Blake Morrison Quote

‘I pick up a photograph, a wonderful sepia set piece, the Blakemores circa 1895, my great-grandmother and her four children posed on a bench, two girls in lace dresses and frills, a besuited boy with a book open in his hand, and a baby in a bonnet. I look at them in their allotted roles‚ -the Eternal Mother (she died within a year), the Proud Beauty (married a womanizer), the Scholar (gassed in the trenches), the Daddy's Girl (but Daddy remarried), the Baby of the Family (already with his bottle)‚ -and I follow their stares back to the man taking the picture, the Absent Father, who had his story too, grief and nervous breakdown. I think how cruelly far the reality of their lives was from what the camera had chosen or predicted for them that day, and how the photo lost nothing in feeling for my knowing this, and how that must mean art can lie as much as it likes, or needs to, and we forgive it anything so long as it is art. The people captured here are real, and there's a frisson in knowing that, which you couldn't get from painting or fiction; but truth does not come into it at all.’

Blake Morrison (1993) And When did You Last See Your Father (Penguin 1994 Edition)

What Is A Family Album?

The family album is a volume of experiences, constructed and presented as historical truth and of immense visual and emotional importance to the owner. These images fill in our gaps; they offer us a method of reconciling our existence, and in so doing bear witness to our internal connectedness with both ourselves, and externally with our family and the rest of humanity; it is often the only proof of our existence at all. It creates a link with both the past and the future and eventually, it provides the one and only link between ‘us’ and ‘there’ or ‘them‘ and ‘then’. Cameras go with family life. A family’s photographic album is generally about us now, but becomes a historic document of the extended family. It seems you cannot claim to have seen anything, been anywhere or ‘belonged’ unless you have photographed it.

Through the production of the family album, we create an idealised image of the world and our place within it and more importantly our relationships. In this document we choose to present photographs of us looking our best, both physically and emotionally, where they are praised for their candor, by the audience that we select to view it.

The family album has its truths of course, but the justification that it shows how it really was, is not so clear. It is a very worthy document, however it is also has a role as a defence against our anxieties. Family albums actively promote nostalgia; one could argue that photography, far from documenting the truth, succeeds more in hiding it.

Image: The Mirror

Does psychoanalysis recollect the forgotten past, making ways of resurrecting and containing deep experience? Or does it create words from feelings, making the unconscious conscious, enriching meanings to events that may give meaning to the here and now? Or does this perhaps describe the artistic endeavour, the creation of photographs to answer these questions. The analyst Liz Bennett, of ‘The Guild’ revues the self-portrait of Spencer Rowell.

‘As I revue this image, it is hard for me to reconcile some aspects of it, perhaps it is hard for the subject to reconcile aspects of himself’. The shape of the work suggests an old fashioned mirror, which allows you to see different views or aspects of the self and the suggestion of a lack of mirroring. This image suggests raw, strong feelings. The subtext seems to be, “Something is coming out of my mouth and the process is horrible and painful, yet I am spewing light and beauty.” Perhaps this is about the subject’s experience of therapy? Is he spewing words and feelings? Or a difficulty in finding a voice for his feelings, something within which he cannot accept and must vomit out, but when it comes out, it is beautiful. Alongside this beauty there is a sense of disturbance and anxiety, a struggle– powers that are beyond control’.

-There I Sit Before my Mother’s Mirror 2011

Paper On: Mirroring and Attunement. Kenneth Wright

Kenneth Wright (2009) Mirroring and Attunement Routledge; 1 edition (23 April 2009)

Mirroring and Attunement.

‘The form of some art corresponds truthfully to some felt pattern of our emotional life. In this sense every object with aesthetic import is potentially in tune with some elements of human feeling… every truthful work will be limited by its authors range of sensibilities, every truthful work will have its supporters because it resonates with them’. Kenneth Wright

Creative Production and Pre-verbal Communication

A fundamental aspect of psychodynamic work with patients is the shared understanding of symbolic gestures, often not verbalised, but ‘felt’. I am interested in the development of these communications through the production of self-portraits and the ability of being able to symbolise ‘feelings’. Where do they come from and what relationship do they have with artistic production?

