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Talks on psychoanalysis, shares topics published in the IPA Society journals and Congress debates worldwide, brought to you in the voices of the original authors. We hope this window will allow you to experience the depth and breadth of psychoanalytic thought around the world. I am Gaetano Pellegrini and in this episode we will listen to Michael Parsons on the relation between psychoanalysis and visual arts, literature and music. He draws on his two books, quoting passages from them, and develops some further ideas relating to this theme. Michael Parsons is a training analyst of the British Psychoanalytical Society and a member of the French Psychoanalytic Association. After a degree in classical literature, ancient history and philosophy, he became a doctor and specialized in psychiatry. He trained as an analyst at the Institute of Psychoanalysis in London and worked for 30 years in full time private analytic practice. He has a particular interest in connection between psychoanalysis and other fields such as art, literature, and religion. He is the author of two the Dove that Returns, the Dove that Vanishes, Paradox and Creativity in Psychoanalysis, published by Rutledge in 2000, and leaving psychoanalysis From Theory to Experience, published by Rutledge in 2014. He is also co editor of the Collected Papers of Enid Balind under the title Before I Was Psychoanalysis and the Imagination, published by free association in 1993. Please visit the details of this episode to find a link to his article and to stay informed about the latest podcast releases. Please sign up today.

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Psychoanalysis and ART It's Thursday, September 5, 1901. For years Freud has been trying to visit Rome, but something has always got in the way. Now he's finally managed it, and on his fourth day there he is, gazing at Michelangelo's statue of Moses in the church of San Pietro in Vincoli. Twelve years later he will write a paper about it, which begins with a confession of his difficulty in appreciating works of art. He is more interested in their subject matter, he says, than in their artistic qualities. He can only enjoy them if he can find an explanation in his own terms for his response to them. He asks, somewhat plaintively, why should the artist's intention not be capable of being communicated and comprehended in words, like any other fact of mental life? To discover the artist's intention, he says, I must first find out the meaning and content of what is represented in the work. I must, in other words, be able to interpret it. However, there is no denying the effect on him that works of art do have. He found the Moses inscrutable, his word, but then writes, no piece of statuary has ever made A stronger impression on me than this. How often have I mounted the steep steps from the unlovely Corso Cavour to the lonely piazza where the deserted church stands and have essayed to support the angry scorn of the hero's glance. Sometimes I have crept cautiously out of the half gloom of the interior, as though I my belonged to the mob upon whom his eye is turned. The mob which can hold fast to no conviction, which has neither faith nor patience, and which rejoices when it has regained its illusory idols. This highly colored writing and deliberate self mockery is Freud's way of dealing with an intellectual bewilderment that he found uncomfortable. Freud was in fact very sensitive to art. The effect on him of the Moses is enough to show that we might also remember him calling Dostoevsky's the Brothers Karamazov the most magnificent novel ever written. Immediately after saying that, however, Freud attacked Dostoevsky for a narrow nationalism and submissiveness to the authority of state and church. Quote, Dostoevsky threw away the chance of becoming a teacher and liberator of humanity and made himself one with their jailers. The future of human civilization will have little to thank him for. End of quote. As a gift to humanity. The most magnificent novel ever written does not seem in Freud's mind to be worth much. He did admire it, but his admiration is distinctly two edged. It prompted him to write, before the problem of the creative artist, analysis must, alas, lay down its arms. So artistic creativity is a problem that's interesting. And then the metaphor of laying down arms implies a state of war between psychoanalysis and art. I wonder if Freud had the same ambivalence about art that he did about philosophy. He believed passionately in an empiricist scientific ideology. Its rationalistic positivism was his intellectual template, but this was in conflict with another side of his character. In 1896 he wrote to Fleece, as a young man I knew no longing other than for philosophical knowledge. He deliberately inhibited this. However, Ernest Jones once asked him how much philosophy he had read and Freud replied very little. As a young man I felt a strong attraction towards speculation and ruthlessly checked it. I wonder if the non rational aspect of artistic creativity disturbed him in the same way and made him want to constrain it within the sort of rational understanding he could regard as scientific. Soon after his experience with Michelangelo's Moses, he wrote a paper, the Unconscious, in which he discusses what he calls thing presentations and word presentations. Thing presentations consist simply of remote memory traces. Word presentations consist of Thing presentations with the addition of words to refer to them. Only if something is available as a word presentation, said Freud, can it become conscious and be thought about. As he wrote about the Moses, he needs things to be put into words so he can interpret them. But works of art are things, not words. Even when made out of words, they are still