The traditional approach of psychoanalysis to aesthetics has been the same as to dreams: Discover the unconscious meaning behind the manifest content and translate this hidden meaning into words. Not surprisingly, the same unconscious motivations were found embedded in psychological symptoms, dreams, mythology, literature, and art.
What is artistic about art, however, is precisely what gets lost in translation into cognitive verbal content. What is artistic about art is what it does and how it does it. In the briefest of statements, it restores fullness to the bleached-out experience of everyday life, invigorating ordinary thought and perception with the coloration of fresh feeling and bringing a renewed wholeness to one's sense of self.
How, then, can justice be done to what is uniquely creative about art? The answer, I suggest, is by focusing on form rather than content, perception rather than motivation.
The “meaning” of a picture is like meaning in metrical poetry. It lies less in the content of the ideas that can be extracted and served up than in the form in which physical sounds and irregular accents of words play across the regular beat of the meter. Nonverbal art deals with the transmutation of external arrangements of color, line, tone, and rhythm into internal emotional meanings.
Accordingly, my approach to psychoanalytic aesthetics (Rose 1980, 1987, 1996, 2004-a, 2004-b, unpublished) shifts the focus from content to form, and from motivation to reality and perception. It holds to an open model of the organism; it views art as evolving within a fluid reality, supporting an adaptive, biological function: growth-enhancing and expanding cultural and historical perspectives.
How does art promote life? It aids the mind in constantly re-sorting intermingled currents of subjective imagination and objective knowledge, feeling and cognition. In psychoanalytic terms, primary and secondary processes are in constant interplay and, in the process, generating the tension and release of affect. This is in contrast to received truth that (1) growth requires secondary process to replace primary process (where Id was, Ego shall be) and (2) that the function of art is to smuggle in forbidden fantasy guilt-free.
Aestheticians point out certain characteristics of the feelings associated with the aesthetic experience. They note the co-existence of hyperacuity and tranquility, force and calm, vitality and ease, energy and repose. In my view, this reflects a common dynamic in the structure of both art and affect: tension and release.
From the side of art, a visual artist, like a composer, knows how to enhance the expressive qualities of tension and release inherent in ordinary perception and how to express them more energetically and clearly to highlight the dramatics of everyday experience. For example, in art oblique lines or rectangular or oval shapes are more tension producing; horizontal or vertical lines or square or spherical shapes are more stable and tension releasing. In music, delaying resolution raises tension. Some ways of doing this are through ornamentation, the minor mode, key modulations, and dissonance.
From the side of the viewer of art, sensitivity to patterns of tension and release is the most elementary attribute of perception. It accounts for having an immediate emotional reaction to stimuli and is rooted in a biological necessity: An organism must make an on-the-spot appraisal of the outside world's perceived hostility or friendliness in order to know whether to advance, withdraw, or wait and see. Such affective perception is the first and most basic response to the dynamic aspects of the external world, that is, its perceived qualities of tension and release, and how to interpret them in the light of knowledge and imagination.
Susan Langer points out that art offers an objective image of the subjective experience of human feelings. “The establishment and organization of tensions is the basic technique in projecting the image of feeling, the artist's idea, in any medium…. [It leads to] an isomorphy of actual organic tensions and…virtual created tensions.” (Langer 1967, p. 164).
The near perfect fit between the attunement of art to one's own feelings and one's responsive resonance to aesthetic forms leads to an evolving interplay between art and recipient. This may proceed in ways that the author never intended so that the receiver becomes, in a sense, a co-creator. (T.S. Eliot considered that some of the meanings attributed to his poetry were superior to anything he had in mind.)
Gilbert J. Rose, M.D., is a Distinguished Life Fellow of the American Psychiatric Association, a Life Member of the American Psychoanalytic Association, a member of the Muriel Gardiner Program in Psychoanalysis and the Humanities at Yale, and in private practice in Norwalk (Rowayton), Connecticut.
In this regard, several considerations are notable.
First, the correspondence between objective aesthetic forms and internal feelings is so close that, I believe, it allows the viewer of art to create a preconscious illusion that art provides a responsive, witnessing presence. As in any intimate encounter (love or treatment, for example), the viewer is licensed to feel more consciously what was always latent but unformed and inexpressible.
Second, such implicit “permission” amplifies emotional responses. They range from the present back to the remote past. Among the most significant of the latter is the experience of affective signaling that takes place in the holding environment between parent and infant. Ideally, this was geared toward the buildup and resolution of tension in a finely tuned dance of the mother's attunement and the infant's responsiveness. This promoted a graded differentiation of feelings rooted in the very beginnings of a sense of self.
Art, too, provides a framework of reliably balanced tension and release, allowing affects to build up with intensity and offering the opportunity for their further differentiation. This is an illustration of how art is biologically rooted: It continues the affect-regulating function of early mothering; it helps elaborate transformations of affect, on higher, abstract levels, of the same resonating emotional responsiveness that existed in the beginning.
Third, other aspects of its biological rootedness have to do with its contribution to orientation and sense of wholeness. For instance, it can be shown that, insofar as aesthetic form stimulates and magnifies the normal interplay of primary process imagination and feeling with secondary process logic and knowledge of reality, it constructively exploits ambiguity. Specifically, it melts and reforms dimensions of time (constancy and change in music), space (holistic and delineated perception in visual art), and person (cognitive sense and sensuous sound in poetry). This refreshes one's coordinates of orientation in a contemporary reality and helps fashion a new balance and sense of wholeness.
