Shadows of Doubt: A Psycho-Geographic Enquiry into the Childhood of Alfred Hitchcock

Symposium: 24th November 2011, 1.30pm

Exhibition: 20th November - 16th December

Private View: December 1st, 6-8pm

In conjunction with the East London Archive

London Metropolitan University, Whitechapel

London

Speakers include:

Steven Jacobs

Simon Usher

Dr Chris Oakley

Dr Nick Haeffner

Sue Andrews

Michael Upton

David George

Spencer Rowell

At London Metropolitan University and part of the East London Archive.

The work in Shadows of Doubt relates to the East End of the film director Alfred Hitchcock’s childhood. It uses images of the built environment as a starting point for an exploration of relationships between physical place, memory, psychological development and aesthetic sensibility. The symposium will look the relationship between childhood and artistic creation, memory as a fictive image and the role of architecture in filmic and photographic representation.

‘The infants initial world is made of symbols, created concrete objects made from his pre-verbal structuring. Does the artist hang on to this unique much earlier code of communication?’ Winnicott.

Much is debated about Hitchcock’s work and its representation. The images I show play with this idea of subjective experience of concrete objects, perhaps bringing external form from some inner state, not necessarily the ‘real’ external world but that of its interior, of inner experience. Can these pictures be seen as portraying the shapes of non-verbal imagery?

Segal, a Kleinian psychoanalyst stated that the rebuilding of these fragments of symbols of scattered objects is the creative act. Do these objects represent the filmmaker’s first ‘not-me’ objects, a subjective part of the infant’s memories of earlier experience?

The attempt is to recast subjective feeling states into more or less objective form as new photographic objects.

Did Hitchcock offer us an insight into his internal world through his films?

Were they a way of showing us his own internal conflicts, of creating a life’s work of scripted realisations of his early life experiences?

‘You must know’ Hitchcock is reported in saying, ‘that when I'm making a movie, the story isn't important to me. What's important is how I tell the story.’ Psychodynamic analytical theory would have us believe that the telling of any story, within a certain frame, is indeed, an insight into early life experiences.

Hitchcock was raised a strict Catholic and within an authoritarian matriarchal family, the influential males in his life where either priests or policemen. His preoccupation with guilt may have been further developed by his evangelisation and education, from 1908 onwards, at St. Ignatius College, Stamford Hill, London (pictured), where it is said, that the Jesuit fathers dispensed corporal punishment with pious rigor. In the words of Hitchcock, ‘It wasn't done casually, you know. It was rather like the execution of a sentence . . . You spent the whole day waiting for the sentence to be carried out.’

There is a sense that there is a search for spiritual redemption in his work; most of his films display some sense of sin, guilt, atonement and redemption, perhaps this is a response to his Catholic sensibilities.

This interim project looks at my curiosity of how it may have been for him as a child, a highly subjective and contemporary view of his earliest influences, an understanding of how, psychologically, Hitchcock’s ability to respond to these complex and emotional influences, may have surfaced as sublimation and humour, two mature defenses mechanisms, where socially unacceptable impulses or idealisations may have been consciously transformed through work; a way of diversion, of modification into a culturally higher or socially more acceptable activity.

Were these defenses really concealing a deeper trauma in order to avoid any unpleasant consequences of confronting inner conflicts?

Of course, we will never know. Hitchcock’s most able talent was to create illusions, this ability to create suspense and of us questioning his (and our) motives, is what he did best. 

Spencer Rowell 2011

The Concerned Photographer - The Search for an Alternative Family Album

from Private to Public

Symposium curated by Sue Andrews and Fiona Yaron-Field

The Women’s Library, 25 Old Castle Street, London E1 7NT

Symposium 3.11.11 from 10am – 6pm

‘To search for historical truth is to live out the metaphor of analyst as archaeologist and to believe, along with Freud, that pieces of the past lie buried somewhere in the persons unconscious’ (Spence. D. 1987)

Spencer Rowell, PHD student at the Cass, artist/photographer

The Search for an Alternative Family Album

The obscured information of significance in a photograph is as revealing as the overt message that the photograph communicates. Recent critical discourse on photography has addressed the notion of the ‘concerned photographer’, where such practitioners’ key role is to witness the ‘truth’, documenting what is visible in the external world. However, many photographers are engaging with what is closer to home: social interactions, inter-personal relationships and representations of the inner world. The ‘concerned’ photographer now turns the camera inward.

