The “In Depth” program on “Dreams and Art,” underwritten by the Lucy Daniels Foundation, filled the Grand Ballroom of the Hilton Hotel during the Fall Meeting in New York. Portions of the panel, which was designed for the general public, were later broadcast by National Public Radio.
Lynn Gamwell, Director of the Art Museum at the State University of New York, Binghamton, opened the panel's theme with a broad overview of the history of dreams and their impact on art. Attempting to understand dreams was almost forced upon Freud as his patients insistently told him their dreams. The visual imagery of the dreams, coupled with the patient's associations, enabled Freud to formulate his monumental theories of dreams as unconscious wish fulfillment. The rest is well-known history. Gamwell added that Freud developed an aesthetic rhetoric of the unconscious based on his dream theories.
Gamwell, who curated the December 1999 retrospective “Dreams 1900–2000,” displayed at the New York Equitable Gallery, provided a brief sampling of the show with slides of some of the paintings and photographs. Psychoanalytic theories of dreams almost immediately became very influential in twentieth-century visual art. The major themes before World War I, which also persisted beyond that world cataclysm, were dreams as secular images of the unconscious.
As the century progressed, figurative painting radically changed, led by Picasso's and Braque's experimental analytic cubism. Braque's painting Femme à la Guitare (1913), with its tilted planes, offers a glimpse into the dark, dense interior unconscious mind of the sitter.
Psychoanalysis also had a profound influence on the surrealists. Max Ernst's 1920 collage L'Ascenseur Somnabule suggests the mental state of a sleepwalker with an unlikely combination of medical and mechanical images that is shocking and almost bizarre.
Lucy Daniels, writer and psychotherapist, in a searing personal narrative, described her desert-like wanderings after publishing an honored first novel followed by a long barren period of writer's block. She was able to reach the promised land of the writer after a long therapeutic psychoanalysis. Central to the process, Daniels believes, has been the analysis of her dreams. “Indeed dreams have been the crucial, revelatory keys to awareness and pursuit of freedom every step of the way,” she said.
Photo by William D. Jeffrey
Daniels' first published novel, Caleb My Son, won a Guggenheim fellowship in literature. Her Guggenheim project, a second novel, High on a Hill, did not become a best-seller, and that was devastating. After the birth of her third child when she was only twenty-nine, Daniels declared to herself that she was not a writer after all. Depressed, disappointed, and divorced, Daniels returned to school, completed her doctorate in clinical psychology, and undertook her analysis.
During her analysis, Daniels expanded the widely held theory of writer's block. She found that writing blocks occur when there is any “unconscious conflict which interferes with a writer's capacity to write effectively and continuously or to accept writing that he or she does do.” Such conflicts impair the writer's ability to symbolize, which is at the heart of transforming personal experience into a more universal experience.
In her talk, Daniels cited several of her dreams and the analysis of them that helped resolve her block. One striking example was a dream in which Daniels was on her analysts couch, with her right hand in a cast. The cast was responsible for the good feeling all over her body. “So there I was feeling good about myself due to being a crippled writer.”
With understandings such as these, Daniels has been enabled to complete a yet-unpublished personal memoir and has begun writing her third novel, the first in thirty-eight years. She has regained her conviction that she indeed is a writer.
Out of gratitude to her analyst who worked with her to regain this artistic identity, Daniels established the Lucy Daniels Foundation to help other blocked artists find freedom. The three panelists of the morning—painter Gayle Lowry, sculptor Sherrod Duggan, and pianist and composer Tom Mann— are all alumni of Daniels' programs. Each has also been in a therapeutic psychoanalysis or psychotherapy. All have changed profoundly.
The double childhood trauma of her father's early death when she was eight and her mother's retreat into grief left Gayle Stott Lowry believing that she had been abandoned and rendered invisible. This instigated her search to be acknowledged and confirmed.