The role of aesthetic ambiguity in nonverbal art as contrasted to literature deserves a closer look (Rose 2004-b). Psychoanalysis has held that literature mobilizes affects primarily through stimulating unconscious fantasy and by being closely related to the primary process through metaphor.
In contrast to literature, however, I hold that nonverbal art stimulates affects directly by exposing and playing with perceptual aesthetic ambiguity—fantasy and language entering only later. Perceptual ambiguity arises from a built-in neural propensity (based on the constant mobility of neural mappings and on central visual processing) as well as being a byproduct of the interplay of primary and secondary processes.
Nonverbal art thus suggests a working definition for the nonverbal sublimation of affect—one that testifies to the fundamental role of motion in both emotional expression and emotional response. It builds on the neuroscience concept that second-order neural maps exist initially in nonverbal form that can be simulated by imagination but are also capable of conversion into language.
What do I mean by this “interplay”? Primary process forms (such as condensation, displacement, coexistence of opposites) are subjected to the delayed discharge imposed by secondary process. This raises the normally subliminal pre-stages of perception into full awareness; reflection becomes possible. Consider Picasso's depiction of multiple spatial perspectives simultaneously.
In music, experts have pointed to the coexistence of opposites during moments of stasis and movement in late Beethoven music. They seem outside time and space. How is this brought about? In the Adagio movement of the “Sonata in C-Minor, Opus 111,” for example, a combination of accelerated motion, rhythmic diminution, and minimal harmonic action leads to blurring of any distinction between rapid movement and stasis. They condense into a “shimmering, sonic barrier” (Solomon 2003, pp. 207-209).
Language, of course, has always been the privileged centerpiece in the analytic theory of sublimation, namely, the replacement of thing-presentations and primary process by word-presentations and secondary process. Nonverbal art, however, offers a further perspective, namely, on the nonverbal sublimation of affect.
How might this work? I speculate as follows: Nonverbal sublimation of affect may begin with the artist projecting unique, personally expressive body-image affect codes of somatic tension and release. They constitute actual implicit motion. With talent and know-how the artist transmutes and intensifies them in the artwork. The perpetual implicit motion of the artist's expressive body images (neural mappings of his/her virtual body as a whole) makes the picture come “alive” with affective tension and release. “Embodied” in the art, they constitute virtual implicit motion.
The concordance between the actual implicit motion in the tension and release of the artist's affect and the virtual implicit motion embedded in the tension and release of aesthetic form is a key to the artist's sublimation of nonverbal affect: It transmits the artist's feelings. It also generates the viewer's own affective response. The latter may or may not be in accordance with the artist's affect. It may range from empathic to antipathetic or be a complex combination depending on the viewer's own psychodynamics. In short, the viewer becomes “co-creator.”
Nonverbal art thus suggests a working definition for the nonverbal sublimation of affect—one that testifies to the fundamental role of motion in both emotional expression and emotional response. It builds on the neuroscience
concept that second-order neural maps exist initially in nonverbal form that can be simulated by imagination but are also capable of conversion into language. It expands on the astute insight of Leonardo carried down to the present that a work of art reflects the “movement of the mind.” Moreover, such “movement of the mind” engaged in for its own sake is pleasurable in its own right as imaginative play.
Which brings us back to Freud.
As early as 1905 Freud, borrowing an idea from Fischer (1889), wrote: “…to derive pleasure from its [i.e., the mental apparatus] own activity I suspect…is in general the condition that governs all aesthetic ideation.” I would add, and affect.
One can hardly fault Freud for not having made more discoveries. But he made a choice, perhaps based on the then perceived dichotomy of scientific truth versus artistic fantasy—and every choice involves a de-selection—for he ended the sentence with, “but I understand too little of aesthetics to try to enlarge on this statement” (pp. 95-96).
For the better part of a century, psychoanalysts have all but overlooked art's potential for enlarging psychoanalysis, itself. Only in the last few decades has interest turned to the nonverbal aspects of psychic life—also referred to as the implicit, presymbolic, out-of-awareness, or unsymbolized. In my opinion, the arrested state of our wordbound concept of sublimation instantiates this.
Opening up a view of nonverbal sublimation of affect thus fills a notable gap. It is also timely in view of the contemporary discussion of the clinical and theoretical importance of non-mentalized processes of absence and emptiness, empathy and negative countertransference. Long before they became an object of psychoanalytic interest one was afforded a glimpse of their power, positive and negative, in Samuel Beckett's (1955) potent imagery, for example, “in this world for you without arms” (p.12).
What if Freud had been more musically inclined? Might psychoanalysts have been more attuned to the nonverbal arts in general during the past half-century? Might we have picked up on their testimony that they act as essential containers for the unverbalizable play of implicit virtual motion and affect—thus prefiguring nonverbal aspects of therapy only now coming to be more fully appreciated?
Their resource potential remains to be further explored (Rose unpublished).
Based in part on Rose, 2002, Aesthetics and Psychoanalysis, in The Freud Encyclopedia, ed. by , pp. 9-10, New York & London: Routledge.