Psychoanalysis and the Image: The Full Introduction

Griselda Pollock 2007

CentreCATH Documents 2.
Why psychoanalysis and the image? An unnecessary question, the relations between
psychoanalysis and art are as old as psychoanalysis itself.
Sometimes, I encounter a different question. Do we have to use psychoanalysis in
art history or visual analysis? Apart from the misunderstanding about the use of theory,
addressed in this volume through performance rather than application, such anxiety stems
from unfamiliarity with a body of theory foreign to art history proper. I do not know much
about psychoanalysis, is a frequent refrain. Reasonable ignorance and/or resistance gain
support in certain new tendencies. Some cultural scholars declare that we are now in a posttheory moment, in which the challenging engagement with the difficult revolutions of
modern thought can be relegated to a historical past. We no longer need that kind of detailed
study, explication and engagement that characterised the intellectual climate of cultural and
visual studies after 1968.1 Theory becomes reified and rejected.
Others confidently proclaim that we are in a post-feminist moment. Attention to the
deep structuring of human subjectivity and sexuality in sexual difference as both an axis of
power, meaning and pleasure is wished away as a temporary episode from which, thankfully,
we have moved on. Feminist and gender questions are treated in some quarters as frankly
old-fashioned, superseded by more inclusive and internationalist perspectives on other more
pressing forms of difference and subjectivity. 2
The intervention offered by this volume is unashamedly, actively, creatively and
faithfully engaged with the necessity for theoria: which, simply means to look at, to travel to
see, to judge one thing by another, to contemplate, to think about by means of careful
engagements with concepts and bodies of thought. The writers here, however, already find
the source of theoria in the art work itself. The brutal division between reified theory and the
innocent art object is displaced in the poetic encounter of theoretical writing and its already
theoretical objects that provoke and call forth a depth of analysis that may travel towards
the object through many related territories towards a reading. 3
This volume, furthermore, testifies to the still rich potential for feminist theoria,
thinking with and about sexual difference. Feminist thought has only just got underway,
having richly equipped itself with relevant resources and charted its complex relations to a
whole field of cultural analysis, theory and history. Yet, feminist thought is not a static body
of theoria. It shifts and responds to iinternal and external provocation to meet the challenge
of holding on to sexual difference as a deep, determining and generative structure in
subjectivity and sociality.Its theoretical analysis informs studies of other axes of difference,
while grappling with its inescapable texturing in social and cultural relations we name class,
culture, or in my own terms, generations and geographies.4 This volume offers close-read
engagements with specific cultural texts and practices that are addressed through
psychoanalytical thinking that is shown to illuminate our understanding the cultural
specificity of textual or visual enunciation in history. This is particularly the challenge met by
Karyn Balls study of Korean American conceptual artist/writer Theresa Hak Kyung Chas
image-text, Dicte in which the tension between enclosing a subject in cultural otherness
(identity or postcolonial readings) and tracking the working through of specific historical
displacements through a more Kristevan sense of writing, subjectivity and avant-garde

poetics exposes the continuing theoretical difficulties we have in reading any cultural
inscription in the double axis of historical emplacement and subjective structuration. This
question appears in Izumi Nakajimas reading of the Net paintings of Yayoi Kusama whose
doubled situation as a Japanese woman artist working in both the United States and Japan in
two post-war patriarchal cultures of abstract painting creates the need for a feminist
psychoanalytical proposition about the subject position of the post-war Japanese daughter.
Challenging divisions which displace feminist with international or post-colonial difference,
these interventions address differentially positioned subjects and their cultural inscriptions
which psychoanalytical theory allows us to read against the reification and exoticisation of
the Other. At the same time, a thematic emerges spontaneously across several texts in this
volume around the figure of the creative rather than hysteric daughter by a return in both
Ettingers and Cernes papers to the figure of Dora from Freuds infamous case study of
1905 a case-study that holds in culture a feminine fascination- fascinance- with looking at a
image of woman: a topic of feminine spectatorship long travailed over in feminist cultural
theory.

