Conflictos: escenarios que preceden a las descolonizaciones

In De Bruyckere’s artwork, the human emotional landscape manifests itself on the surface of her fragmented figures’ bodies. Psychoanalysis, therefore, is a particularly valuable tool for the discussion of De Bruyckere’s artwork, as it provides a model for understanding the psychical connection to the body. As Elizabeth Grosz acknowledges: “the psyche is a projection of the body form” (Grosz, E. 1994: 27). The body holds a significant position in Freud’s tripartite structure of the self because every connection and piece of information between ego and the ‘outside world’ is acquired through the body and the skin. In his view, the surface of the body is where both internal and external perceptions and sensations start (Freud, S. 2001a: 25). Similarly, in Lacan’s mirror stage, the image of the body plays a fundamental role (Lacan, J. 2006: 76). Additionally, several psychoanalytical concepts based on Freud’s and Lacan’s theories are essential to determine the importance of the absence of body parts in the signification process.

Psychoanalysis in general, and Sigmund Freud’s theories in particular, have been heavily criticised and branded unscientific and ineffective (Cohen, P. 2007).¹² Although I am aware of

11 The body has always been a matter of concern to feminist thinkers and ‘activists’. Indeed the body took centre stage during what is mostly referred to as ‘the first-wave’ feminism. The social reformer, Josephine Butler recognised the importance and absolute necessity for women, to keep control over their bodies (Heidensohn, F. 1995: 21). The violation of basic women’s rights at the hand of male doctors was still widely perpetuated in 1952, as female patients were routinely injected with cancerous cells in the uterus without being asked and notified (Skloot, R. 2011: 179-190). After the First World War women continued to fight for sexual equality and the right to control their own body (Abortion Reform Association), but the body/mind dualism lingered on, as the body was believed to be separate from the self and to be controlled by it. Simone de Beauvoir’s work, The Second Sex, has been seminal in theorising the link between the body and the self. Her vision is considered the starting point of the sex/gender separation, where sex is seen as fixed and determined by biology, and gender is seen as a social construct, historically and socially changeable (De Beauvoir, S. 1997: 295). However, the new generation of feminists disagreed with Simone de Beauvoir’s negative description of the female body (De Beauvoir, S. 1997: 333), sexual initiation and motherhood (ibid: 513), and tended to highlight the positive sites of being a woman, “turning difference into a strength, of affirming positivity” (Braidotti, R. 2013: 187).

The ‘second-wave feminism’, which lasted from the early 1960s to the late 1980s, focused on inequalities. During this period the personal aspects of women’s lives took central stage. The personal became deeply politicised, and became instrumental in revealing the sexist structure of power. “Feminists began to develop a critique of the ‘politics of the body’ in terms of the material body as a site of political struggle” (Bordo, S. 2003: 16). The work of feminist researchers to recover women’s history during the second wave feminism focused unavoidably on the body. Several major works published in the 1970’s, such as Sheila Rowbotham’s Hidden from History (1975) and Germaine Greer’s The Female Eunuch (1970) just to mention a few of them, highlighted the different roles played by women in society. During that time feminist activists were reassessing the female body and its meaning in a wider context, recognising the importance of the personal experience of women alongside the political and institutional forms (Battista, K. 2013: 13).

12 The June 2008 issue of The Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Assocation, has shown that Freud’s theories have been critiqued for being sexist, fraudulent, unscientific and wrong (Cohen, P. 2007).

these critiques, I believe it is important to reflect on Freud’s singular contribution to human thought and the sheer originality of his ideas. His work had a tremendous impact on Western culture, shaping the way we understand childhood, personality, memory and sexuality. His theories and terminology have entered popular culture, film and television in the West, becoming part of the everyday language. Furthermore, during the last fifteen years,

psychoanalysis’ reclaims of scientific status seem to have become a reality, although it still resonates little outside the bounds of psychology education.¹³