Wright offers us an insight into the relationship between early pre-verbal relationships and the mother. He focuses on two aspects of functioning in the pre-verbal relationship provided by the mother, that of mirroring and attunement.

I draw these parallels with the relationship between client and analyst, as he feels his way into the patients’ world through identification and the artwork, both giving back to the patient/viewer his reflection of this world.

Both mirroring and attunement are pre-verbal forms of communication based on affective affirmation. Mirroring is confined to mothers facial expressions and is seen as a single modality (vision), attunement generates a variety of forms across many forms of modalities. Together providing a range of symbolic communication of the infants inner state.

How do we describe this feeling of being in touch? Can we draw parallels with art production and appreciation?

What is artistic creativity? Could it be the skill in accessing this rich imagination, a subjective state finding form for these inner feelings? A return, to the development of the mothers’ skills in holding and attunement, or perhaps, lack of them?

I will draw parallels with the artists’ and others identification with my work as a simile of the mothers’ early identification with baby.

Is psychoanalysis a science or an art.? Does is recollect the forgotten past, making ways of resurrecting and containing deep experience? Or does it create words from feelings, making the unconscious conscious, enriching meanings to events that may give meaning to the here and now? Or is this the artistic endeavour, to seek out these answers through continued development of these questions.

As Wright states ‘how much is analysis a science and how much an art, and is it closer to the sobriety of prose or the inspiration of poetry?’ It is the feature of poetry and of all arts that they have the power to reveal experiences never fully known, and arguably both attunement and analysis have a similar potential’.

My research will enquire into of three basic links, arguing that these are the precursor to this artistic endeavour, of art production and of art appreciation.

The adaptive attuning mother who reflects the forms of the subjective infant and during this process develops a language of shared symbolic gestures.

The psychoanalyst who helps the patient into being, by fostering a new provision of attuning forms as a way of a replacement of that early lack in that earlier relationship.

The photographer, compensating for this deficient in attunement, makes reflective forms of his own and gains an ability to exist and feel real through this process.

The roots of creativity start at the very start of life within the relationship with the adaptive mother. ‘The art object is a structure of non-verbal signals’ (Susanne Langer 1942)

Both in the therapy session and during the production of these photographs, there is the possibility of existence in a new world of newly created reflections. This may be seen as a way of reviving the process in the patient/artist that had died or failed to develop or simply the artists’ need to enquire, reform, reconstruct and search for any deficiency.

Subjective responses come from a place that pre-exists the use of language and it is this area of communication I am interested, in both the session and in the unconscious communication of, in particular, a self portrait photograph. Can these pictures be seen as portraying the shapes of non-verbal imagery? Can they in sequence produce an alternative family album?

From Mirroring and Attunement to Creative Expression

During this early and important stage, while the mother is so intently indentified with the infant, the baby internalises the maternal form and is experiencing an essential phase of early symbol-formation. This is the precursor for linking of inner experience with external forms. At the pre-verbal level, where image based forms are fashioned by the mother at a time when the baby is clearly differentiating himself from her and beginning the stage of separation from her and creating a sense of self.

Mirroring, in context of the emotional mirror, is where the baby sees his own face in the face of the mother. It marks out the mental space between mother and baby (Winnicotts’ ‘Potential space’). As well as the baby feeling an essential sense of connection, rapport, and through resonance and attunement (mother infant communication) it creates a direct line of conscious and unconscious communication between the two. This subjective engagement differs from language, in that this is an objective line of communication where the words conjure up learned symbols.

Winnicott (1967a) proposed that the mothers face, with its rich variety of emotional responses, was a principle means through which the preverbal infant obtained emotional ‘feedback’ about himself. Being the child’s first mirror, what the infant sees in the mother’s expression is related to what she perceives as the infants ‘experience’.

In a therapeutic session and during any empathic engagement, the analysand tries to put inner experience into words, although this can be done in many other non-verbal ways. In mirroring we attempts to reflect the perception of the inner state. In attunement we attempt to imagine what is the inner state being experienced. This identification provides the external view of the inner experience.