To the opening question why psychoanalysis and the image I can give three answers.
Firstly, psychoanalysis is one of the major theoretical discoveries and hence
theoretical resources of the twentieth century. Its topic: subjectivity or in other terms, the
split sexuated subject and its affections, is clearly central to the arts and humanities.
Alongside theorisations of society, language and the sign, textuality and meaning-making,
and the elaboration of an anthropological concept of culture, a theory subjectivity and the
specificity of the workings of the conscious and unconscious have been undoubtedly central
to modern thought and cultural experience. Psychoanalysis is not an esoteric, clinical field
remote from twentieth century culture. With Saussure, Proust, Einstein and Picasso, Freud
and his movement are part of the modernist cultural revolution that asked: what
is.questions? Asking what is the human mind? psychoanalysis has radically reshaped the
way we understand subjectivity and sexuality, and the subjectified production of meaning
through word and image.
The second response, argued persuasively in this volume by Mieke Bal, involves
recognising that psychoanalysis is the major theorisation of the constitution of sexual
difference. For feminists, from the earliest publications of psychoanalysis at the beginning
of the twentieth century, down to the revival of feminist discourse at its end, psychoanalysis
has held open a theoretical space otherwise not offered in other social or cultural theories
for examining sexuality, gender and sexual difference. These are, importantly, not
synonymous. It is precisely psychoanalytical theory that takes us beyond any idea of given,
innate sexed and sexual identities, or sexualities and beyond theories of gender : socially
constructed or performative notions of meanings created for sex differences which frame all
discussions in terms of a heteronormative man/woman difference. Psychoanalysis enables us
to theorise sexual difference as the very problem of creating, accessing, negotiating and
inevitably failing to occupy sexually differentiated, historically contingent, psycho-linguistic
positions named masculinity and femininity that are not synonymous with our sexualities,
desires or phantasies. Such positions, hinged between undefined undetermined corporalities
and the pre-determining signs (he/she, man/woman) provided in language, are not about
men and women (a symmetrical pairing of two sexes destined for each others completion
given in biology or shaped socially). Masculinity and femininity, unevenly distributed

between and accessed by human subjects incompletely, define systems of differentiation

and, above all, asymmetrical effects. These effects (never essences) hierarchically privilege
the signifier masculine as a positivised, if always phantasmatic term, while rendering
feminine, not the equal complement, but a negated, cipher-like other, consolidating, through
its lack as simply the minus term, the positive illusion of the masculine as a sign of presence
and identity. In providing, therefore, the theoretical terms to think about sexual difference as
an asymmetrical hierarchy of impossible and unstable positions and effects, psychoanalysis
adds considerable theoretical potential to our thinking about and transforming the meanings
and positions created for masculinity and femininity in culture under the naturalised myths
of gender and sex. It also enables us to study the relays of that hierarchy of constitutive
difference on a plus/minus logic, into other phantasmatic axes of power such as race. The
colonial and racialised other is comparably positioned in this logic of plus and minus,
presence and absence and its attendant desires and narcissistic anxieties about lack. 5
In this volume, Bracha Ettinger, a close but differentiating feminist reader of the
later, often unpublished theoretical revisions of Jacques Lacan, the theoretical mouthpiece of
sexual difference formed by [symbolic] castration that shapes this phallic logic of
plus/minus, plots out the implications of this classic model of sexual difference in
psychoanalysis. Reading against its phallocentric grain, she produces from within its own
changing theoretical territory, a radical shift that transforms its deepest aporia, the feminine
as a sexual difference that is not premissed on the feminine as simply the negative
difference from the masculine. 6 Ettinger names her supplementary signifier that expands
the symbolic, the matrixial that she has been researching and elaborating for over twenty
years at the intersection of her own painting practice and her practice as a psychoanalyst.