Through my self-portraiture and study of psychoanalytical theory, I will discuss my practice and its impact on access to self-identity, relationships and interaction with the external world.

Spencer Rowell 2012

With contributions from Emmanuelle Dirix, Lecturer in Critical Studies at the Royal College of Art, Winchester School of Art, Central Saint Martins and Antwerp Fashion Academy in Belgium. Laura Hynd, Artist, Lesley McIntyre, Photographer, Eti Wade, Mother-Artist, Senior Lecturer in Photography University of West London, Ian Robertson, Artist / Subject Leader in Fine Art at The Cass, LMU and Susan Andrews, Artist / photographer/MA Photography Course Leader at The Cass, LMU.

An Essay on Shame

‘When I draw, I’m in oblivion. I don’t see what I’ve done because I can’t see my own face- I don’t know what I look like. ‘

A schizophrenic patient (1991 p.265)

Paper On: Vision and Separation; Between Mother and Baby  Kenneth Wright (1991)

Introduction

In his book, Vision and Separation; between Mother and Baby (1991), Kenneth Wright offers us insight into the importance of early visual interaction alongside a discussion in psychoanalytic theory. It is at this early stage of development of infant experiences where the first view of self is experienced and through this early interaction and identification that the concept of consciousness (coming into being) and self-consciousness (of being seen) can be traced. I will discuss this in the conjunction with an interim response to the interpretation of ‘Session 2’, by ‘The Guild’; an image largely interpreted as representing a symbol of shame.

‘Session 2’

The facial engagement is a rich source of emotional messages and is a very important part of the process of early human interaction. This first infant-mother visual contact should be seen as not necessarily as a literal visual interaction, but more of a shared reverie; a knowing based on seeing or being, rather than looking or being looked at. It will be argued that, the self-portraits presented to ‘The Guild’, along with their psychoanalytical interpretations, reach back into the artist’s early experience of this early facial interaction.

All art, according to Langer (1942) is concerned in ‘giving form and articulation to human feeling, and a re-creation of such early feelings and states of relatedness to the mother (p20). Fuller (xxxx) suggests, using Natkin as an example, that artists strive to recreate a dialogue with mother. ‘I am suggesting that, for Natkin, the canvas surface became a surrogate for that reciprocal encounter he had lacked with the good mother’s face’ (p211)

I would certainly be in keeping with this view. It is unimaginable, I believe, that this early encounter could leave no trace in creative expression and self-representation. I am enquiring whether a suspension, latent or potential, of mother infant interaction remains in the self–portrait/analyst engagement and that symbols of this early reflection can be re-covered through the viewing and psychological assessment of them. This article is an opportunity to respond these early interpretations of artwork offered to ‘The Guild’.

Wright comments that his book is primarily,

'An attempt to tease out [….] that may be written of myself, an autobiography. An internal self I feel but have not been able to describe. Or explain. To pursue my reflection in search of knowledge to illuminate my darkness ‘giving ease to unknowing’ and create a form of knowing of oneself. Seeing gives form and understanding, previously felt but not understood'. (1991 intro pxii)

The Conscious to Self-conscious

Consciousness comes into being during this short and yet so important stage of visual development or mirroring. First the child sees the mother’s face as himself in the mirror; this emotional reflection is seen as the infant’s complete internal world, the omnipotent ‘I’, merged and ‘as one’ with his carer. As the development of consciousness continues and through partial separations, a realisation of ‘Me’ occurs, of being both a physical and emotional separate entity. From this intense visual didactic relationship comes a sense of both mother and infant being looked upon. A view from beyond the maternal bond, of being seen from the position of the ‘Other’. It is during these last stages, that a sense of self-consciousness evolves.

In Searle’s view (1963p.xx), the central issue is that the ‘mother’s face is the child’s first emotional mirror and that it is through her responsiveness, that the child is able to know his own emotions’. This first emotional reflection that he experiences and along with symbol formation brought about by this psychic conflict, can also be seen as the beginnings of consciousness, a ‘looking and thinking space’ Wright (1991 p. xx).

