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Christopher Bollas opened the reading of his essay this evening with a dedication to Marion Milner, just recently deceased.
Bollas invites us to ponder the impact of what he considers to be Freud's greatest accomplishment, the introduction of the method of free association. We experience proximity with aesthetic struggle and expression of individual artists, as Bollas credits Freud's free-associative method for inspiring an extremely intense period in Western fine arts. The impact on writing, music, and particularly in visual arts in surrealism, cubism, and abstract expressionism, is examined by Bollas in such a way as to open the path for our consideration of the psychoanalytical process as a creative form in its own right.
Bollas brings us viscerally right into the painting process, providing examples of Kandinsky with his visions and revisions, and that of De Kooning, who emphasized keeping the paint alive until the last possible moment of painting. Tensions between awareness of the process and the losing of one's self in the process are presented as essential to both art and psychoanalytical process.
Emotions are conceived by Bollas in the fullest sense, as “psychical states rising out of all of the ingredients that go into human experience: instincts, memories, evocative objects, etc.” He encourages our further analogous consideration of aesthetic and psychoanalytical experience as he describes the struggle of the painter Francis Bacon with the object or figure. Emotions, articulated by Bollas, are “thick meetings between inner interests and circumstances.” “No two emotions are alike, and each emotion changes the contents of the internal canvas.” An aesthetic experience is seen as an encounter with object and form, central as well to the vitality of psychoanalytical process. Features such as revisional processes, accidents, and the intrinsic integrity of form are dynamic workings of each art analysis. Forms of expression are seen to have their own laws. Bollas ent