Here she offers a matrixial re-reading of two different but key literary texts that are, none
the less, theoretical: Freuds failed case-study of the hysteric he named Dora [ida
Bauer](1905) and Margurite Duras novel The Ravishment of Lol Stein (1964). She reposes
Freuds despairing admission of defeat before the enigma of the feminine: what does a
woman want, by reposing it to show that feminine desire and desirability is forged in a
question posed by the girl not to a Man but to another Woman. To Doras longing
contemplation of the Madonna, Adriana Cerne returns in the final essay in the volume,
drawing on Ettingers theory of a matrixial gaze and metramorphosis7 to re-examine key
questions of feminist film theory and feminist film practice in relation to visual pleasure in
the feminine language of desire in a poetic reading of the final shot of Chantal Akermans
film News from Home (1976).
Psychoanalysis has been mobilised by feminist theorists to understand the hinge
between the socio-economic structures of phallocentric/patriarchal societies and the
subjectivities of its individual constituents, each of whom is accessed to the cultural
formation through psycho-linguistic processes that involve imaginary identifications and
submission to the symbolic systems of language through which alone we can articulate an
I.8 Psychoanalytical theory of how the sexed, speaking human subject is formed from the
animal infans Latin for without speech - provides the missing link, as it were, between the
larger social and cultural field of historical social relations and the conditions of individual
and subjective involvement, structuration and negotiation as a historical but also passionate,
affective and thinking being. No other theoretical discipline defines the problematic of the
creation of the speaking and sexed subject, the vagaries and ambivalences of sexualities and
their excess through the specific workings of the unconscious, and hence the possibilities of
transformation. Perhaps one of the most misunderstood of Freuds pronouncements, the
significance of sexuality in human subjectivity, provides the theoretical resources for
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thinking about art itself as an activity, as well as its specific processes and modes. Freuds
scandalous proposition of infantile sexuality a passionate pursuit of pleasure not at all tied
to what we think of as adult, genital or reproductive sexual aims, lays down a foundation of
drives, aims, objects, frustrations, displacements, and sublimations that provide the structural
characteristics of our adult activities. This is not to reduce humans to children, but to lend
to our adult, measured and oblivious lives, the energetic traces of the intense passions and
anxieties into which the becoming-human infant is born. Thus psychoanalytical readings of
the image offered here are not iconographic, teasing out a hidden, neurotic content. They are
structural, thinking about the processes and forms that bear the stamp of these intensities
and formative matrices of sexually differenced subjectivities.
Finally, the co-emergence of art/cultural history as a scholarly and critical discipline
in later nineteenth century German-language culture at the same time as Freuds foundation
of the psychoanalytic movement in Vienna, ensures that psychoanalysis has always been a
party to modern re-thinking about arts and cultures histories and meanings. Most of the
originating thinkers and critics in the discipline were aware, if not of psychoanalysis itself
though many were - of the sources in Nietzsche and other thinkers that also formed Freuds
ideas about irrationality, the unconscious and split subject.9 By the 1930s, many artists and
art historians were keenly interested in what it offered to artists and to aesthetics. I could
mention Adrian Stokes or Meyer Schapiro to name but a few. 10
By the same token, from its start, art was studied by psychoanalysts as a
supplementary archive for the study of subjectivity and its fantasies. Psychoanalysis strove to
comprehend creativity in human subjectivity towards whose analysis psychoanalysis could
make its specific contributions about sublimation, repressed memory, anxiety, defence,
eroticism, delusion and above all the coded structure of psychic representation by
displacement and condensation, metonymy and metaphor, in the dream which, with the
joke, is the paradigm for the poetic and aesthetic image. The opening essay in this volume
addresses one of Freuds earliest forays into analytical criticism of a novella at whose heart
was an image, a Roman bas-relief of a running woman, delusively fixated upon by a young
archaeologist of the ancient world who has turned to lapidary fixation in lieu of living
eroticism. Freuds writings on artists such as Leonardo, on Michelangelos Moses, as well as
his references to Greek myth, European literature and drama are already well known as are
some of Melanie Kleins or Julia Kristevas studies in art, creativity and literature.11
There is, therefore, nothing novel about the creative intersection of psychoanalysis
and the study of the arts. What of the image specifically? In the last quarter of the last
