Art, Affect and Aesthetics

In this unusual panel event, the artist and psychoanalyst, Desy Safán-Gerard, made a dual presentation consisting of a kind of aesthetic autobiography of the evolution of her own work, shown by photographic slides, accompanied by a broader theory of artistic creation. A native of Chile, Safán-Gerard returned to her homeland with a moving account of her psychic struggles with separation and loss that she expressed through her paintings, as she has come to interpret them through a theoretical framework owing much to Klein and Bion. The result was a complex amalgam of (mostly non-representational) images, self-revelation and highly abstract formulations of the conditions of creativity. The two discussants, Alain Gibeault and Gilbert Rose, picked up the theme of the psychic processes implicit in the creation of works of art, while distancing themselves from any attempt to interpret their specific psychological meanings. Safán-Gerard then replied to these remarks with a prepared text.

Safán-Gerard stressed mainly the destructiveness inherent in creativity and the reparative efforts associated with it. Attributing the earliest psychoanalytic appreciation of the importance of destructive wishes in the creative process to Sabina Spielrein's paper ‘Destruction as the cause of coming into being’ (1912; ‘Die Destruktion als Ursache des Werdens’. Jahrbuch fürpsychoanalytische undpsychopathologische Forschungen, 4: 465-503), she elaborated on two types of destructiveness. In Spielrein's model, destruction is directed at an unsatisfactory object in order to create something new, analogous to Winnicott's concept of ‘ruthlessness’ in the service of development. In the Kleinian version, the ‘pristine canvas’ may stir up envious fantasies of attacking and annihilating the good object, traces of which become part of the painting and in turn promote guilt and reparative efforts. In this regard, early fantasies about the maternal breast and its contents hold a central importance for Safá