The Secret of Faces: Commentary on Paper by Rachael Peltz

Abstract

Dr. Rachael Peltz stresses the aesthetic dimension of analysis. In fact the aesthetic experience can serve as a model for all that is deepest and truest in our lives and in the analytic encounter. We all have an “inner painter” which transforms primitive sensoriality into images or pictograms and then tie them up into oneiric thoughts, dreaming and thinking in order to give a personal meaning to experience. This model gives us the possibility in the clinical work to be more attentive to the musical, rhythmic, or semiotic aspects of the interaction between patient and analyst. Dr. Peltz shows in a beautiful vignette how, equating analysis to the aesthetic experience, it is possible to help the patient to reach a fuller sense of consonance and contact between mind and body.

Notes

This paper was translated by Philip Slotkin, M.A., Cantab. MITI.

¹Translator's note: for convenience, the masculine form is used for both sexes throughout this translation.

²A central aspect of Dr. Peltz's paper is her account of how Bion revolutionized the meaning of the dream work, hence the proximity of art to psychoanalysis. Interestingly, in some respects a similar trend has emerged in contemporary philosophy with Derrida, whose concept of deconstruction is not an interpretation that dissects the text, as it is often misunderstood, but a reading that opens the way to a huge number of possibilities that are only seemingly arbitrary.

³The following passage from Proust (1931) conveys something of the irreplaceable cognitive function of pain: “Moreover, does it [pain] not on each occasion reveal to us a law which is no less indispensable for the purpose of bringing us back to truth, of forcing us to take things seriously by pulling up the weeds of habit, scepticism, frivolity and indifference.”

⁴Compare Grotstein (2007): “I put forth the notion that beneath the hidden order that runs through the entirety of Bion's works lies the concept of a truth drive and that all the ego defence mechanisms are principally counterposed to the irruption of unconscious truth rather than of libido and aggression” (p. 52). Grotstein reported that Bion himself mentioned the concept of a “truth instinct” to him in 1979.

⁵See also Ferro (2005, 2006, 2011), Civitarese (2008), and Ferro and Civitarese (2012)