century, there was a renewed engagement fostered by the cultural dissemination of the work
of Jacques Lacan. Lacans teaching re-read Freudian writings through the prism of semiotics
and structuralism, neo-Hegelianism and phenomenology as well as Kleinian revisions of the
archaic period of infancy. As influential as his work was challenging, and even baffling to lay
readers, Lacan energised the interactions between psychoanalysis and the intellectual field
of arts and humanities through participation in the intellectual revolutions of Paris circa 1968
which included the politicised re-emergence of feminist discourse. 12 The Paris-based
Marxist-feminist group Psychoanalyse-Politique already acknowledged the double necessity for
social and psychic theories to effect radical change.13
After 1968, the unfinished business of the modernisation and theorisation of sexual
difference, initiated within the first and still scandalous Freudian revolution was resumed
beyond the professional field of the psychoanalytical movement. Psychoanalysis was taken
up in the Anglo-phone world through the impact of Lacanian psychoanalytical innovations
on emergent film theory mediated by theorists such as Christian Metz and Raymond Bellour.
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Lacans work on the mirror phase and on its revision in his 1963 seminar as the gaze as
objet a contributed a further revolution in which the paradigms of art or literary history that
had shaped film studies. Authorship, the great work, expression, formalism gave way to a
reconceptualisation of the apparatus as a whole. Instead of studying a discrete film (or art
work), we moved on to analyse cinema as a system that comprehended the conditions of
industrial capitalist production, creating as the means of its ideological effectivity a structured
relation between spectator and textuality in conditions of imaginary capture that were
founded on the specular and the scopic dimensions of subjectivity and sexuality that Freud
had intimated but never fully theorised.14 Terms that are now so commonplace as to have
been banalised in cultural theory, namely the spectator and the gaze broke the mould of art
history or film historys conventional attention to authors and their expressive works by
attending to our investments in looking. Combined with the concept of the text (a weaving
of many threads of potential meaning drawn from both the maker and the culture of making
rather than the film or art work as discrete, expressive communication), spectator and gaze
need to be recognised as conceptual tools that allowed radical changes in how we studied
practices of representation. Spectator, gaze and text challenge the idealist and romantic
notions of a self-defining artist creating personal meaning and depositing it in the art or film
where the viewer or reader merely receives it in an appraising manner. Instead, the
processes of producing meaning are stretched between the decentred if not entirely
displaced producer and the productivity of reading/viewing through the active semiotic
processes of textuality that always take place in culture and history. This, furthermore, means
that there is no one meaning secured by the projected fiction of the author as origin before
and outside the text, art work or film. The activity of cultural analysis is always a situated,
ethical process of reading the meaning-producing elements of the cultural languages and
forms that are always already culturally embedded in histories and moments, but are
infinitely negotiable and productive of meaning at all levels. In this space, furthermore, the
disciplinary divisions between literature, art and cinema break down to allow us to work with
the processes of representation that involved linguistic/visual elements and poetics in
complex relays and overlaps.15
While Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalytical schools offered materials for
philosophy, ethics, literature, poetry as well as art, a decisive historical feature of the later
twentieth century, probably as itself a symptom of its own increasingly spectacular turn in
postmodern culture, was the attention to a dimension of subjectivity, sexuality and meaningmaking that we can provisionally identify with the image and the scene/seen, even while
changing our understanding of what these are.
Freudian legends of the subject posits two decisive moments, or scenes that involve
seeing. The primal scene where an infant may witness its parents sexual congress, and a
later encounter with the sexual specificity of the female body that precipitates the subject
into the crises of castration anxiety. In both cases, Freud reverses the typical association of
perception with knowledge. What is seen cannot be comprehended. Its meaning eludes the
subject because the scene it witnesses occurs prior to the existence of any psychological
apparatus through which it could be apprehended. None the less, the sight leaves a trace
whose affects will be loaded onto successive sights that retrospectively confer their
meanings belatedly onto the originarily indecipherable primal scene.
