Full text unavailable

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.

PSAR 62(1):5-28 (1975)

Giving New Depth To The Surface: Psychoanalysis, Literature, And Society*

Author: Jim Swan

Abstract

Observations of problems to do with painting had all led up to the idea that awareness of the external world is itself a creative process, an immensely complex creative interchange between what comes from inside and what comes from outside, a complex alternation of fusing and separating. But since the fusing stage is, to the intellectual mind, a stage of illusion, intoxication, transfiguration, it is one that is not so easily allowed for in an age and civilization where matter-of-factness, the keeping of oneself apart from what one looks at, has become all-important.
—Marion Milner8

The general problem raised by a psychoanalytic interpretation of texts can be stated most clearly as a paradox. Along with Marx and Nietzsche, Freud belongs to a “school of suspicion” (Paul Ricoeur). That is, for the psychoanalytic interpreter the text is always a pretext for motives and meanings which it conceals. But, at the same time, the text is the only form in which these particular motives and meanings are realized and, with interpretation, revealed. Thus, concealment and revelation, masking and showing, are dialectical versions of each other. Ricoeur puts it this way:

Psychoanalysis thus invites us to move from a first purely reductive reading to a second reading of cultural phenomena. The task of the second reading is not so much to unmask the repressed and the agency of repression in order to show what lies behind the masks, as to set free the interplay of references between signs. … The only thing that gives a presence to the artist's fantasies is the work of
* This is a shorter and somewhat revised version of a paper first presented to the seminar on creativity led by Rolf Arvidson of the Boston Psychoanalytic Institute in June 1973.
Page 5
art; and the reality thus conferred upon them is the reality of the work of art itself within a world of culture.”10a

In effect, Ricour resolves the problem by turning it inside out. Meaning is not so much something hidden and in need of discovery as it

PSAR 62(1):5-28 (1975)

Giving New Depth To The Surface: Psychoanalysis, Literature, And Society*

Author: Jim Swan

Abstract

Observations of problems to do with painting had all led up to the idea that awareness of the external world is itself a creative process, an immensely complex creative interchange between what comes from inside and what comes from outside, a complex alternation of fusing and separating. But since the fusing stage is, to the intellectual mind, a stage of illusion, intoxication, transfiguration, it is one that is not so easily allowed for in an age and civilization where matter-of-factness, the keeping of oneself apart from what one looks at, has become all-important.
—Marion Milner8

Psychoanalysis thus invites us to move from a first purely reductive reading to a second reading of cultural phenomena. The task of the second reading is not so much to unmask the repressed and the agency of repression in order to show what lies behind the masks, as to set free the interplay of references between signs. … The only thing that gives a presence to the artist's fantasies is the work of
* This is a shorter and somewhat revised version of a paper first presented to the seminar on creativity led by Rolf Arvidson of the Boston Psychoanalytic Institute in June 1973.
Page 5
art; and the reality thus conferred upon them is the reality of the work of art itself within a world of culture.”10a

In effect, Ricour resolves the problem by turning it inside out. Meaning is not so much something hidden and in need of discovery as it