During this interaction, there are many opportunities for the maternal reflection to develop distortions. If this is the case, during this early process of experiencing separateness between infant and mother, a feeling of alienation can be created; the realisation that the mirrored distortion, along with the infant’s fears of separation, confirms a look of non-affirming, coldness, filled with anxiety, this reflection becomes something to fear.
'The first face confirms and strengthens the child’s subjective being, amplifies it through reverberating circuits of reflection and response. The second face disconfirms, puts the child at distance, arrests the continuity of subjective feeling, and offers in its place a spectacle of the bad self that puts the continuity of love in question’ (Wright 1991 p27)

The presentation of image ‘Session 2’ can be seen as a search for this experience or of the visualisation of a deformed or distorted reflection. This is what the artist is trying to access, foster and adapt, in the production and presentation of the self-portrait; a form of synthesis of these feelings. If, not a loving face, but that of a more terrifying reflection is experienced, a reflection that perhaps brings a sense of distance and of non-affinity, the internal self image will be distorted. Projecting this distorted view out on to the ‘Other’, who looks in on to the maternal Dyad, confirms this distorted external appearance of self from the outside, this now distorted internal world. Shame.

Shame

In this sense we dread the faces of the onlookers. A look that could be accepted as a distorted view of an earlier self, a pre-verbal crisis, in the sight of the ‘Other’. What I see is a re-intrajection of an initial projection of a distorted view, which has been experienced from this initial visual engagement.


'There was someone, myself, raging against a controlling and constricting object, at a distance from, and unrecognised by, the one I loved. I saw myself there through the eyes the ‘Other’ as this awful, nearly subhuman sort of creature'. (Wright 1991 p115)

Lynd (1958), in Shame and the Search for Identity, says that shame can be described as the ‘exposure of oneself to oneself’’. It is an aspect of the ‘Other’s’ view, ones external view of self from this original distorted reflection. Shame could be described as being looked at, rather than being seen. My personal experience of finding it difficult to hold a stare, is this distorted view from the ‘Other’ and is shame based. To explore this territory for myself and get this more objective view of my internal world, this alternative angle of view, I exhibit self-portraits and ask for interpretations.

'The move to the triadic view is more transforming, it mediates to something closer to knowledge a new vision of self, each new position gives a new vision; each new vision throws a pattern on reality; each new pattern revitalises the previous ones'. (1991 p230)

Shame is ‘where ones experience (inner) and the ‘Others’ view (outer) meet’ ‘An interface between persons’ (1991 p29). Our internal world continues to be dictated by this view of our external self; it is defined by the outside view of this original traumatic reflection. In the case of shame, the internalised distorted reflection looking back on to self, I look into the mirror; but it is not as everyone else sees. This shame is but the distorted reflection of the early catastrophe experienced. This built distorted view of a frightening distorted reflection becoming not only an internal feeling, but also the view of ‘Other’.

John Paul Satre, says In Being and Nothingness, Me, ‘Shame is by nature recognition. I recognise that I am as the other sees’. As I produce the work, and offer the work for analysis, to be looked at, probed and ‘spat out', I experience being looked at, from many different angles. It is how I feel I am seen, and as I know myself, however, this process of self-witnessing allows a re-forming of inner image and a way of redefining self.

Reflections and Symbols of Feelings, as Interface to Communication.

It is this interaction between artwork and viewer that lets us into their world. Are these self-created symbols a search for a fit with that remembered reflection? Is it the interface to verbal expression of this feeling-state? Perhaps it is this symbol formation that we engage with during the viewing of any artwork, the viewer searching in their past for an image of this pre-language imagery, visualising these shared pre-verbal symbols.

Hannah Segal, notes, in her book Symbol Formation (xxxx)
'Not only the actual content, but also the very way in which symbols are formed and used, seems to reflect precisely the egos state of development and its way of dealing with its objects'.

This symbol formation is the coming together to this outer form and inner knowledge. Metaphor allows us to define our feeling in our way. In the therapeutic engagement, a client may use metaphor as a personal language, as precious to ones own world. However, if a combined communication is found through this connection then connection is more empathic, as with abstract art, it feeds directly to the world of connection before words, before language.