Early on, she realized that painting and drawing provided a way for her to escape the pain and problems of her life. She found a way to become vocal and visible. As a child she drew pictures of what she saw around her. As an adult she painted beautiful, serene landscapes, a sustaining activity that grounded her.
For fifteen years this solution worked. But after the failure of a second marriage six years ago, she was forced to confront her anger, pain, and isolation. In her search for healing, she turned to the Lucy Daniels Foundation, learning about its techniques developed for creative artists. Her paintings began to change. The serene mood of her landscapes receded in the face of her painful emotions. She began using a more gestural technique to capture these strong feelings. Facing the childhood trauma now with a greater sense of mastery, she could recapture the childhood feelings in her art. A slide illustrated a dark interior dominated by a red chair. Retrospectively, Lowry recognized the chair as a condensation of her therapist's chair and the red leather chair her father sat in most evenings.
Several years ago Lowry began drawing female nudes as a way to see herself, so often had she felt silent and invisible even to herself. She has also come now to grips with living alone for the first time in her adult life as her daughter left for college.
Morris L. Peltz, M.D., is a training and supervising analyst with the San Francisco Psychoanalytic Institute. He manages the Program Committees “In Depth: Art, Culture, and Politics” program.
Like her colleagues on the panel, Sherrod Duggan, a sculptor, had felt scarred by her experience growing up in her family. Like her colleagues, she felt healed and liberated by her work with Lucy Daniels.
Duggan's mother, although loving and generous, was very controlling, invasive, and insistent on compliance. Duggan felt stifled, suffocated. These feelings emerged in an alien, frightening, repeating thought that surfaced one night as she was falling asleep. “The rewards that never left her had a way of killing her.” In retrospect, Duggan believes she needed a parent to protect her from her mother. Her father, a loving, kind man, was emotionally out of touch with people and was not up to the task of interceding.
Duggan began sculpting in clay, and her early figurative works clearly show how depressed (but unaware) she was as she began her career. Piece after piece was of a crouched nude, a vulnerable figure. Undaunted by fear, Duggan was driven to make figure after similar figure.
Duggan's next psychologically significant series were almost self portraits: the face, an image of herself and the body, that of a man. She understood the figure as representing her sense of being a dependent, submissive woman with a longed-for imagined self, as a man, strong, powerful and capable of exerting his independence.
As she has continued to resolve her conflicts about her wish to please and her wish to assert herself, Duggan has felt freer in accepting commissions for portrait busts and life-size portrait sculptures. “I enjoy working from life and making sculptures of other people as long as I am free to assert myself and my ideas in the work.”
Pianist Tom Mann described the past joys, sorrows, and trauma that can all contribute and compromise creativity. He has found that, like Lucy Daniels, he needs a “place” to create.
Whether I'm dealing with the composition of a work symbolic of the death of a former student or the pianistic realization of the subtleties of a Brahms intermezzo, it is all about finding a mental space that is free enough to play with, where ideas, where information “bubbles up” — where one captures and transforms the moment. It is a place where good sense is made of opposites; where confusion and clarity become synchronized; where the most abstract, diffuse, and sublime come together.
Mann was taken to his first live concert when he was eight, and he was hooked. From then on music was his solace, “the expression of his soul.”
Two degrees, a marriage, and two children and twenty-five years later, an analysis jolted him to a further artistic awakening: He discovered new meaning in his life. In probing his dreams and unconscious mind, he is startled and amazed at the music he had stored in his soul. He has begun composing and uses the computer and digital processing to work improvisationally as he works the layers of his ideas. After careful editing, some ideas are retained and some are discarded.
What inspires his compositions? The intense emotions that have accompanied the events of his life. His composition Fear expresses the chronic fear of his youth and adolescence dominated by an abusive, alcoholic father. John was composed as eulogy for John Sekara, an African-American writer and scholar who died suddenly and unexpectedly of a cerebral hemorrhage. Mann illustrated his work from audio-taped segments.