You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
Pirkko Siltala's paper on Frida Kahlo and her paintings is, to borrow from the title of an abstract painting by Marion Milner, “a thought too big for its concept”. Siltala has presented us with an inter-textual dialogue bursting at the seams with fascinating information, rich observation and a host of psychoanalytic formulations concerning Frida and her art. Yet Siltala says it is a “limited defective incomplete” paper. She ends the paper with Frida's life and her art cracked wide open. The reader must “correct and supplement” it. But can psychoanalytic understanding of a life evolve in any place other than within the confines of our consulting rooms, our safe intersubjective laboratory where we can test the accuracy or inaccuracy of our understanding? Can transference and countertransference, so essential in the psychoanalytic endeavor, ever live and breathe outside of our clinical laboratory? Is “applying” psychoanalysis to Frida Kahlo and her life cracking the conceptual limits of psychoanalysis?
I believe that the value of Siltala's paper rests in the very fact that it is a thought too big for its concept. Siltala had something more in mind than merely “applying” psychoanalysis to Kahlo's life and art. For me, her paper and her subject affirm the utter necessity of our continual bursting, sometimes leaking, sometimes even dancing through conceptual seams. Siltala is encouraging psychoanalysis to look at Frida Kahlo, this often bedridden, often plaster-cast- entombed “self creating” woman who refused “to stay within the lines” in her life, her politics, and her art. Her life is fundamentally about the refusal to stay confined. Are there lessons here for psychoanalysis? I think so. Psychoanalysis, if it is to survive in the next millennium, must always be going beyond its boundaries, bursting out of its conceptual clothing, daring to bridge and then to co-mingle with the full range of arts and sciences, not only to enhance them, but for them to enliven, and enhance