'The glimpse of the baby’s and child’s seeing the self in the mother’s face and afterwards in a mirror, gives a way of looking at analysis and the psychotherapeutic task. Psychotherapy is not making clever and apt interpretations; by and large it is a long term giving back to the patient what the patient brings. It is a complex derivative of the face that reflects what is there to be seen. I like to think of my work this way, and to think that if I do this work well enough the patient will find his or her self, and will be able to exist and feel real. Feeling real is more than existing; it is finding a way to exist as oneself, and to relate to objects as oneself'.

Winnicott, Playing and Reality. (Xxxx pxx)

It is through the counter-transferential process of assessment, that shared symbols are brought to the surface by the analyst, their subjective state is forged into this work. Perhaps we can put it this way, I, as the portrait, am in the room with the analyst; though receiving a written interpretation the photographs analyse the analysts. (See future essay) This become part of the work, they identify, get close, juxtaposing a part of themselves into the image. As a way of integrating some of their inner form of experience, personal and theoretical, with that of the work. A shared pattern where the analyst and artwork resonate.

The viewer wants to find something of himself within the work, along with their integration of selected theories (those that resonate with the anylist), it enables the viewer to view something of himself that may not have been resolved or cannot be verbalised other than though the language of theory. Wright claims that ‘all psychodynamic theory is a piece of auto-biography, a symbolic form of the own therapists self’ (p313)

Conclusion

As a series of photographs, these self-portraits can be seen as external observations of one person from many different angles, observations of the internal self, viewed from all angles. Changes of perspective in relation to ones own self. ‘Session 2’, and its interpretation, is one such angle, giving more of an understanding and knowledge.

Art expression, which may of course include the written word, are these shared symbolic images. Clients in therapy, will grope about using words that seem to fit, often using language creatively, including metaphor and symbols to communicate. Language, then, along with unconscious material, becomes the way one becomes visible in the session. As an artist, exhibiting is the way we are seen and the way other’s will view us. The artist’s lexicon of the world becomes these symbols of the past built upon through mirrored reflections of self.

This image produced and its part in the collection, progression, their assessment and feedback create a part of a narrative of experience and can be seen as symbols or metaphors that form an interface to expression of pre-verbal communication. Perhaps, through this process, the external image is reformed, in a similar way with therapy, as a process of renewal; a possibility of finding new forms a more acceptable form of self.

Through the interpretation of a symbol ‘Session 2’, I have attempted to create a dialogue with shame. It was recognised as such through interpretation and I have explained through theory its relevance to early interaction and infant relation. Where curiosity prevails, exploration will always follow and this process, perhaps being a representation of a form of artistic regression, into the search of this primal catastrophe. I have discussed the image and its interpretation from the position of being potentially a symbol of distortion, part of a narrative, or one image, taken from one angle, of a person’s internal world.

This rich immediacy of pre-verbal language from our early and first experiences of the world are expressed through artwork, they languish in all our pasts in this repressed state. Although unique and personal in their associations with the artist, it is perhaps a relief, also, to find that these symbols represent a much more common language. These remnant’s are vivid and real, timeless and as in dreams, primal stirrings, often being incommunicable through language.

As we grow though childhood, language appears and there is a distancing from these early forms of communication, these buried memories of a maternal presence.

Spencer Rowell 2012

Paper On: Stephen Frosh 'For and Against Psychoanalysis. 1997 Routledge

Stephen Frosh For and Against Psychoanalysis. 1997 Routledge

The Visualisation of Incoherence (The Difficulties Of Using Psychoanalysis In the Process of Research)

The Mystical Process

Psychoanalysis is born to the encounter between the hysterical woman and the positivist man of science’ (Moi 1989)

Can we ever get away from the controversy that psychoanalysis brings to the area of research? Does it have standing of true value, as in the status of science as Freud believed, or can we trust its empirical effectiveness at all? If is has a cognitive and affective dimension, that may be seen as knowledge, how can this be represented?

As voiced by Hans Essence, perhaps psychotherapy and its associated milieu are just a series of tell-tales. But can these unconscious utterances, as I would prefer to call them, be used to build some kind of narrative of the human condition, that may ultimately be used in the pursuit of both understanding and insight.