‘In attunement, a similar situation prevails. First the mother identifies with the baby’s experience (emotion), then recasts it in her own idiom and replays it to the baby. If the baby can experience the mothers enactment in a resonant way (ie corresponding to something in the infant), at that moment, baby and mother, like the artist and the audience, will be momentarily linked through the created (maternal) form’ p10

Attunement is effectively outside the mothers’ sense of awareness. It is spontaneous and intuitive. Stern states that the attuned mother ‘tracks the changing contour of the infants state and Spontaneously enacting the baby’s feelings’.

When one talks to a patient, he knows I am listening to him if I create an image or symbol that resonates with him, he will sense I am in touch with him. This is the nature of art and its affect on the viewer. Responsive dialogue involves a match, or ‘fit.’ The proposed research is less about looking for mother, than looking for my own reflection of myself in mother.

A Sense of Self. Winnicott

‘To put things in this way begins to make the link with art more apparent; there is an emotional reaching out towards the subject, with perhaps the expectation of a response; a medium that allows itself to be transformed; and a ‘finding’ or creating within that medium of significant forms that reveal the subject to himself. Winnicotts’ model readily transposes into the language of art’

The real focus for Winnicott is this notion of ‘fit’. A vital ‘something’ in our own experience. The creation of maternal nurturance within the objective canvas, often creating, what would be a subjective disturbance.

The critical importance of Winnicott maternal responsiveness runs through all of his work, but whereas in early theories he stressed the physical, he has more recently focused on the non-verbal, adaptive communication, thus shifting from the relationship between mother and breast to non –verbal dialogue with the mothers face. He likens the mothers face to an emotional mirror and suggests that the infant sees, and begins to experience himself, through the visual medium of the mother’s responsive expressions.

‘The infants initial world is made of symbols, created concrete objects made from his pre-verbal structuring, as language appears he now faces another world, made half by other, restructuring his world in the fashion of language that carries other meanings. Does the artist hang on to this unique much earlier code of communication?’

A Need For Reparation. Klein

In Klein’s view, the creative act is driven by guilt or concern. Segal, a Kleinian, states that symbolism within the artwork is based more on absence and the loss of the object. The rebuilding of these fragments of scattered objects, is the creative act. It is this attempt to repair, to make reparation to the object that becomes the artistic endeavour.

Segal, extends Klein’s theories into the study of art and writes of the fact that artistic creation is inextricably linked to the capacity to symbolise. Art involves representation- not necessarily of the external world but that of its interior, of inner experience. ‘The “Significant form”, where a viewer recognises an arrangement as an inevitable sequence.’

In a generalised way, the Kleinian concept of creativity comes from a sense of lack, and replacement of what is missing, it reinstates the missing experience, and replaces the adaptive mother with a more perfect version.

This differs from the Winicottian model of creative production, the development of mother –infant relatedness from a time that the mother and baby is merged as a single object. The assumption by Klein is that the mother baby link is broken and is already be in the position of the necessary reparation.

The Artistic Endeavour

Peter fuller perceived the relevance of Winnicott work of the painter Natkin, and is very eloquent as regards Winicottian theories on the relation between preverbal communication and visual expression. Fuller, (1980) suggested that the picture surface could be thought of as a face like structure, with which the artist communicates in ways that reach back to earlier experience with the mothers face. Where the maternal response is out of the infants control the artist can modify the surface until it gives back to him the responses that he needs

The artist operates in dialogue with the canvas and creates an illusionary and expressive surface through his technique. Eventually ‘the canvas surface’, wrote Fuller, ‘becomes a surrogate for the good mothers face. ’Through this, it would seem, artistic creation has a therapeutic function for the artist Winnicott states, that if the maternal mirroring fails, then the infant looks around for other ways of getting something of himself back from the environment.’

Wright says the artist, in this space, is poised on the edge of ‘no mother’ (the un-attuned mother), so hence the compulsion to go on creating. From a certain perspective a transitional object can be seen as an external form of internal memory or feelings. The baby retrieves an experience in the absence of the mother, touching and observing this object brings her back, the infants way of remembering her.