In the other, later, scene of the sight of genital difference, an event in the realm of
sight potentially holds open traumatic meanings about the possibility of mutilation, to escape
which psychological defences come into play to re-write the seen, or to write over its
threatening implications. This is the foundation of the structure of fetishism, which involves
5

simultaneously knowing and not-knowing in the same endless circle of fright and disavowal
that calls forth the fetish to disavow the very knowledge that it will commemorate. Both
situations are scenes, as indeed is another scenario used by Freud to discuss masochism in
his essay A Child is Being Beaten.16 Freud theoretically conjures up for the reader an image,
a situation in which the minds eye sees a scene involving the formative effects of an
encounter experienced not verbally but visually . Yet in describing what happens internally as
its psychic imprinting, Freud has to propose a kind of speaking of the subject to a him/her
self that will become a him/herself precisely as the effect of the incomplete cognition of this
encounter. The effect of the traumatic, inexplicable sight that is witnessed is to generate the
place of its inscription: a phantasy explanation an explanation not yet in language,
communicable and hence to be checked against any one elses or common understanding.
Phantasy is already an interpretation framed by the premature psychological state of the
subject with its limited resources for explaining the possible meanings of sights that are
traumatic i.e. have an impact that cannot yet be known- but have not yet a meaning for the
subject. It is this gap, between the traumatic impact of encounter with some intimations of
sexuality, desire and sexual difference in the field of vision and the childs integration into
the cultural world of language which provides the structure of communicable and shared
meanings, that generates the realm of phantasy. It is phantasy that was the special concern
for Lacan in his development of a theory of the registers across which human subjectivity is
thus stretched: the Real (events without meaning hence happening at what could be called
the corpo-real level of non-verbal intensities and affects), the Imaginary (the level of
phantasy and its key element, the image) and the Symbolic ( the realm of thought and
linguistically signified meaning).
Lacans infamously early
work positing the mirror phase took up the incomplete theorisation of the spectacular
dimension of human subjectivity implied in Freuds metaphors of scenarios and mise-en-scne.
These theatrical and cinematic metaphors are as inevitable as they are significant in
reminding us of the relays between modern cultural technologies and forms and
psychoanalysis as a theoretical resource for noticing and exploring their implications. The
implications of the mirror phase are taken up in this volume in a number of papers, notably
Korean art historian Young-Paik Chun/Chun Young-Paiks detailed analysis of the inhuman
image in the work of French painter Paul Czanne and in the important study by the late
Andrea Fisher of documentary photographs of working women by American woman
photographers in the 1940s.
These papers also point to the range of ways of reading images made possible by
working with the implications of Lacanian hypotheses about a moment in human becoming
that involves the assumption of the image. This contradicts common-sense notions of our
having eyes to see so that an image is understood to be a perceived mimesis of something in
the world, which we recognise for its likeness and process perceptually and intellectually in
one cognitive movement. Lacan posits, as does Freud, the infant as pre-or even not yet
human. To be a human subject is not a matter of simple biological development. It is a
matter of psychological precipitation that is, in fact, a tragic tale of loss.
