Title: Nine: Psychophantic Relations with Art: Analytic Romanticism and the Problem of Perversion
Abstract: The primary IMAGINATION I hold to be the living power and prime Agent of all human Perception, and as a repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act of creation in the infinite IAM. The secondary I consider as an echo of the former ... It dissolves, diffuses, dissipates, in order to re-create; or where this process is rendered impossible, yet still at all events it struggles to idealize and to unify. It is essentially vital. . .FANCY, on the contrary, has no other counters to play with, but fixities and definites ... no other than a mode of Memory emancipated from the order of time and space ... all its materials ready made from the law of association. (Coleridge, 1951, pp. 283-284)In love and in art, identity floats. (Bersani, 1977, p. 15)INTRODUCTIONAs observed at the beginning of chapter three, the failure of psychoanalysis to get to the bottom of drive theory and its implications undermined the basis for an a-civilizational stance; professional psychoanalysis was handed over, lock, stock, and barrel, to the project of civilization and its health agenda. This turn of events in the history of psychoanalytic ideas damaged the capacity of the profession to grasp what is really going on in the art world, and what the recent history of art could tell us about the psyche, culture, and history. Instead, through a kind of envious strategy of appropriation, using the cultural mechanism of selective idealization, psychoanalysis generated idealized caricatures of art. Claiming as its own the aesthetic attributes that best conform to the health agenda, psychoanalysis presented itself as the wise protector of public hygiene, championing the salubrious benefits of creative art, all the while subtly hinting at its own superiority to art, its more sober and contained appreciation of the true meaning and value of the aesthetic impulse in our lives.The confusion of psychoanalytic thinking in this area derives from a misunderstanding of its own basic concepts, notably the concept of idealization. Freud was clear that idealization is a assertion of value, a way of positioning psychic energy so as to establish an object. The narcissistic drive is a mobile and sometimes labile form of carnal animation, a self-delighting psychic charge that crystallizes into packets of concentrated semantic energy ripe for investment. In this libidinal economy, the environment (objects, systems of signs) has more power to organize these packets than the subject, which is itself a dependent and insecure focal point of such investments. When Freud said that the object is the most variable part of the drive, he meant in part that although it does not matter so much which object, it is still the object world (including the body and the psyche) that organizes these investment packets; it is not the ego alone, which is itself one of these variable potential objects, competing with the body and its demands, the breast, and so on.The contingent object has litde chance of being noticed unless the culture that surrounds it directs our energy toward it; and our narcissism is not very likely to become aware of its own activity in relation to this object unless the offertorium draws the libido into it, organizing and crystallizing the focus of the narsensorium not only on the object but on the way psychic energy suffuses the relation to the object. The work of art in the offertorium, like the psychoanalytic setting, makes it possible, from time to time, but never in a predictable way, to disassemble this process within the unfolding of the process itself. In other words, narcissism, and its investment fund of idealization, is not primarily an expression of subjectivity and is not controlled by the subject. It gives rise to subjective organizations such as the ego and the self but ultimately remains free of their influence; they may gain a certain measure of contingent independence when special conditions are arranged in which it becomes possible for this to happen. …
Publication Year: 2012
Publication Date: 2012-01-01
Language: en
Type: article
Access and Citation
AI Researcher Chatbot
Get quick answers to your questions about the article from our AI researcher chatbot