What the artwork wants: thoughts for, against and around interpretation in art and psychoanalysis

Dear Laura,
I have taken the liberty to interrupt your letter. Forgive me for breaking into the flow of your thoughts. When you write to me, are you also writing to yourself? A letter is often designed to elicit a response (it is a demand): identification, sympathy, recognition, money … I have just watched Max Ophul’s film with Joan Fontaine, based on a short story by Stefan Zweig: In Letter from an Unknown Woman, the dashing hero receives a letter from a woman he does not remember, and yet he has fathered her child. Letters are much on my mind. As your supervisor, my role is to give you a response, one that recognises you and then either validates or criticises your research (which is offered to me as an obligation); you would then do a little more reading, a bit more looking (I would hope), and some rewriting (if not at once, then later, say, in four years time). As your supervisor, I am supposed to know more than you; I am the one supposed to know and that phrase will resonate for you, won’t it? We can say it in French: sujet supposé savoir. We can say it in Lacanese, too: the supposed subject of knowledge, and Jacques Lacan himself will say: ‘As soon as the subject who is supposed to know exists somewhere there is transference.’ If this were a conference paper, rather than a letter, I should cite the source, shouldn’t I? But this, my dear Laura, is a letter, a letter, shall we say, about knowledge and transference. It is even a letter about letters. When Freud writes his letter to Rolland in 1936, it is an open letter, a letter to salute Rolland on the occasion of his seventieth birthday. It is a letter he was reluctant to write. On 6th January 1936, Freud writes to Victor Wittowski, in reply to the suggestion that he writes something for the seventieth birthday of Roman Rolland. He says he will be eighty. He would like to give, of course, but he has nothing to give. Producing something new for the occasion, well, that will not be forthcoming at his time of life, no, not for him. The previous year he wrote something that would have interested Rolland, but it had a defect, which prevented its publication. His ability to produce has dried up since then, and it is probably too late now to revive it. It is easier for him to refuse, as there is a constraint on what he may write: any reference to politics must be excluded. If he were to write, then evidently he would have wanted to praise Rolland’s courage of conviction, his tolerance and love of truth, and so no, he will not write under this paralysing restriction, no, he could not do anything, even if he were in his prime. On 29th January, he informs Wittowski, he will write a few affectionate lines to Rolland, now that he knows the date of his friend’s birthday. When I write to you, will you take these as affectionate lines? I would like to give, myself, but what do I have to give, except myself? And of course, as analyst or supervisor (and I would add, as work of art), that is a gift that is not on offer, though you must continue to believe in its possibility for a while.

The analyst’s role, despite anything received opinion and the movies tell us, is to listen to the analysand. The analysand speaks or stumbles over speech or is completely silent, and the analyst must be attentive to the words, ruptured, stammering, choked out in tears, tumbling out of the mouth, and to the moments when words fail. The analyst plays another role simultaneously, that of intervention in the speech of the analysand. While the intervention may take many forms, appear as no more than the lighting of a cigarette, a cough, or the notorious ‘hmm’ of the analyst (which at least reassures that the analyst is awake), it is more usually considered to take the form of an interpretation. An analytic interpretation is the offering of something that breaks into the conscious discourse of the analysand, and which has an effect on that discourse at the level of the unconscious. An interpretation makes unconscious thoughts become conscious, recognised, and articulates something repressed from memory. An interpretation in this sense brings to light what has been left out of the analysand’s account of events; it displays the symptom – ‘dreams, slips of the tongue and flashes of wit (…) are structurally identical with symptoms.’ The display of the symptom and its further articulation results in a cure. This is how Freud starts and if it seems simple enough, it still has an effect (though its effects wear off, as analysts, including Freud, began quite soon to notice). I may have to break off for a moment, to have a little cigarette.

Yes, indeed, dear Laura, I am delighted to see you have done your homework, and must thank you for your diligent production. No doubt, you will feel I am never grateful enough for the gifts you bring me. You will remember when I took on the role of your supervisor- when I agreed to fulfill that function (for I am not a personage but a function), I told you to go into analysis. I felt that you would not be able to write – even think – about your enquiry if you did not understand the situation. You know, anything can be an interpretation, if we do not dwell too much on the uncovering of hidden meanings, if we do not insist upon a premature symbolisation. As your supervisor, and not your analyst (though the same would apply if I were) I can say anything, anything at all, and whatever I say, however banal, however stupid (and I am often banal and stupid) will have affect, precisely because of our relationship and what you invest in my function. What I say will disrupt meaning. You will nod, as though what I say makes sense, but it does its work – if it works – in the non-sense it produces. You will feel, no doubt, that you have not made your point, which will leave you in doubt, in anxiety. Or that I am wilfully missing it, as I ask you to produce yet more associations, and you will be irritated, frustrated. You will wonder why I persist in refusing to understand you. Am I even listening to you? Another cigarette, I think.