The psyche is precipitated in the human subject by the gap that lies between the
huge neurological potentials with which the human baby is born and its complete physical
prematurity that makes it unable to survive without intervention from an Other; from the
start intersubjectivity must be established. Furthermore, in such life and death dependence,
the infant will be physically subjected to extremes of desperate lack hunger, cold,
comfortlessness that register as the imminence of annihilation and absolute bliss
6

plenitude, warmth, comfort that overcome, erase and envelop the child in an ecstatic state
between pleasure and pain named jouissance for a moment. In the patterning of swoops
between these extremes begins the grooving of what will become the psychic space that is
called forth to hold and register these currents of alternating anxieties, intensities and bliss. It
is here that the shift from what animals have: instincts which are neuro-chemical
prepatterned responses that foster survival, give way to what Freud theorised as the drives
pathways and their energies surging towards the satisfactions that are associated initially with
survival, namely nourishment, but which simultaneously become supplemented by
associated experiences of comfort, movement, pleasure, and significantly contact physical,
scopic and acoustic. Drives, furthermore, because of the infants dependency on something
other than its own capacities, are characterised by having aims : satisfaction achieved by
means objects, that will do the satisfying. Initially, these are partial: the breast, milk, and so
forth and later they will be consolidated in others (hence the field of Kleinian psychoanalysis
that contested Freuds drive-base theory with a study of the archaic world of the childs
earliest object-relations). In the initial turbulence of early, archaic relations that not yet
differentiated into boundaried self and others, certain areas of the infants body become
intensely, erotically, associated with the play of these life-seeking drives that are attended
with increasing surplus: pleasure. The mouth and digestive tract are obvious candidates. But
Freud specified and Lacan elaborated the scopic drive: the eroticisation, that is, the libidinal
investment with the potential to bring satisfaction of the drives, of the field of vision,
rendering eyes infantile-erotic organs and the gaze of the m/Other ( a term explained more
fully by Bracha Ettinger in this volume reminding us of the femininity of the primary other
before she is recognised as the/my Mother in the Oedipal triangle) an object of lost desire.
Andrea Fishers lyrical study of a photograph of a woman asleep in her car, reprinted here as
an exemplary work of psychoanalytical reading of the photographic image, plots out the
complexity and profundity of our psychic involvement with the field of vision because of the
many levels of anxiety and pleasure, phantasy and projection to which this archaic legacy and
its rewritings give rise.
Lacans theory of the mirror phase first posited the specific role of the specular in
the formation of human subjectivity. The not-yet-subject can only become a subject if the
conditions for imagining oneself as a discrete I are laid down . But these conditions have to
enter the subject from outside, from the field of the Other, from those Others already there
in language and culture who mediate the latter to the baby Lacan imagined as an hommelette
punning on the notion of a not yet man/homme and the broken eggs of the omelette. Thus
the metaphor of the mirror phase is not about the self-knowing child looking into the mirror
and recognising itself a logical impossibility if it can only have the basis of an I as a result
of this misrecognised encounter. It is about a network of looks between baby,
screen/mirror, Other in the mirror and outside that marks out a field of vision within which
the subject will be found/displaced by the gaze of an Other. It is a theory of another
scenario possibly performed with actual mirrors, but phantasmatically happening over an
twelve month period in so far as the baby witnesses the constant representation of
humanness to it from the world around it. The adults faces, looks, handling, words, and
practices are all the mirrors through which an imago is being formed that will be projected
from the screen of culture into the baby. Recognition is more a moment of active alignment
than perceptual understanding of the imago. Lacan speaks of the capture of the baby by the
image: something in it fascinates and draws the baby to what it offers as an ideal beyond its
own experienced and oscillating incoherence. In the mirror phase, the baby takes into itself
this other the imago - as a kind of armature around which to arrange its chaotic and
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disconnected sensations and impulses into an internalised phantasy of a boundaried,

territorialised proto-subject. Thus does the subject come to have a body as its imaginary
space with its skin as psychic boundary. Its apertures become frontiers marking inside and
outside as the terms of self and other. This theory poses the paradox of the alien origin of
the self as an effect of internalising an imago /from an Other so the baby held up in the
mirror appears to be self-defining and supporting in contrast to the shapelessness the baby
itself feels. The apparent recognition is always a mis-recognition of an ideal-other that is
enthralling but also a rival leading to an identification with the ideal that is incorporated to
provide the skeleton for a self that is at heart alienated. It is this formative structure that
enables us to begin to theorise our fascination with the image, our capture by image culture,
our phantasies of identification with what is not us: heroes, film stars, celebrities, characters.
The workings of ideology, advertisement, ideological colonisation, visual pleasure in art and
cinema are massively enlarged by this theoretical concept.