I consider psychoanalysis as a dynamic ‘set of theories’, which are continually

re-contextualised, quoted and reviewed by both supporters and detractors. Griselda Pollock, for instance, underlines the importance of placing psychoanalytical practices and the academic field of visual culture, in a “productive relation to each other”, and points out the synergy of debating similar questions in different practices (Pollock, G. 2013b: xiiv). To prove her point, she highlights the massive influence played by psychoanalysis as a theoretical framework in the understanding of images and spectatorship from the 1970s onwards. She lists Lacan’s mirror stage, the imaginary, the gaze, and feminist psychoanalysis, as playing a significant role in the study of images and spectatorship. Feminist scholars have also widely used psychoanalytical theories in order to look at the workings of the unconscious in terms of pleasure, pain and desire. They utilised psychoanalysis to understand ideology in general and in particular the concept of patriarchy (Mitchell, J. 1987). Psychoanalysis has also been widely used to understand and disrupt the visual pleasure (Mulvey, L. 1975), that was believed to reinforce patriarchal modes of sexual- and racial- differences, (Pollock, G. 2013b: 7; Jones, A.

in Mirzoeff, N. 2013: 367). Moreover, theories of fetishism, which were used from the 1970s to 1990s to make sense of differences, still influence the way we interpret images of the body, even though more scholars and artists are moving towards a more intersectional method of

13 Of special interest are a series of papers written by Kihlstrom, a cognitive-behavioural authority, in which he progressively

‘reaches’ psychoanalysis from a pure cognitive-behavioural and empirical ground. Kihlstrom, J.F. Mulvaney, S. Tobias, BA.

Tobis, I. (2000). In E. Eich, JF. Kihlstrom, GH. Bower, JP Forgas & PM. Niedenthal (Eds.), Cognition and Emotion. New York, Counterpoints: Oxford University Press.

The other front where normally people would dismiss the scientific status of psychoanalysis is regarding its psychotherapeutic practice: does psychoanalysis cure people? Thinking of that question, another important paper is De Maat et al., which is a meta-analysis of effectiveness of psychoanalysis. See: De Maat, S. C. Dekker, J. De Jonghe, F. Kraker, R. Leichsenring, F.

Abbass, A. Luyten, P. Van, R. (2009). The Effectiveness of Psychoanalysis: A Meta-Analysis. Harvard Review of Psychiatry, May-June, 21(3), 107-137.

For a further discussion on the empirical evidence of psychoanalysis see:

Luborsky, L. & Barrett, M. S. (2006). The History and Empirical Status of Key Psychoanalytic Concepts. Annu. Rev. Clin.

Psychol., 2, 1-19. Westen, D. (1998). The Scientific Legacy of Sigmund Freud: Toward a Psychodynamically Informed Psychological Science. Psychological Bulletin, 124(3), 333-371. Masling, J. (2000). Empirical Evidence and the Health of Psychoanalysis. Journal of the American Academy of Psychoanalysis, 28(4), 665-685.Alfonso, C. A. (2012). Evidence Base for the Molecular Underpinnings of Psychodynamic Psychotherapy. Psychodynamic psychiatry, 40(3), 533-535.

identification formation.

The way subjectivity is theoretically conceptualised strongly influences the production and understanding of artworks. During the second half of the twentieth century, the scholarly debate on the formation of subjectivity was dominated by two major views. One group, built upon the psychoanalytical work of Freud and Lacan, argued for the possibility of finding out about the structure of subjectivity and the processes influencing its formation. This model implied a subject with assessable and recognisable content. The other group of scholars and philosophers (Foucault, M.), instead, saw subjectivity as a result of the power structures inherent in society, implying that the subject has no knowable content in itself. Subjectivity, therefore, cannot exist outside of the predetermined power relationships. For the purpose of this investigation, both debates on subjectivity’s formation are relevant, as they still influence contemporary visual culture. Furthermore, both models of identification highlight the

importance of the relationship to the ‘other’ in the formation of subjectivity, its fragmentary state and the disputed belief in the subject’s autonomy and freedom (Mansfield, N. 2000: 51-52, 66).

For Freud, at the core of personality lies a profound alienation. His contribution was central in developing the idea of the de-centered or fragmented subject, as he divided the self into conscious, preconscious and unconscious (Freud, S. 2001c: 71), and into three different mental ‘realms’: the Id, the Ego, and the Super-Ego.¹⁴ With his tripartite model, Freud

undermined the possibility of a subject centered by a single, fully self-conscious, self-defining identity and Ego (ibid: 72).