‘The panic of facing the blank canvas is a re-enactment of the primitive anxiety of the non-adaptive mother, the distracted mother when the medium gives the artist what he needs then he experiences joy and self-realization’.

Finding This Voice

The therapist finds his voice with his client essentially as an artist does; creating a joint metaphorical and creative language. Ordinary language, is essentially practical and concerned with external reality, it is object related and it needs considerable adaptation before it can be used to embody subjective phenomena, like symbols and art.

Language, of course, offers us an important form of shared communication regarding external objects however, non-verbal communications of symbols offer us a much more profound insight into inner objects and feelings. It has the power to move, to pierce (Barthes term) the inner self and of others.

Finding this authentic voice is a not easy, never more difficult than in the therapist room, of finding a common voice with that of the client. A persons true self lies deep in this preverbal world, the world the artist accesses, it is here that the persons important and often most difficult feelings to communicate lay beyond the reach of ordinary language.

This core value of non-verbal communication convinces the client you are authentic, as with artwork, the showing of the true self is what’s authentic. We also achieve self-acceptance through this relationship; this recognition is a place where the self is made.

This joy of being recognised (by the artist) of being responded to (heard) is the confirmation that is so desired, a confirmation of self or the creation of the good enough even perfect maternal object. From the Winicottian perspective this is the adaptive mother giving what the child requires, as opposed to the Kleinian model where guilt and reparation are the motives for the production of the work.

Conclusion

Individual experiences are of course significant to the creator, but so often with creative work, there is a ‘fit’ or an unconscious ‘knowing’ with that of the work and the viewer. Shared pre-verbal experiences, shared attunement. If a portrait is based on this structure of non-verbal presentational of symbols the ability of the ‘fit’ between mother and child, the creative endeavour can provide fertile material. If this creative material is accessed, this pre-verbal symbol formation can it be assessed and used to offer an insight into our early life experiences.

Being of such an objective nature, photography is a particularly difficult medium to integrate ones subjective gestures of the individualism of the artist. Winnicott realised this integration of the objective and subjective view an important feature of the creation of symbols, he spoke of it as ‘primary creativity, a realm of illusion, a place of transitional objects and from a much earlier stage of the child’s omnipotence.’

Perhaps the work created by the artist, of a surrogate mother, creates a more perfect object and contains more of the artist self than the artist can communicate verbally. Through its formation, refining and experimentation, the reflections one would have preferred begin to emerge. A maternal extension of self.

Through symbols, the artist gives a voice to the inarticulate to communicate to the viewer, on one hand we raid the inarticulate and on the other wait for the mother (adaptive) to bring the form of the feeling to us. Like trying to recapture a lost memory, we will hope and wait to have it released, producing what Winnicott would call our transitional objects.

Through production of these photographs, I will bring external form from inner states., these transitional objects are the first ‘not-me’ objects, a subjective part of the infants memories of earlier experiences. The function is to recast subjective feeling states into more or less objective form as photographic objects. A bridge to our earliest experiences.

It is important to stress the importance of these photographic representations’ importance of the shared experience, rather than simply becoming a vehicle for self-examination, self-analytical exorcism and an individual journey of self-awareness. Winnicott saw this symbol communication as the primary form of communication in us all, the preverbal world being the foundation in the formation of self and of symbolic representation. These primitive communications are based on shared preverbal symbols and communicated non-verbally and not intellectually via words..

The joy of being recognised also serves all our narcissistic needs for recognition, acceptance and uniqueness. The artists inhabit these forms and continue to refine the process slowly in doing so, becoming more fully himself and have a more meaningful contact with other human beings.

Spencer Rowell 2011

Mirror Therapy- From the Notes of Jo Spence

Kind Permission Terry Dennet- The Jo Spence Archive

Mirror Practice notes- - Self Portraiture therapy

Desensitisation---- release emotions-- change tight body language-- re model old image into something else-- say Yes when my face and body says No ------To look -----when my mind says don’t look---- at that mutilated Breast

To change the visual concept from ------- dependant self pitying victim--- to a positive a survivor----Cancer War Hero--put on some medals-- a soldier’s hat???-- People used to look up to War heroes didn’t they--- not any more though!!!!!!