Lacan was, however, to recognise deep logical flaws in this thesis.17 In his 1963
seminar he developed the concept of the gaze as objet a object a : another baffling formula
that is well-worth struggling to understand.18 The reader of this book will soon realise how
deeply dependent psychoanalytical theory is on metaphors. Here we need the metaphor of a
kind of cloth or web. According to classic Freudian-Lacanian theory, the infants passage to
human subjectivity is precipitated not by natural development but by a series of more or less
traumatic severances from its confusion with the world and others. Thus the beginning is
posited as a kind of undifferentiated enmeshment in which the flows of intensities and
energies that shuttle the baby between extremes of despair and bliss pulsate across its as yet
undefined corporeality in continuity with everything. Slowly slight separations occur
through space and sight allowing the caretaker/mothers face to come into view and be
associated with the bliss of fulfilment. With each advance in cognition and location,
however, comes the chilling threat of separation from that which she holds the breast, the
milk, the love, that are vital for survival and may, because they are not continuous with the
baby, be withheld. Thus, in order to become a subject, the baby has to be cut out from the
continuous cloth of its archaic undifferentiated state of continuity with the world and its
need-fulfilling partial objects. Where these separations occur, a trace, a scar is left on the
now external skin border of the psyche, marking the severance that renders what was once
continuous with the child as lost. Thus, and this is paradoxical, the breast only comes to be
registered as the lost-breast. Before its loss it was but there. Only with the gap, does it
inherit/signify longing. The mothers gaze becomes longed for only as something from
which the child is now cut: it is a lost-gaze. What it was that is now lost also has no real
shape or meaning. Its register in the psyche is only as the psychic trace of a lostness for
which the subject that can only become a subject if this has happened, is condemned to
mourn. So Lacanian theory beautifully and poetically because this is not everyday logic
conjures up this tragic condition of subjectivity as eternal mourning (that is what desire is)
not for its lost objects but its never known but bliss-producing pre-objects as lostnesses that
carve the very space of the subject as this shape in a tissue of scarified wounds. The subject
is condemned to impossible desire. Thus the subject will forever scan the world for the objets
a (that we suggest are the mothers body, breast, voice, gaze and so forth). But if the subject
encountered the objet a as object, the subject would be knocked out of the picture, because
the subject is only and effect when it is severed from its pre-objects whose lostness is the
negative field from which its delusory positive is cut. This model ha, however, hugely
gendered implications. Lacan argues that what the subject is cut from the maternal gaze,
touch, voice and breast i.e. elements of the corporeal, sensory zones of the real, are lost as
8

the condition of subjective emergence. The feminine-maternal is hence cast into the realm
beyond knowing and meaning, the realm Ettinger names Woman-Other-Thing that lies
beyond primary repression marked in the Lacanian scheme by psychic scars or objets a.
In this volume, Bracha Ettinger theorises through a reading of a novel that has
already thought in advance of the theory that comes to recognise it - another scenario and
another kind of gazing that has specific repercussions for theorising femininity beyond this
phallic model of the cut. She writes of links, encounters and shared events that involve
notions of trans-subjective transformations of subjects momentarily caught in shared
scenarios and encounters in which strings attach various poles that co-vibrate.
Paradigmatically
the
analytic encounter and its transferences already intimate shifts within subjects that occur
when borders are opened without confusion. The aesthetic experience itself is another
instance of encounter-exchange of shared intimacy between partially-open borders of several
subjective partners where a unknown other, the viewer, may process and make sense of an
others the art works materials. Hitherto only thinkable in mystical or idealistic terms,
feminist matrixial theory offers a way to understand aesthetic and transferential experiences
that we not only have when reading, watching or seeing art forms, but which, we can show,
art forms have already intimated and raised to the level of cultural visibility. She also shows
starkly what is the cost to subjects, particularly feminine subjects, if this sphere is not
respected but brutally ignored.
