The Ambassadors; see also S7, 139-42).

     There are, nevertheless, significant differences between the ways in which

Freud and Lacan approach works of art. Though Lacan does speak about

sublimation, unlike Freud he does not believe that it is possible or even

desirable for psychoanalysts to say anything about the psychology of the

artist on the basis of an examination of a work of art (see his critical remarks

 on 'psychobiography'; Ec, 740-1). Just because the most fundamental com-

plex (Oedipus) in psychoanalytic theory is taken from a literary work, Lacan

says, does not mean that psychoanalysis has anything to say about Sophocles

(Lacan, 1971: 3).

     Lacan's exclusion of the artist from his discussions of works of art means

that his readings of literary texts are not concerned to reconstruct the author's

intentions. In his suspension of the question of authorial intent, Lacan is not

merely aligning himself with the structuralist movement (after all, authorial

intent had been bracketed by New Criticism long before the structuralists

appeared on the scene), but is rather illustrating the way in which the analyst

should proceed when listening to and interpreting the discourse of the analy-

sand. The analyst must, in other words, treat the analysand's discourse as a

text:



     You must start from the text, start by treating it, as Freud does and as he
     recommends, as Holy Writ. The author, the scribe, is only a pen-pusher, and

he comes second. . . . Similarly, when it comes to our patients, please give

     more attention to the text than to the psychology of the author   - the entire
     orientation of my teaching is that.
                                                                                                               (S2, 153)


Lacan's discussions of literary texts are thus not exercises in literary criticism

for its own sake, but performances designed to give his audience an idea of

how they are to read the unconscious of their patients. This method of reading

is similar to those employed by formalism and structuralism; the signified is

neglected in favour of the signifier, content is bracketed in favour of formal

  structures (although Jacques Derrida has argued that Lacan does not in fact

follow his own method; see Derrida, 1975).

     Besides serving as models of a method of reading, which Lacan recommends

analysts to follow when reading the discourse of their patients, Lacan's

discussions of literary texts also aim to extract certain elements which serve

  as metaphors to illustrate some of his most important ideas. For example, in his

reading of Poe's The Purloined Letter, Lacan points to the circulating LETTER

  as a metaphor for the determinative power of the signifier.
     A new branch of so-called 'psychoanalytic literary criticism' now claims to

be inspired by Lacan's approach to literary texts (e.g. Muller and Richardson,

1988, and Wright, 1984; other works dealing with Lacan and cultural theory

  are Davis, 1983; Felman, 1987; MacCannell, 1986). However, while such

projects are interesting in their own right, they do not usually approach

literature in the same way as Lacan. That is, while psychoanalytic literary

criticism aims to say something about the texts studied, both aspects of

Lacan's approach (to illustrate a mode of analytic interpretation, and to

illustrate psychoanalytic concepts) are concerned not with saying something

about the texts themselves, but merely with using the texts to say something

about psychoanalysis. This is perhaps the most important difference between

Lacan's approach to works of art and Freud's. Whereas some of Freud's works

  are often taken to imply that psychoanalysis is a metadiscourse,           a master

narrative providing a general lutmeneutic key that can unlock the hitherto

unsolved secrets of literary works, it is impossible to read Lacan as making any

such claims. For Lacan, while psychoanalysis might be able to learn something

about literature, or use literary works to illustrate certain of its methods and

concepts, it is doubtful whether literary criticism can learn anything from

psychoanalysis. Hence Lacan rejects the idea that a literary criticism which

makes use of psychoanalytic concepts could be called 'applied psychoanaly-

sis', since '[p]sychoanalysis is only applied, in the proper sense of the term, as

  a treatment, and thus to a subject who speaks and listens' (Ec, 747).