In writing to me of your dream, you make another gift, and I should ask you more, to keep you writing and writing well. I have to read you as a text, of course, but I also must forget what I know at times, and resist the impulse to be smarter than you, more of a doctor, so to speak. You do not know what you know yet, but you are the only one who does know. And you also know that it is a repressed wish or desire that instigates your dream thought. You have dreamt, but do not know the meaning of your dream and I – or whomever you put in my place – will talk your dream back to you. I could give an excellent interpretive performance, but until the moment you understand it yourself, my interpretation, however convincing, however expert, would have no effect at all. I think we are about to move on to the work of art, no? Well, the situation may not be so very different.

Shall we agree that it is a mistake to offer an interpretation too soon, to hasten to symbolise (as Lacan criticises Melanie Klein for doing in her analysis of little Dick) in a psychoanalytic encounter? Let us consider this in the encounter with the work of art. The work of art is singularly mute, even when it is quite noisy. It may appear to be saying something, but what? Wherever there is a gap, one hysterically seeks to fill it – Freud calls these false connections, a way of making sense when there is no sense. Where else does one look for sense, for meaning, when one cannot find it at hand in the work?

Moreover, it is also a refusal to leave the artist out of it, while the artist really should disappear. However, we do so like the artist to be there, as a personage, that is, not a function. We like a nice critical review as well. In addition, we do not accept either as expert, should we disagree. I remember, if you will forgive me being anecdotal, a conference in which the keynote speaker gave an erudite and convincing paper on the work of a great British artist, and the somewhat self-congratulatory response from an academic in the audience (who had earlier in the day given a paper on Proust, I think). He sat back, folded his arms, and remarked that although he had not seen the work under discussion, save in the form of slides in the paper, it certainly had not provoked the response in him the speaker appeared to be proposing. The work, the artist too, failed in what he supposed was its endeavor. He challenged it to do its stuff and found it sadly wanting, like much of contemporary art. He assumed that it should follow form, perform, and if it did not, well, it was to blame.

Yes, dear Laura, yes.

Despite increasingly longer catalogue essay, works of art do not depend on what one has to say about them (as Freud accepts). Yet, paradoxically, in order to be works of art they can exist only in a world already structured by language in a network of social relations that contains the concept of such enigmatic things as works of art. In this sense, if the work of art touches something that persists as untransformed by language, the impossible in the chain of words, the work also produces something beyond the symbolic order, which is formed by the symbolic itself, as a result of it.

If I may return to an analytic model, deflecting the encounters you raise above, if the work of art is treated as a symptom of its maker, then it is indeed possible to say something about the psychology of the artist. If something may be said about that, one can position oneself as a viewer in a relationship of recognition or identification with the symptom, a symptom gratifyingly shared. In this way, psychoanalysis would function as a metadiscourse, holding the key with which to open the undisclosed secret of another human being. Its general theory could be applied in any place, at any time, to any (art) object. ‘Aha,’ one might exclaim with confidence, ‘I spot an unresolved Oedipus complex in Simon Morris’ reconstruction of a work by Ed Ruscha.’ One could make a fairly decent living at it, applying psychoanalytic theory in the field of art criticism, as long as one forgets that works of art do not lie down on the couch, even when their makers do.

From the place of a viewer turned wild analyst, unhesitatingly launching into his own venture, refusing or unable to recognise ‘his own raison d’être in the disorder he denounces in the world’, it will remain only to make an interpretation.

Best wishes, as ever,

Sharon

P.S. This interpretation may be a creative act, a construction of a new work founded on the experience of an ‘original’ – an act of translation in the best of senses. The hallmark of bad translations, according to Walter Benjamin, is that they transmit only information, or inessential content, somewhat like airport novels, whose real intention is the tedious accuracy of the account of the functioning of their standard locations, showing that the writer has done his or her research. Benjamin says that the consideration of the reader is misleading – that art is not concerned with his/her response. Although the work of art may not care about that, any analysis of a work is fundamentally engaged with the nature of its reception. The sign of a bad viewer (or reader or PhD student) is his or her constant demand for facts, for useful information, unaware that this may be quite unnecessary. However, even in a bad translation something is communicated or integrated, just as a wild analysis may achieve some punctuation in the analysand’s speech, in the immediate communication of an apparently satisfactory explanation of the significations s/he has expressed. This occurs to the plagiaristic patient of Kris, as you know. It is good, I think, to be without a compass from time to time – and to consider, that in an analysis what occurs in the encounter must be taken as the compass with which to guide the treatment.