14 The Id, “is the dark inaccessible part of our personality” (Freud, S. 2001c: 73), aimed at gaining pleasure and avoiding pain, (ibid: 74). Freud calls the Id, a “cauldron of seeding excitation”, and believes that this bundle of instincts is, and always will be, dominant because it exists as the unconscious part of our personality (ibid: 73).

The second part of the personality, the Ego, is the voice of reason. In Freud’s theory the Ego is the “perceptual –conscious part” (ibid: 75), it is the voice of common sense that tries to restrain both the Id and the Super-Ego from their irrational threat of domination (ibid: 76-77). The Ego has three masters, the Id, the Super Ego and the real world (ibid: 77). The Ego is the negotiator and has to mediate between the wild wishes of the Id and the restraints imposed by the Super-Ego and ‘reality’. If the Id is guided by the pleasure principle, then the Ego follows the reality principle, as it is in contact with the external world.

The Ego, therefore, is formed out of the need to create a protection layer against the outside world. The Ego is weak, ineffective and incapable of containing the demands of the other two parts of the personality: the Super-Ego and the Id (ibid:

73-77).

The Super-Ego represents an internalising of the learned values and morals of society or, as Freud writes, “the father regarded as a model”, and the acceptance of what is considered to be right and wrong (ibid: 80). The Super-Ego has two distinct parts:

the Conscious and the Ego Ideal. The Ego Ideal is the state of internalised perfection that children believe they need to reach (ibid: 65). The Super-Ego punishes with guilt, but can also reward with gratification, if you strive to attain unreachable expectations (ibid: 61). In this respect, the Super-Ego often opposes the pleasure principle of the Id and the reality principle of the Ego with the morality principle (ibid: 61-65). A well-developed Super-Ego will support the Ego in the repression of forbidden thoughts or actions that might be deemed wrong or threatening. These banned impulses are repressed from the conscious mind into the unconscious mind. The unconscious material however, does not always remain hidden but can re-emerge in dreams, neurotic symptoms, or “slips of tongue” (Cornea C. 2007: 53). It is important to note that, at the core of Freud’s model of subjectivity there is a self-sustaining individual that, although decentred, can still be separated from the other subjects (Mansfield, N. 2000: 36).

The French psychoanalyst, Jacques Lacan, emphasised the important role language plays in the formation of subjectivity. Re-interpreting Freud’s theory of subjectivity, and continuing Freud’s critique on the centered, autonomous, unitary and stable Ego, Lacan showed how body fragmentation is set in motion through the Mirror stage, a key stage in the child’s development of subjectivity.

Lacan’s mirror stage is particularly useful in the interpretation of De Bruyckere’s

fragmented figures as it brings to the fore the tension between the fragmented and vulnerable

‘lived’ body, and the wholeness of the body reflected by the mirror. Through the mirror stage and ‘the Imaginary’, Lacan highlights the importance of the visual fields in the formation of subjectivity, pointing to the fact that the image of the self always originates from the outside.¹⁵

The mirror stage is a process in the psychological development of the child, where the relationship between the inner and outer world of the child is established. Lacan describes how during this stage, the child acquires his/her bodily awareness, which is essentially experienced as fragmented (Ibid 78). The human child goes through a process in which an external image of the body, his image reflected in the mirror, produces the mental representation of the ‘I’.

The recognition of the image of the ‘I’ in the mirror, comes at a time when the infant still lacks motor coordination. The reflected image appears as more coherent, whole and perfect entity instead of the uncontrolled and fragmented movements and undefined boundaries between self and others (Lacan, J. 2006: 78). Faced with the imaginary unity in the mirror image, or the body in pieces, the child rejects fragmentation and identifies with its mirror image, what Lacan calls the ‘ideal I’, which seems stable, perfect, unified and in control of its parts. Lacan

develops the notion that, the child succeeds in overcoming the first experience of bodily fragmentation only when seeing his/her integral self in the mirror. During the formation of the Ego, in order to avoid anxiety about fragmentation, a myth of wholeness is created,

counteracting “images of castration, emasculation, mutilation, dismemberment, dislocation, evisceration, devouring, and bursting open of the body” (Lacan, J. 2006: 85). Subjectivity is then defined by a system outside his control, in which the child takes on the image of the

“Other” and identifies with it (Lacan, J. 2006: 78). This identification with the mirror and the

15 Lacan elaborates three fundamental ‘orders’: The Real, the Imaginary and the Symbolic. The Real, which is not

synonymous with ‘the truth’, or reality, is positioned outside language, beyond symbolisation. The Real is the pre-conscious, the pre-thought, the basis of what will become experience categories once it becomes symbolically appropriated (Evans, D.