‘Psychoanalysis, in a very strict sense of the term, is a mystical experience. Mystical experiences can be best defined as follows; an emotional experience, which at the same time purports to be and is felt as being the acquisition of knowledge which is important, privileged and out of the ordinary’ (Gellner 1992)

Perhaps we need to move the debate about psychoanalytical research forward, rather than engaging in the same old arguments that Gellner highlights above. The plague is here now, perhaps we need to engage with it more as a process of discovery, as a way forward, to take us further down the road towards an alternative form of knowledge.

In Gellner’s words, (1985), ‘a beast is at work; something that lies within us and systematically disrupts everything we think and do.’

But this ‘beast’ is worthy of enquiry, a way of exploring this new semantic space, constructed and reconstructed, in every move made by patient and analyst, (artist/viewer) deeply complex, multilayered, heavily contextualised, obscure and performative in its knowledge.

At root, the psychoanalytical experience is formulated as a discipline and practice of uncovering latent meanings, of reaching below the surface of action and consciousness to reveal the disturbing elements of unconscious life. To be a legitimate form of study, psychoanalytical enquiry has to be accountable, should show evidence, be responsive to criticism and it is still a view of knowledge that is produced through human activity and underpinned by theory. Even though its role seems to be to disrupt common sense.

‘To search for historical truth is to live out the metaphor of analyst as archaeologist and to believe, along with Freud, that pieces of the past lie buried somewhere in the persons unconscious’ (Spence. D. 1987)

The limits of language

‘Psychoanalysis, it might be argued, processes some of the most versatile explanatory concepts in intellectual history, so versatile that they are immune to appraisal by rational means’ Frosh. S.

It is essential for this enquiry, to remain a critical vision of ones own and throw light on the process of this new discovery. The research question that is asked is, can the documentation of image production deepen our understanding of human functioning and is the methodology consistent and honest? The goal is not necessarily the truth, in the empirical sense of what really happened, but rather an understanding that it includes a powerful affective and experiential component. As Flax (1981) states, ‘The past is lived through the transference, it is not mealy grasped intellectually’.

In the therapist’s session, successful outcomes are a form of linguistically mediated self-knowledge that places a client in a more controlled position over his life’s experiences and relationships. It uncovers a process as a system of tensions and reconciliations always on the move and in flux. The production and assessment of my photographs will uncover ‘truths’ or series of ‘truths’ of the human condition. The to and fro between the analysing of, and production of, work in this intersubjective domain will be reflected upon and integrated into the production of new images to be then interpreted. A new narrative will be produced.

What criteria can I employ to assess an approach that is seen as having a claim to new knowledge? (i.e. rational). In the words of Frosh, ‘Although not always dependant on language and aimed at a consistent meeting of the unconscious, taking the significant residue and putting it into a rational form’. Is it in this residue where creativity of subjectivity resides?

Free association Interpretation and insight

Freud stated the fundamental rule of psychoanalysis is free association, that it is no more than a joint process of free association and transference. The later being the key mechanism and the former the ‘fundamental rule’.

Macmillan (1997) says this free association effectively creates its data, rather than recovers it and ‘cannot be used as any guide to the facts of human behaviour and mental life’. It is at best, ‘an unreliable guide to memory’, and as Grunbaum reminds us, ‘can be contaminated with the promptings of the analyst. All this makes it at untrustworthy’.

The important thing is how this created data is used, as a part of this process and how its interpretation influences further production. The interpretation becoming new information in the patient’s free association, a deepening of the understanding of the conflict and in doing so broadens the patient’s capacity for psychic experience. The above quotes, of MacMillan and Grunbaum, I feel, fail to understand beyond Freud, as interpretations are now seen as combined truths of thousands of supervised client hours. Interpretation is, in a broader sense, simply the understanding of any text, be it a film, poem or interview. The process of making the artist/patient aware of some aspect of his psychological process that he had been not previously conscious of.

‘Far from offering the analysand a new message, the interpretation should serve merely to enable the analysand to hear the message he is unconsciously addressing himself… The analysis plays on the ambiguity of the analysand speech, bringing out its multiple meanings’ (Evans 1996)

These resulting interpretations involve the change in the thing being interpreted, making the original interpretation immediately out of date and informing the process in a forward motion. It is constructive and transformative without being right or wrong, the artist is changed, something new appears in the place of what was there before.