things. This was brought home to me vividly when I met the author of a remarkable novel, acclaimed for the quality of its writing and its portrayal of character. Having been intensely moved by the book, I was interested to ask the author about the experience of writing it. He was happy to talk, but what he had to say seemed to me banal compared to the power of the novel itself. I had expected something more profound and was disappointed until I reflected that the profundity was, of course, in the work of art. This particular work had been created out of words, but that did not mean the artist should be expected to use words profoundly about it, any more than we expect painters, sculptors or composers to explain their work in words. The intention of the artist is a fact of mental life, which, despite Freud, is not susceptible of being fully represented or interpret it in words. It resides in the work itself. Freud struggled with the idea of artistic meaning. His solution was to attend to the content of an artwork and give it a meaning which would go into words, but to ignore the form of the work because he could not do that with it. The result is what happens in his paper about the Moses. There is an ingenious interpretation of what is going on at the snapshot moment pictured by the statue, but this says nothing about the statue's artistic impact. It's clear in the paper that Freud identified himself with Moses, and there is a letter to Firenze showing he was aware of this. He ignores the question, however, of why the statue had the overwhelming effect on him that it did. Freud is doing the same thing with Michelangelo's Moses as he had done with King Lear a year earlier. In the theme of the Three caskets, Freud ranges there through various myths and works of literature, which contain the recurrent motif of a fateful choice between three objects or three people. He arrives finally at King Lear and his three daughters. In Freud's theory, the third element in this motif always represents death. In King Lear, the third daughter is Cordelia, and according to Freud, Lear's rejection of Cordelia shows an old man refusing to accept the inevitability of his death. For Freud, that is the underlying meaning of the play. And once you have understood this, you know what the play is about, really does this explain the overwhelming tragic impact that King Lear makes on an audience once the meaning of Michelangelo's Moses is discovered to be the hero, restraining his anger so as not to destroy the tablets of the law? Does this account for what happened to Freud and the Corso Cavour? Ernest Jones does something similar with Hamlet. Hamlet's uncle Claudius has murdered Hamlet's father and gone on to marry Hamlet's mother. Hamlet resolves to kill his uncle in revenge, but keeps delaying and never acts on his decision. Jones explains this by saying that Claudius has enacted Hamlet's unconscious Oedipal wish to kill his father himself and marry his own mother. It's Hamlet's unconscious identification with Claudius that prevents him killing him. For Jones, as for Freud with King Lear, to understand this is to understand the meaning of the play. This approach treats a work of art in the same way as Freud treated dreams. What matters is the unconscious wish or intention behind the dream. This has to be discovered and elucidated in a verbal interpretation. Once that's done, the dream itself, which both concealed and conveyed the unconscious intention, has served its purpose. To take the same approach to art as Freud does implies that once the artist's intention behind the work has been understood, put into words and interpreted, the work of art itself becomes superfluous. The obvious absurdity of this shows there is something wrong with treating a work of art like a patient on the couch, whose unknown, hidden intentions have to be brought to light and interpreted. We need a different kind of psychoanalytic relation to works of art. This may involve giving up familiar ways of thinking. We might, for example, have to abandon thinking of characters in a play as individuals. Psychoanalysis is interested in emotional conflicts and intrapsychic organization. If we think of a play as a totality, the characters may best be understood not as individual people distinct from each other, but as particles of an organic whole, one that represents and explores in dramatic terms multiple aspects of a state of mind. Aeschyla Sagamemnon, for example, is permeated with a grotesque, perverse sensuality. It would be a mistake to try to analyze the individual characters as though they each had an intrapsychic structure of their own. Rather, they are elements in a perverse emotional organization, which is the psychic reality of the play as a whole. Agamemnon is the first play in the Oresteia trilogy. The two subsequent plays trace the evolution not of the individual characters, but of this kind of emotional organization towards something very different from its starting point in the Agamemnon. Here's Another way of approaching art from a psychoanalytic perspective, the most important thing analysts do is to listen. Instead of using psychoanalysis to explain a work of art, we could try using it to listen to a work of art. Take poetry, for example. As we try to understand a poem, there comes a point when going on studying the words on the page takes us no further. We have to allow the poem to get inside us and see what happens when we do that. This is what analysts do with the words and silences of their patients. Seamus Heaney describes how he set out to study T.S. eliot's the Waste Land using academic commentaries, but found they didn't help much. Then, in some of Eliot's own writing about poetry, he saw a poet's intelligence exercising itself in the activity of listening. This freed Heaney simply to listen to the