The cultural experience

Stating that culture is of major importance to psychoanalysis is commonplace. Yet fathoming the relationship between culture and psychoanalysis is all but a simple work. On one hand, culture seems the main field of what is called “applied psychoanalysis,” that is, “the application of psychoanalytic knowledge to explanatory, methodological, or technological problems arising in disciplines or human endeavours other than psychoanalysis” (Edelson, 1988, p. 157). On the other hand, cultural products, especially artistic and literary works, have been essential to the development of psychoanalysis, Freud’s conception of the Oedipus complex included (Freud, 1900). One could note a reciprocity of influence between culture and psychoanalysis (Esman, 1998).

Freud observed early enough a parallel between the processes involved in the making of cultural products such as poetry and the noncritical self-observation required in psychoanalysis. He writes:

I have noticed in my psycho-analytical work that … the self-observer … need only take the trouble to suppress his critical faculty. If he succeeds in doing that, innumerable ideas come into his consciousness of which he could otherwise never have got hold … the adoption of the required attitude of mind towards ideas that seem to emerge ‘of their own free will’ and the abandonment of the critical function that is normally in operation against them seem to be hard of achievement for some people. The ‘involuntary thoughts’ are liable to release a most violent resistance, which seeks to prevent their emergence. If we may trust that great poet and philosopher Friedrich Schiller, however, poetic creation must demand an exactly similar attitude. In a passage in his correspondence with Kórner … Schiller replies to his friend's complaint of insufficient productivity: ‘The ground for your complaint seems to me to lie in the constraint imposed by your reason upon your imagination. I will make my idea more concrete by a simile. It seems a bad thing and detrimental to the creative work of the mind if Reason makes too close an examination of the ideas as they come pouring in. Looked at in isolation, a thought may seem very trivial or very fantastic; but it may be made important by another thought that comes after it, and, in conjunction with other thoughts that may seem equally absurd, it may turn out to form a most effective link. Reason cannot form any opinion upon all this unless it retains the thought long enough to look at it in connection with the others. On the other hand, where there is a creative mind, Reason relaxes its watch upon the gates, and the ideas rush in pell-mell, and only then does it look them through and examine them in a mass. You critics are ashamed or frightened of the momentary and transient extravagances which are to be found in all truly creative minds and whose longer or shorter duration distinguishes the thinking artist from the dreamer. You complain of your unfruitfulness because you reject too soon and discriminate too severely.’ … Schiller describes as a relaxation of the watch upon the gates of Reason, the adoption of an attitude of uncritical self-observation, is by no means difficult. Most of my patients achieve it after their first instructions. (Freud, 1900, pp. 101–102, emphasis added)

Concerning the effect of a work of art on its audience Freud notes: “Some writer on aesthetics has discovered that [a] state of intellectual bewilderment is a necessary condition when a work of art is to achieve its greatest effects” (Freud, 1914, p. 211, emphasis added). In his essay “The Moses of Michelangelo,” in which he exposes his reflection concerning the massive, imposing statue of Moses in the Church of San Pietro in Vincoli, in Rome, Freud will, according to Ernest Jones, attempt to solve “the riddle of why it affected him so deeply”(Jones, 1957, p. 387). The experiences Freud describes somehow illustrate the state of intellectual bewilderment to which he had already referred to: “I have essayed to support the angry scorn of the hero’s glance!,” he writes. “Sometimes I have crept cautiously out of the half-gloom of the interior as though I myself belonged to the mob upon whom his eye is turned – the mob which can hold fast no conviction, which has neither faith nor patience” (1914, p. 212). Here one could view Freud’s mind in a state of illusion, the “intermediate area of experience, contributed to by both the inner world and outer reality” (Winnicott, 1953, p. 89).

Winnicott notes:

Man's cultural life …  is the adult equivalent of the transitional phenomena of infancy and early childhood …  in which area communication is made without reference to the object’s state of being either subjective or objectively perceived. It is my opinion that the psycho-analyst has no other language in which to refer to cultural phenomena. (1965, p. 183)

We could say that the deep affinity between cultural life and psychoanalysis lies in the concept of transitional space, which is of pivotal significance for both.

Translation from one language to another may comprise such a space, as the object, that is, the text that undergoes translation, the words and linguistic forms that compose it – and the author themself as a figure – are subjectively perceived, understood, and conveyed in another language by the translator. In this issue, in their article “The Persian Freud: Freud’s early reception between the 1930s and the 1970s in Iran,” Mir Mohammad Khademnabi and Ali Khazaee-Farid, fathoming the translation of Freud’s works into Persian in the light of reception theory, underline that, in a given historical period (1930–1970), Iranian translators took Freud as a philosopher, “an intellectual whose ideas could help the Persian intellectuals to fight superstitions” in a traditional society.

Fighting superstitions could be regarded as a road to intellectual freedom. Philosophers, as Eleni Filippachi informs us, have long debated the question of a particular conception of freedom, namely autonomy. In her article “Forms of freedom: Towards a psychoanalytic conception of autonomy,” the author argues that autonomy is a crucial concept for psychoanalysis and, traversing the path from philosophical concepts of freedom to psychoanalytic thought, proposes “a framework for a psychoanalytic conception of autonomy based on an intrapsychic and an intersubjective axis”.

Viewing works of art has intersubjective dimensions as the viewer may, in the transitional space viewing offers, conceive the artist as a figure, through relating with what they perceive in the forms the artist “proposes.” In their article “Lucian Freud: The ruthless genius,” Miguel Angel Gonzalez-Torres and Arazanzu Fernandez-Rivas move freely from psychobiographical data to observation of formal traits and repetitive themes in Lucian Freud’s painting. The bewildering effect on the viewer is of course present here. The authors observe: “There is a feeling that the model is no longer there … we are only seeing their body … the soul has passed to the painter who holds it for as long as the lengthy creation process lasts,” stressing, in my opinion, an important element in artistic creativity: that, “Just as the child nourishes himself on his mother, the creator is a vampire to his object,” as Chasseguet-Smirgel (1984, p. 403) writes, whence the captivating ruthlessness in the work of artists as Lucian Freud.

Graphic novels are a relatively new form of artistic expression where visual art, verbal narrative, and cinematic montage procedure converge often in the form of an extended daydream. In his article “Intergenerational irruptions in Olivier Schrawen’s Arsène Schrawen,” David Leukowich, “drawing on reverie, countertransferential dreaming and Marion Milner’s oscillation phenomena,” discerns two kinds of dreaming that traverse the graphic novel, one within the novel itself and one in the author’s merging with the subjects of the story. The author underlines that the overly subjective, unrealistic portrait of the grandfather’s artist by the artist in the novel achieves at communicating the “enduring and destabilizing presence of generational echoes, which continue to oscillate as the counternarrative dream material of present life.”