Qualities to think about

The Mirror is dumb non evaluative and non human - whatever I do in front of it -

It can’t be critical like a person- It is not my Mummy or Daddy -- mirror pictures are-a private self activated show --just for me until I want to invite others in.

Mirror images cannot be saved for others to see later ---so it is safe to be uninhibited and show /release my most exposed self--? Important when Im vulnerable to work alone for a session??? But needs courage--do/will I always have the courage to face reality alone??

Mirror image is a reflection of the living image in real time ----but as ephemeral as real time--- it is not automatically preserved- except-imperfectly-in memory

The Photographer as a Resurrectionist--- not a body snatcher --- not TAKING pictures but reconstituting events

The Camera process can encapsulation real-time aspects-- but only as a dead embalmed cultural artefact------- photographs are pieces of paper-- why do people forget that ----So our task as photographers is to resurrect these dead things- to use our Art to get the shapes encoded in the paper to express something of the realities of the former living essence we confronted with our camera---

Thank God for a shared process of communication----- What would we do without it--and who will truly read our images and our intent when we do not share the same cultural codes?

Mirror image -a part self- a shadow self-- looks real -- moves in time and space but only a reflected illusion -- therefore some of my pretend situations and constructed image rehearsals will be no less real than others- I can choose my visual reality-- dress up ---makeup --all appear real -- but all are illusion in the mirror

The Mirror and the Camera Set up Camera with bulb release to click any useful images first start with mirror rehearsal --No Photos--- only looking

Review: 'Shadows of Doubt' Revue-Evening Standard

Sue Steward Evening Standard

Shadows of Doubt, Darnley Road Gallery - review

Serendipity was at work with this small, very brief but intriguing exhibition built around the actual and possible East End landmarks of Alfred Hitchcock's childhood. News of the discovery in New Zealandof his silent film "The White Shadow," made in the Islington Studios in 1923, coincided with the opening night.

David George and Spencer Rowell share a fascination with Hitchcock's early years in East Londonand their impact on his films. They approaches differ but both draw on locations mentioned in biographies and by Hitchcock himself, and the links between the psycho-geography and the actual places where the greengrocer's son lived until he was 16.

David George takes the more literal approach, creating sinister, cinematic images around East London and the East Endat night. Illuminated only by the city's sodium-yellow, they suggest scenes from the films - some more accurately than others.

At Wanstead Flats Easter Fair - which the boy must surely have visited - George shot from across the fields, leaving the Fair silhouetted against the yellow sky, outlining caravans and rides. The superbly appropriate stencilled letters shout "THE SCREAMER" from the horizon. At Limehouse Steps, reference to The 39 Steps are obvious. Here, he waits for the tide to ebb and standing on pebbles, focusses on the threatening stone walls and steps where pirates were drowned and corpses slung. Out near Epping Forest, Hitchock's father William drove his son on his fruit and veg cart. David George stands behind a burger van, lighting the scene with passing car headlights which add tension - and ensure the van's CCTV camera is in view.

These mergers of real life and fantasy rely on the suggestion that the places were embedded in Hitchcock's memory and his films. Spencer Rowell's interest lies in the interior, psychoanalytical interpretations of the director's life, particularly the impact of his Catholic upbringing on his work. His triptych of large, dream-like scenes are located in Hitchcock's school chapel at St. Ignatius's College, Stamford Hill, and inside the local family church. Rowell immerses himself inside the scene, seated on a chair, back to the camera and over illuminated to ghostliness in the claustrophobic bell tower. Here, the lighting is perfectly noir-ish without need for black and white film, and light beams through shuttered windows and the open door. His final touch - laying shredded blown-up prints of the scenes over the scenes - adds another layer of mystery and interpretation.