Frosh describes this as like taking a stills camera to photograph something, It represents something that was there at that moment, ‘true’ in an approximate kind of way, but never quite to be the same again’. ‘No interpretation can be the truth, but like language itself, performative.’ This act of interpretation gives the subject the opportunity to seize the lost or hidden meanings and re-own them, restoring an identity between the subject and ones own subject-hood, interpersonal intersubjective truths allowing the emergence of unconscious fantasies out of which meaningful insight might become known, and in doing so, improving that flow to free associations.

Methodology

Every picture produced is then, a provisional state, often reflecting potential confusion, emotional investment and desire. At each stage it is open to negotiation of its own development and assessment, indeed as the process moves forward, re assessments of previous works are integrated into this provisional narrative. Backed by theory these assessments will seek to validate events and how they are perceived. Psychoanalysis works with phantasy, with the internalised version of the world through which individuals communicate and relate to shared external events. There are no true or false statement, each reading is intriguing and unique and its understanding will be able to be taken to the next engagement.

This collaborative enterprise and validation of enquiry, aims at constructing meaning, has both an affective as well as cognitive part and will depend more upon the empirical accuracy of interpretations and than on the accomplishments of self-reflection. It is these joint narratives, of interlocked theories, of corrected distortions and the creation of a revised set of narratives of personally transformative knowledge that will form a convincing and new photo biography.

Provisional transitional truths

‘Narrative truths convince because of their capacity to evoke and structure experiences, to offer coherence where there is fragmentation, to articulate half understood meanings and to throw light on obscurity.’ Frosh

As in any assessment, these psychological states are often characterised by a kind of alienation, where the subject is separated from objects, experiencing as if an object split from ones own meanings, wishes and desires. As individual images, they represent a temporary transitional stage showing these splits. As a series they becomes narrative of theoretical coherence, inner consistency and have narrative intelligibility.

What if everything is a fairy story? Does this mean that the narrative holds no potency? The alternative family album is a process of unravelling those things that are not as they seem, into a new understanding, an understanding of the human condition, underpinned by established theory and extensive supervision. Thus is the intense experience of psychotherapy as reseach, the searching for or staving off of something new, on the journey to insight, this road to personal change may be the same route towards that of human understanding.

‘Phantasy is not merely an escape from reality, but a constant and unavoidable accompaniment of real experiences, (we are) constantly interacting with them’ Segal 1973

Spencer Rowell 2011

A Look At Symbolic Representation

To translate a dream to reality, to face and find expression for the internal conflicts, to achieve lasting reparation in reality as well as in Phantasy is the joy of aesthetic expression.

Background of Image

This image was photographed, at dawn at Brancaster Beach. It was the closest beach to where we lived and although three hours away by Morris traveller, a beach regularly visited throughout my childhood. The image of contained boxes on the beach came to me one morning.

I searched in my therapy sessions for problems in these containers, opening some of them, closing some boxes that were partially open, revisiting. However, the contents of each individual box were unaware of each other’s objects, individual boxes continued to remain out of sight of the viewer’s so as to hamper their ability to create a picture.

There are reasons why patients chose not to integrate certain objects within the session, create boundaries between subjects, often approaching each challenge as a separate issue. These defences protect from integration.

I had chosen compartmentalism as an unconscious process to defend against these very anxieties. It was an attempt to simplify things, to inhibit attempts to mix those affects that cognitively would simply create too much pain to be reconciled. It is common to experience these uncomfortable affects that come about from trying to hold conflicting ideas within sight of each other.

This incompatibility has its roots in the non-integration of our polarised selves. That our ‘all good’ and ‘all bad’ are placed into separate containers, this contradiction of behaviour can only be made bearable through denial or through a state of indifference. This division into parts and there insolubility is a survival mechanism, the self will only become one once the parts have been introduced to each other, within psychological dialogue.

The Jungian-trained psychiatrist Antony Storr believes,

"Creative people, show a wider than usual division in the mind, an accentuation of opposites. It seems probable that when creative people produce a new work they are in fact attempting to reconcile opposites in exactly the way Jung describes. [Their work] symbolise the union of opposites and the formation of this new centre of personality...”

After completion of the image and the psychoanalytical theory that it may represent, I researched the symbols within it.

