Editors’ introduction to Diana Caine and Denis Echard’s ‘Staging the Unconscious…’

One of the most intimate aspects of the human subject is the unconscious. As such, Intimacy Unguarded considered the ways in which this material becomes the basis for contemporary art, critical writing and the dynamics of the consulting room. At the symposium ‘Intimacy Unguarded: Gender, the Unconscious and Contemporary Art’, held at and supported generously by the Freud Museum London, psychoanalysts Diana Caine and Denis Echard presented a paper that examined the Lacanian psychoanalytic process of ‘patient presentation’, and what happens when the private experience of being in psychoanalysis becomes exposed within artistic practice.

‘Staging the Unconscious…’ by Diana Caine and Denis Echard – beautifully transposes their talk into an article – examines a process in which patients are interviewed before a group of experienced and trainee psychoanalysts. Although this article is not specifically about contemporary art, as the authors suggest in it,

If memoire, biography, the singular trauma of a life, frequently find their way into artistic production, becoming in the process both a source of material and a means by which to explore the personal, in the presentations de malades something almost inverse is at stake. Here, one could say rather that the refashioning of a certain art form, that of the theatre, is used to stage something particular, an unscripted dialogue about a life, between two strangers before a highly selected audience.

‘Staging the Unconscious…’ opens up the importance of the theatre of the mind for many artists who use personal and autobiographical material in their practice. As such, the authors ask us to consider:

What is it for people who work with the personal in their art production? There is something so raw, so naked about the lived experience exposed in these encounters, that it is hard to know whether the pain one feels is pain on behalf of the patient, for their suffering or for their exposure? Or on one’s own account, such psychic proximity to the all but unspeakable trauma of another? What is certain is that this is an encounter of a kind that redefines the notion of intimacy.