"Shadows of Doubt" (from the film "Shadow of A Doubt") applies to the doubt surrounding the chosen locations but crucially, to the extent to which they feature in Hitchock's films and the doubt in all of his mysteries. Similarly, in this exhibition. An expanded version in September, will be accompanied by films and talks around the subject. Follow the story in the photographers' Uncertain States publication.

Until August 12. 07771 784 931 uncertainstates.com

Exhibition: 'Shadow of Doubt' Interim show August 2011

Shadows of Doubt:

A psycho-geographical journey through Hitchcock’s East End childhood.

Photography by David George and Spencer Rowell. Curated by Dr. Nicholas Haeffner. Presented in conjunction with the London Metropolitan University’s East End Photographic Archive.

Introduction by Michael Upton

The work in Shadows of Doubt relates to the East End of the film director Alfred Hitchcock’s London 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. This exhibition is a work in progress for a larger show in November and December of this year.

The photographers have each approached the project with one rule- David George has photographed exterior places. Spencer Rowell has focused on interior spaces. This expedient division is consistent with their broader practice and interests; David in the sublime psycho-geographic essence of nocturnal places, Spencer in relationships between photography, psychoanalysis and childhood memory. Yet with Hitchcock as a common catalyst this has resulted in work which shares a sense of fear, apprehension, suspense and mystery appropriate to the director’s vision and public persona.

Alfred Hitchcock was so effective in creating a version of his childhood based on a handful of anecdotes which suited his promotional ends, that it is easy to forget that he spent sixteen years in the east end of London. Hitchcock’s biographers have portrayed these years in varying ways to support their interpretations of the director and his texts. Donald Spoto’s lonely ‘Fred’ dwelt in dark and oppressive rooms above a shop, while ‘Alfie’s’ world in Patrick McGilligan’s version was brightened somewhat by seaside trips to Cliftonville and family get-togethers in Putney. Many of the actual places which constituted Hitchcock’s childhood realm have vanished. A Jet garage occupies the site of the greengrocers shop at 517 Leytonstone High Road where Hitchcock was born; the Green Man pub which the family frequented is now an O'Neills; the Police Station where his ‘wrongly accused’ motif was inspired is fast becoming commercial premises and much of Limehouse has been raized and regenerated.

Given the scarcity of reliable factual and physical evidence these subjective images, (consciously or subconsciously mediated through Hitchcock’s texts), his biographical legend, and the artists’ own visions and experiences arguably offer as truthful a representation of Hitchcock’s childhood as any objective documentary account.

Spencer Rowell on Shadows of Doubt

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 as 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 defense 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.

www.spencerrowell.co.uk

David George on Shadows of Doubt

Educators and psychologists have long known that childhood environment informs adult behaviour so it is pertinent to argue that the same environment would mould personal aesthetic and artistic sensibilities. Look at George Shaw’s paintings done in Airfix paint palette of the mundane and melancholic housing estates of his childhood or Ridley Scott’s nightmarish opening shots in “Bladerunner” of a city of the future, squarely based on the night time industrial landscapes on the mouth of the River Tees where Scott grew up, to see evidence of childhood geography feeding into adult creativity.

The idea of the “Shadows of Doubt” project was to try to photographically capture Alfred Hitchcock’s childhood East End as one of the elements that shaped his filmmaking. This was not an easy task as most of the information about Hitchcock’s childhood is at best sketchy, and at worst unreliable. This is coupled with the relentless way London has been knocked down or blitzed and rebuilt in the intervening 100 years destroying large areas of London relevant to his early years.

I decided the best way to revisit Hitchcock’s childhood London was to walk the areas I knew he inhabited (Wapping, Wanstead Flats, Whipps Cross, Limehouse and Leyton) and photograph elements of these urban landscapes that I understood were contemporary and therefore familiar to him, places that he would still recognise if he were alive today.