Beach

Psychologically the beach evokes for us the daily experience of the slim shore between consciousness and unconsciousness lapped and buffeted, shifted and changed, temporally submerged and once again delineated in the tidal rhythms of waking and sleeping. There are ‘deposits’ from dream and fantasy, the play of the imagination, the clarity of awareness. Sometimes what the psyche tosses on to the shore can, like the jellyfish, only be experienced, but not assimilated. As the perspective and rhythms of the beach and the movement between water and land can liberate ones feelings and expand ones sense of space, time and being, so does the exchange between the depths of the psyche and consciousness.

The Book Of Symbols. The Archive For Research In Archetypal Symbolism (2010:p122) Taschen

Box

The box is interpreted as a female symbol of the unconscious and the maternal. It always holds a secret, enclosing and keeping from the world something precious, fragile or awesome. The box protects, but at the risk of stifling. The box, at the bottom of which Hope remains, is the unconscious for all its potentialities for the unexpected, the destructive, or the positive if it is left to its own devices. Paul Diel links this symbol with a highly charged imagination which invests the unknown object hidden in the box with the power to realise ones hearts desire, a power which is totally illusionary and the source of all our woes!

The Dictionary Of Symbols (1969:p116) Penguin

Spencer Rowell 2011

Paper On: Unconscious Phantasy and Symbolism in Photographs

Hannah Segal. Dream, Phantasy and Art

‘If it where possible that a person should give a faithful history of his being from the earliest epochs of his recollection, a picture would be presented such as the world has never contemplated before. A mirror would be held up to all men in which they might behold there own recollections and, in dim perspective, their shadowy hopes and fears – all that they dare not, or that daring or desiring, they could not expose to the open eyes of the day. But thought can with difficulty visit the intricate and winding chambers which it inhabits.’

(Shelly 1812)

Unconscious Phantasy is a key aspect of Kleinian theory and with it comes her mental picture of emotional activity. It is this psychological aspect of instinct, says Klein that produces ‘image potentials’, these enable the infant to construct meaningful memories, a way of testing phantasy against reality.

Klein’s ideas, of the movement between the Paranoid Schizoid to Depressive Position and its influence on aesthetic communication influenced the psychoanalyst and theorist Segal profoundly. She emphasises the importance of the discussion of Unconscious Phantasy to our understanding of dreams and argues that it is incomplete unless ideas of symbolism are introduced. She opens up discourse between the relations between art, dreaming and daydreaming.

Freud described dreaming in 1900 as;

‘… a piece of infantile mental life that has the power to suspend’ and that ‘Psychic dream work aims at fulfilling the unacceptable and conflicting wishes by disguising them, and this involves a particular mode of expression- the dream language’

An integral part of this language, are symbols (any indirect representation of various kinds) that may be used through the defences of condensation and displacement. Condensation, where the immediate recollection of a dream doesn’t immediately surface but may offer other valuable links that arise at a future date and displacement, which would be to emphasise or dwell upon some seemingly insignificant detail. We find surfacing, through these two defence mechanisms, the currency of symbol formation, the visual language of unconscious communication.

Phantasy and symbolism are seen as an important combination in the process of art production. It is this internal unconscious dialogue that is the ‘working through’ of art production, where latent images can immerge and dissolve back into the unconscious to be re-assimilated at a future date.

Segal states. ‘The richness, scope, and correctness of our mental activity is linked with our relation to Unconscious Phantasy. If our Unconscious Phantasies are split off or too severely repressed, our conscious life is impoverished and restricted. On the other hand, if our reality testing is impeded and uncorrected by reality testing, our mental life may appear to be rich but it is delusional’

The Symbolic Expression Of Unconscious Phantasy

Feud came to the conclusion that symbols where universal, that they may vary in different cultures, but they are given and not formed and derives from the archaic past. Jones (1916) takes Freud further by describing ‘conscious and unconscious symbolism’ and that only what is repressed is symbolised, that the repressed symbol often has an opposite meaning.

Symbolism underpins Unconscious Phantasy, it is its ‘language and currency’. These symbols could be described as either object, behaviours expressed in relationships, or a repressed thought. All psychotherapists working with patients would recognise the use of symbols used in communication, often to protect repressed feelings. As a therapist you are thinking as much about what the client is saying as much as what he may not be saying.