2006: 162-163). The notion of The Real continuously changed during Lacan’s career, however, after 1964 he describes the Real as “beyond both the symbolic and the imaginary and acting as limit to both …and is associated with the concept of trauma” (Homer, S. 2003: 83). Lacan calls what we perceive as our real world, the Symbolic, because our reality is made of symbols and the process of making meaning (ibid: 81). The Imaginary order originates with the mirror stage in the process of identity formation.

anticipation of mastery allows the child to perceive him/herself as a complete or whole being.

At the same time, however, the image in the mirror is alienating because it becomes confused with the self and takes its place. As the subject sees him/herself in the mirror, s/he realises that both his/her identity and image of the body originates in the external world, so that unified self is obtained at the cost of this self being an-other: the mirror image (Lacan, J. 2006: 78). The function of the Ego is then misrecognition. It is the rejection of bodily fragmentation and alienation. This misrecognition and illusion of completeness causes misery as the psyche projects the image of the perfect body and creates a standard that the fragmented body has to live up to (Lacan, J. 2006: 85). In Lacan’s model, the Ego is formed through the image and is based on an illusionary image of wholeness and on the assumption of the inner emptiness of the subject; ‘a lack’ that can be only replaced by something that originates outside and is, therefore, constructed in a process that is alienating for the subject (Homer, S. 2005: 26).

Lacan’s mirror stage will also play an essential role in the discussion of De Bruyckere’s incorporation of soft materials in her work, such as pillows and blankets, as potentially

functioning as a substitute for the initial fused state with the mother. Indeed, the representation of the body as fragmented and vulnerable will be a constant reminder of the child’s

renunciation of the initial perfect unity with the mother and the subsequent quest to ‘re-join’

this wholeness.

In De Bruyckere’s fragmented figures, the Lacanian relationship between the ‘real’ and the ‘symbolic’ plays a particularly important role due to its connection to the ‘body-image’.

Indeed, the presence/absence dyad already plays a significant role in the infants’ life, when they realise that a particular word or sound can successfully influence the caregiver, in turn affecting the presence or absence of ‘things’ and/or actions that have an effect on their

wellbeing. For the infant, the mother is the first symbol of presence and absence and the ‘first agent of the child’s frustration’, as it is the mother who controls the presence and absence of the breast (Lacan, J. 1956-1957: 33).¹⁶ The mother’s breast as part object, therefore, is the first

‘object petit a’. This is because before the mirror stage, the breast takes up the role of the whole mother in the eyes of the child (Lacan, J. 2004: 168). The ‘object petit a’ is a term introduced by Lacan to conceptualise the loss of wholeness which produces desire. It emerges as the child separates from objects, such as the mother as ‘Other’, the breast, the voice, that he/she previously experienced as part of itself. These part-objects representing the ‘object petit

16 My own translation.

a’, are seen as objects that could have provided unity to the fragmented subject, but instead are forever lost. This ‘object petit a’, because it is both separated and included in the child’s body, becomes the “presence of a hollow”, (ibid: 180). Being the ‘index of a void’, the ‘object petit a’ is both presence and an absence, which can never be reached, thus causing desire

(Moncayo, R. 2008: 10).

For Lacan, needs are essentially demands for love. The perception of such love reflects a yearning for an impossible state of wholeness and unity with the mother, whom the subject imagines existed in the pre-Symbolic Real. Needs become desires, as soon as the child's demands become detached from his/her natural needs and become demands for love. Hence, this demand for love becomes infinite and will always involve a margin of dissatisfaction. The subject will never be sure that any object is a definite sign of love, as every object in the symbolic order can stand for something other than itself. For this reason, the demand, according to Lacan, will never be satisfied (Lewis, M. 2008: 33-34). In this reciprocal

repercussion of absence and presence in the symbolic order, absence can then be said to have just as much of a positive and influential existence in the symbolic as presence has. This is what permits Lacan to state that ‘the nothing’ is in itself an object (ibid: 183).