The resulting photographs are hopefully a small vignette of the psycho-topographical backdrop to Alfred Hitchcock’s formative years in London’s East End.

http://davidgeorge.eu

Image: Untitled aged 10 months

Image: Mother in Him

Paper On: 'On Not Being Able To Paint' by Marion Milner

Marion Milner (1950) On Not Being Able to Paint Routledge; 2nd Edition (23 Sep 2010)

In Anna Freud’s introduction to 'On Not Being Able To Paint', she writes,

‘The legitimate result of analysis is the inner experience of formally unknown affects and impulses, which find their final outlet in the ego processes of verbalisation and deliberate action. The main achievement is, according to the author, a joining of that split between mind and body that can so easily result from trying to limit thinking only in words.’ P. xiv

Through the production of self-portrait photography, can one, through a constant unravelling and then reconstruction, find a version of the true self? Marion Milner uses her book, ‘On Not Being Able To Paint’, as a record of personal experience, ‘in order to understand becoming able to see’, and as a way of documenting her stages of process and discovery.

To engage with the world through photographic expression is, of course, a logical process for a photographer. As in a way of producing symbols of representation, conscious and unconscious, a way of verbalisation without words. This process of image production, when followed and perhaps seen as a series of growth, offer us a consensus, ‘another form of seeing’. Within this self-observation and discourse, just as in the analytical situation, the revealing of new insights into the photographers’ inner world are revealed. These comparisons with the representations of the inner reality provide awareness, allowing progression to more insight, which then lead to further creative expression. This creation and production of symbols of lost objects, running parallel with newly found awareness, can create not only the lost object but a replacement object that may never have been made available. It is this battle for free association and non-verbal expression, leading to the uncovering of the unconscious mind, which makes up the core of an analysts therapeutic work. One image informing another, as with one session with a client would reveal some underlying defence mechanisms, this, however, takes time, through dialogue and consistent availability, before an overall picture emerges. But over time one looks back and sees intuitive work practice and process being underpinned by theory. In photography, it is the representation of these objects in the internal world, shown in the external world that becomes part of this therapeutic dialogue.

Symbol Production

We have, of course, words to bridge this gap between our experience of the inner and outer realities, a way of inner ‘realities’ coming to terms with there ‘external’ surroundings. Perhaps as an image-maker, it is useful to distinguish between these two worlds by images and symbols, rather than words. These portraits can be like going back, not necessarily in retreat, but as a conscious search into the past, just as in psychoanalysis, a search for something lost which, if revealed, may be of value in the present or future knowledge.

My interplay between the inner and outer interpretation of reality, sheds light on a seemingly lack of presence of significant others, my search for lost objects, this is the key area of my concern.

‘Looked at in these terms the problem of the relation between the painter and his world then became basically a problem of ones need and the need of the ‘other’, a problem of reciprocity between ‘you’ and ‘me’: with ‘you’ and ‘me’ meaning originally mother and child’. P134

‘The definition pointed to the fact that their relationship of oneself to the external world is basically and originally a relationship of one person to another, even though it does become differentiated into relations to living beings and relations to things, inanimate in nature. In other words, in the beginning one’s mother is, literally, the whole world.’ P134

This transfiguration[1] of the object occurs in the light of ones dreams. There is no sharp line between daylight and darkness, there is only twilight and it is within this twilight of dream, memory and desire, where the search usually occurs. This underpins self-awareness and the photographer’s ability to bridge this gap, often with symbols.

As Milner states:

‘It is a tendency of the mind to make broad distinctions, to split problems viewed into two extremes, and that this splitting is necessary. Certainly one has to make the distinction between dreams and reality, for instance, or between outside and inside, body and mind, doing and thinking. But having done that it is necessary to bring the two halves together again, in a complex rhythmic interplay and exchange,’ p100

The placating of ones external reality and its reconciliation with ones internal experience has becomes my main preoccupation through my work in both image production and therapy. This discrepancy between what was seen and what was felt, this belief in the distorted view of the outside world, has become an incalculable feat to bridge, certainly just in a purely verbal sense.

The inner dream and memory is continually tested and compared with the experience of external reality. There seems great difficulty in these two worlds meeting; there is, perhaps, a profound fear of something being lost in the process. However, this process of loss is indeed of value, in the hope that a gain will be made during this experience.

