Being in analysis: on the intimate art of transference

ABSTRACT

In this article, the author considers psychoanalytic transference in the context of contemporary art. The author focuses on the work of artists who have been in psychoanalysis and have put this personal material to use within their creative practice, and argues that these artworks enact the experience of being in analysis. Using an expanded understanding of transference wherein the fantasy and reality experienced in the ‘here and now’ of the consulting room is transposed onto sites of cultural production, the author considers the very real and often disruptive emotional and psychological affects that are a part of the viewer's experience of these artworks. In considering these artworks we move from the intimate life of the consulting room to an intimately complex psychic, social and political world. Ultimately, the author aims to find a space in which the individual affects (such as anxiety and crying) experienced while fully engaging with an artwork (through transference) can be dissipated or released, as a form of subjective transformation, and ultimately be mobilized as a form of political and collective action.

KEYWORDS:

• Transference
• psychoanalysis
• anxiety
• crying
• Louise Bourgeois
• Andrea Fraser

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Dr Joanne Morra is Reader in Art History and Theory at Central Saint Martins, University of the Arts London. She convenes The Doctoral Platform at CSM, and is Founding Principal Editor of Journal of Visual Culture. She has published widely on contemporary art and psychoanalysis, including in: The Limits of Death (co-edited with Robson and Smith, MUP 2000); New Formations (Spring 2002); The Prosthetic Impulse: From a Posthuman Present to a Biocultural Future (co-edited with Smith, MIT 2006); Journal of Visual Culture (April 2007); Journal of Modern Art (December 2009). She has become particularly interested in spaces of practice (the studio, study, gallery, classroom and consulting room) and what each space can offer the others. Publications on this topic include: ‘Seemingly Empty: Freud at Berggasse 19, A Conceptual Museum in Vienna’, Journal of Visual Culture (April 2013); ‘The Work of Research: Remembering, Repeating and Working-through’, in What is Research in the Visual Arts? Obsession, Archive, Encounter, eds. Holly and Smith (MIT/Clark 2008); the curatorial project Saying It (Freud Museum London 2012); ‘On Use: Art Education and Psychoanalysis’, Journal of Visual Culture (April 2017). Her recent book Inside the Freud Museums: History, Memory and Site-Responsive Art will be out in October 2017 (IB Tauris). She is working on her next book, In the Studio and On the Couch: Art, Autobiography and Psychoanalysis.

Notes

1. The notion of ‘enactment’ that I am using builds upon while also diverging from Andrea Fraser's work. Fraser employs the concept of enactment in order to rethink the idea of performativity (J.L. Austin and Judith Butler). She takes her cue from the work of relational psychoanalysis and its understanding of transference as a means of ensuring that artistic practice (and pedagogy) involves both an intrapsychic and intersubjective framework that opens up onto social and political realms. Fraser's most recent articulation of this can be found in 2015, 2016a, 2016b. What I am highlighting in this article is the ‘affective’ quality of enactment. Thus, my focus on anxiety and crying. My aim is to find a space in which the individual ‘affects’ experienced while fully engaging with an artwork (through transference) can be understood as individual feelings, as well as instigate the mobilization of political and collective action.

2. This brings to mind Lacanian psychoanalyst Dany Nobus understanding of transference in Lacan's work. Nobus writes that for Lacan ‘Each time a man speaks to another in an authentic and full manner, there is, in the true sense, transference, symbolic transference something takes place which changes the nature of the two beings present.’ And also ‘On this symbolic plane, transference operates as the motor of analysis and it can take either the form of love or hate, and quite possibly a mixture of both’ (Nobus 2000, 116, 109). And I would add, perhaps many more emotions besides love and/or hate.

3. This history is vast. For the purposes of my argument and the affective possibility of anxiety, I would like to point to the work of: Butler (2015), Ahmed (2004), Berlant (1998, 2008, 2011), Cvetkovich (2012), Sedgwick (1999), and of course Fraser's work.