poem, making himself, as he put it, an echo chamber for the poem's sounds. He writes in the heft and largesse of the poem's music. I thought I defined an aural equivalent of the larger transcendental reality. The breath of life was in the body of sound. Heaney was a poet, not an analyst. But there is a psychoanalytic quality to the way he listens, both to the poem and to the effect its music has on him. What about actual music? Could we listen to a symphony or a piano sonata with the same sort of receptivity that Heaney brought to the wasteland? This would mean not trying to understand psychoanalytically why a composer wrote the music as they did. Plenty of analysts have done that, but instead letting the music help us to listen more psychoanalytically. In a Bach fugue, for example, the different voices are always finding new ways of relating to each other. It would be interesting to take, say, one of the 48 fugues in the well Tempered Clavier and listen to it over and over again, not studying it theoretically, but simply listening. Gradually, over time, one might hear more and more of how sometimes here, sometimes there, the different voices join and separate, respond and harmonize, or play against each other, and slowly one would pick up more of what is going on between them. Overall, this is the same kind of listening, receptive but alert, that lets an analyst gradually learn to hear the different voices that go on in a patient's internal world and pick up the changing ways that they relate to each other. One can look at a painting with the same kind of contemplative receptivity, Vermeer's painting, the Kitchen Maid in Amsterdam's Rijksmuseum is famous. One could study it endlessly from an art historical point of view. Alternatively, one might simply look at it and look again and again. It shows a maid servant pouring milk from a large jug into a bowl. She appears motionless, with the angle of her body in perfect equilibrium with the weight of the jug. The milk flows out of the jug, but Vermeer paints it in sharp focus, defining it with a clarity that seems to immobilize it. Behind the maid there is a wall whose emptiness allows no distraction from her absolute absorption in the moment. Nothing is moving or seems to need to move. The painting radiates an extraordinary stillness, the stillness of time suspended. But the milk is flowing, and soon the maid will have to tip the jug further or put it down. The family that she serves may be waiting for its breakfast. The flow of thyme, like the flow of milk, cannot be ignored. On a table there is some bread painted with a perfection of detail that gives it, like the milk, a suspended existence. But this bread is going to be eaten. Marks on the wall behind the maid show where objects have been hung on, has been made use of. It has a history. The viewer contemplating this painting in the way I suggested listening to a Bach fugue, may gradually register that Vermeer positions the maid at the intersection between the timelessness of the susp moment and its location in a continuing story that has a past and a future. The analytic setting lifts the session out of ordinary time. It is a suspended moment where the timelessness of the unconscious can reveal itself. It is also part of the patient's ongoing life, which has a past that the session examines and a future that it hopes to make a difference to. Contemplating Vermeer's Kitchen Maid, without seeking to explain her, but with the peaceful alertness I am trying to describe, turns out to be a surprisingly psychoanalytic experience. The sort of contemplative receptivity I'm talking about also appears in an extraordinary piece of film footage. Interestingly, it brings us back to the Moses of Michelangelo and a very different kind of encounter with the statue from Freud's. At the age of 92, the Italian director Michelangelo Antonioni made a short film, less than 20 minutes long, that shows himself looking at the sculptures in San Pietro in Vincoli and always coming back to the Moses which is his constant focus. There are no words. We see Antonioni enter the church at the beginning, we see him leave it at the end. In between, the film consists simply of him looking at the Moses, but how he looks at it, that is the point of the film. He stands in front of it, motionless, and watches it. He moves around it, observing its details from every angle. There is a passionate receptivity in this old man's gaze. As though he wants to let the statue make the deepest impression on him possible. It's very reminiscent of the relaxed intensity of a psychoanalyst's listening. The soundtrack is virtually silent. So when footsteps and other small sounds occasionally break the silence. One finds oneself, in fact, listening to them in the same way. The title of the film is Los guardo di Michelangelo. The gaze of Michelangelo. This is splendidly ambiguous. Which Michelangelo? Buonarroti or Antonioni? Who is gazing at whom? Patient and analyst, in their different ways. Ask themselves the same question. Both, of course, the two Michelangelos are gazing at each other. This is the last footage Antonioni ever shot. He died two years later. One of the tasks of analysis is to help patients confront the inevitability of their death. And the closing sequence of the film shows, unmistakably. That as well as the Moses, Antonioni is also gazing at his death. The film has been a moment suspended in time. And it's coming to an end. We, as viewers of the film, no longer see the statue. We watch the viewer in the film leaving and taking his experience with him. But the way this man in his 90s. Walks down a corridor of light. Coming through the doorway. And out into a beyond that we cannot see. Says much to analysts about what they hope their patients will take with them. When they leave the consulting room for the last time.