Segal suggests two types of symbol formation, one she calls symbol equation, this is concrete and rational, the other she called symbolic representational, a form representing the object, however is not wholly equated with it. Segal suggests that these two modes represent both the Paranoid-Schizoid and the Depressive position respectively.

Segal sates ‘I should like at this to point to summarise what I mean by the terms ‘symbolic equation’ and ‘symbol’ respectively, and the conditions under which they arise. In the symbolic equation, the symbol-substitute is felt to be the original object. The substitutes own properties are not recognised or admitted. The symbolic equation is used to deny the absence of the ideal object, or to control a persecuting one. It belongs to the earliest stages of development’.

This is what gives an image it’s initial punch, its primary reading. This is the concrete impact on the viewer’s own experience. But the real achievement of an image that evokes something else is the key achievement of artistic expression. It is these symbolic equations that Segal talks of that are the more primitive aspects of this experience and, I would argue, come from a more universal pre verbal time.

The Dream Function

Why do we, as viewer, enjoy these phantasy worlds? Why would we stand before the repressed wishes of an artist, airing their conflicts in public?

The dream as Freud describes is a way, through symbols, of expressing and elaborating unconscious fantasy. He imagined a compromise-taking place, in the form of wish fulfilment, satisfying both wishes and defences. The dream is performing the function of expression of this unconscious conflict and is the communication between these conscious and unconscious worlds.

The recounting of a dream in the therapeutic session, can be seen as a client offering the analyst unbearable feelings in the form of symbols, perhaps this is what a work of art can do, asking the viewer to create something of his own, to be understood from the position of the artists internal conflicts. When we view work, we are looking for Unconscious Phantasy imbedded in it and how, through this process, it enriches our understanding and empathy with the work.

The understanding of Unconscious Phantasy does not mean interpreting the dream, but rather interpreting ‘Such stuff dreams are made of’.

Aggression

Klein however developed her theories around the representation of aggression resulting from anxiety and guilt. She saw anxiety and guilt as the prime movers in symbol formation, this is where the ideas of aesthetic production from Klein and Segal differs from the work of , for instance, Winnicott and Milner.

So in Kleinian thinking, the act of creation is the movement to and from the Depressive Position. This movement involves reparation. Through reparation the artist’s inner and outer worlds are brought together and given a new voice, whether reconciliation in the conflict within ones own artwork or insight gained in a therapy session, this is how these affects are reconciled.

The need for reparation is central to Klein’s view on creative expression. This need for salvation is what Segal in 1952 writes, ‘the artists need is to recreate what he feels in the depth of his internal world.’ that my internal world is shattered and that there is a need to recreate something that will become part of a new whole. The fragmented self, reassembled in my own way and during this process that, states Segal, ‘there can be no art without aggression and that true reparation includes the acknowledgment of this aggression’. Adrian Stokes, also talks of what he describes as art being the ‘first step in the containment of this aggression’.

Fry describes ‘This found echo of emotion’. It is this ‘aesthetic emotion’, if found and described by Bell as, ‘a central common quality peculiar to all aesthetic interaction [that] we will have discovered and that distinguishes art from other classes of objects’.

To translate a dream to reality, to face and find expression for the internal conflicts, to achieve lasting reparation in reality as well as in Phantasy is the joy of aesthetic expression.

Spencer Rowell 2011

The Family Album

The family album is a document of importance, but what of its standing in the communication of the truth. As the character Sye Parish, played by Robin Williams in the film, ‘One Hour Photo’ says,

‘Family photos depict smiling faces... births, weddings, holidays, children's birthday parties. People take pictures of the happy moments in their lives. Someone looking through our photo album would conclude that we had led a joyous, leisurely existence free of tragedy. No one ever takes a photograph of something they want to forget.’

This research, through the metaphor of the family album has been instigated by a need to investigate why ones ‘experience’ doesn’t quite match the ‘evidence’. An 'Alternative family Album' is a re-construction of events that may have been forgotten, through defences, or as means of survival; a new visual connection with our early informative years, confronting these fears and knowing, to quote Deepak Chopra; ‘The things you're most afraid of have already happened.’

Image: 'Why Are You Crying?'

Image: Family Portrait 1938-2011