Often the inner tension and frustrations can be intolerable in this situation. Perhaps it would be better to retreat to defence mechanisms after all, living things go on behaving as they behaved in the past. The capacity to change through production of photography, however, offers us an exciting new experience. As we produce work we break away from the reparation of routine hoping to perhaps ‘bump into’ the self. Using intuition, I am looking to plunge into the unknown. Similar to the delight we experience as children drawing, although this is not so much a plunge, ‘it delights children because they are used to this visual representation of communication’. p113 This underpinning of intuitively imagined ideas are how judgements are made in scientific theory of course. Starting initially with intuition, and then developed by logic. There seems little recognition of the documentation of this process within art, of lived experience combined with logical thought.

In Kleinian theory and as a way of restoring the split and bringing the subject and object together in a new kind of unity, is explained through her theories of the Paranoid Schizoid position to Depressive Position.[2] Through the revisiting of this theory and through the concept of projective identification[3], another Kleinian theory, artist’s can construct a new reality. But how can this enquiry into psychic creativeness be discussed? Perhaps the issue is the ability to make a symbol. As art is, as Marion Milner states ‘the capacity for making a symbol.’ p173 Ultimately the capacity for that symbol to be communicable to others, ‘thus creativeness in the arts is making a symbol for feeling, and creativeness in science is making a symbol for knowing. P173 Photography can be a way of creating symbols dreamed up in the internal world and through photography, make it an object in the world of reality. Just as a client, in the therapeutic session, has to communicate his feelings through, words, can photography use symbols to make the unknowable, real and knowable?

The Return of the Lost Object.

The function of this ‘psyche-photography’, can be seen as being the recreation or restoration of the lost object and well as its creation, through the re-enactment of the transition to the Depressive Position over and over again. The family album can also be seen as a way of this restoration. ‘In psychoanalytical terms this process of seeking to preserve these experiences and can certainly be described in terms of the unconscious, as “an attempt to preserve, recreate, restore the lost object; or rather, the lost relation with the object conceived of in terms of the object”’ p187

As children we are encouraged to daydream, play, invent and live in fantasy. This is our way of believing in the world and finding our place in it. We become lost in these worlds. As in therapy, we attempt to distinguish between the ‘me’ and ‘not me’, we replay our inner world, to distinguish between our own and perhaps our ‘others’ problems.

The importance of this process is the return of the lost object that this photographer re-creates. As with a patient, in the therapeutic space, or as Marion Milner puts it, ‘I think the essential point is the new thing that has been created, this new bit of the external world that he has made significant and “real”, through endowing it with form’. The photographic unmasking of these old symbols and the making of new ones, the continuous process of destroying and remaking and the constant integration of the exterior world with that of ones interior, is new knowledge.

There are, of course, two sets of happenings, in this dyad of communication, that of the producer and that of the viewer. During her production, Marion Milner writes of the interplay between the two partners, the partners of imagination and action, of dream and reality. But what of the viewer?

‘Such a setting, in which it is safe to divulge in reverie, is provided for the patient in analysis, and painting likewise provides such a setting. Both for the painter of the picture and for the person who looks art it’ p193

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[1] a large change in appearance or form; a metamorphosis

[2] Melanie Klein describes the earliest stages of infantile psychic life in terms of a successful completion of development through certain positions. There are two major positions: the paranoid-schizoid position and the depressive position. The earlier more primitive position is the paranoid-schizoid position and if an individual's environment and up-bringing are satisfactory, she or he will progress through the depressive position.

[3] Projective Identification (or PI) is a term first introduced by Melanie Klein of the object relations school of psychoanalytic thought in 1946. It is a concept 'more and more referred to in psychodynamic work', especially in circumstances 'where A experiences feelings that belong to B but that B is unable to access; and instead "projects" them into (not just onto) A'.[1]

Projective identification thus designates a psychological process in which a person engages in the ego defense mechanism projection in such a way that their behavior towards the object of projection invokes in that person precisely the thoughts, feelings or behaviors projected. It has become accepted that 'Projective identification may unconsciously aim to get rid of unmanageable feelings but it also serves to get help with feelings'.