In this volume, subtitled transdisciplinary perspectives in cultural analysis, theory
and history, the authors do not operate within the confines of disciplines: art history,
cultural studies, philosophy, literary criticism. That does not mean, however, that the
specificity of either their objects of study or their methods are eroded in favour of some new
interdisciplinary confection. Art History has certain protocols. For most of my academic
career, I have been in conflict with many of its normalised conventions for the study of art.
What I am seeking is not an alternative disciplinary home, but a reconfigured continuity with
the long history of intellectual challenge and theoretical research into methods adequate to
the complexity of that which we claim to study. To my mind, there is no going back to
business as usual untransformed by the intellectual revolutions of the later 20th century. Nor
is there any pretending that we have moved on from them. What has changed is not the
horrible addition of a lot of alien theories imported from philosophy or literary criticism or
film studies or psychoanalysis. Change has happened at the level of concepts.
The Art History or Literary or Film Studies that think in terms of artists, authors,
movements, styles, genres, periods, greats and minors will remain the curatorial keepers of
heritage and tourism, dependent on class-ridden notions of civilisation and the sponsorship
of corporations. Serious intellectual work acknowledges that advances have been made
because we now think with concepts that transcend curatorial categories of artist, name,
period, school and style.19
Visuality, sexuality, space, gaze, spectator, difference, resistance, poeisis,
identification, and the image inform the terms of analysis in this collection. Psychoanalysis
in all the aspects I have discussed so far informs, but critically, the work done on and with
these concepts. Melancholia, trauma, hysteria, delusion and the dream are specific areas
addressed through its terms. All the authors, however, share a method: close-readings of
the image in texts that require all the wealth of scholarship, historical documentation and
attention to cultural, historical, classed, gendered and sexual specificity. Thus the
intervention we hope to make in art history and its relatives comes through the expanded
space of transdisciplinary cultural analysis, theory and history in which the articulation of the latter
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three terms is performed in each piece of writing while the transdisciplinary allows space and
specificity to each area of cultural practice that is being addressed: video installation,
conceptual exhibition, conceptual word-image writing, abstract painting, documentary
photography, modernist self-portraiture, and avant-garde film making.
Being faithful to the still rich potential of theoretically precise, historically specific
and practice-specific analysis, this collection presents a varied set of engagements between
psychoanalysis and the image that address one other, often asked question: what is the
relevance of psychoanalysis beyond its culture of origin? No one can simply predict. The
work done here on artists from Korea and Japan and by Korean and Japanese art historians
provides a more nuanced space for considering this as a matter of concepts and practices
that travel and traverse shared and diffferentiated intellectual and artistic spaces. Karyn Balls
substantial analysis of the critical difficulties and turns in post-colonial and identitarian
politics of reading the work of Theresa Kyung Cha in the 1990s reveals both how hard it is
to avoid the very illusions of identity and the desire for masterful knowing that
psychoanalytical theory helps us to recognise, and how helpful psychoanalysis itself becomes
as a monitor of our delusions and desires as scholars.20
As Jacques Derrida painfully pointed out, the frequent mistake that is made in
working with and on Freud is not to imagine that Freuds work itself changed the terms of
all of our work as scholars. To work with psychoanalysis, apsychoanalytically, to imagine
that ones desires, fantasies, aggressions and delusions are not always in play, is to fall at the
very first hurdle. Freuds texts have themselves been studied for their own unconscious and
this appears in his own private museum, discussed in this volume. We need not merely to
work with but also to work on psychoanalysis. Mieke Bal explores the troubling implications
of psychoanalysis as something we cannot do without, without denying ourselves a
theoretical route into subjectivity and its plays. Yet it is implicated. Her paper moves
between a study of the dream-as-artwork-as-dream re-theorised by an installation by Bill
Viola and the British analyst Christopher Bollas and a reading of an installation by American
artists Kathleen Gilje and Joseph Grigely who staged a parodic exhibition on a recovered
painting by Italian Baroque painter Caravaggio restored to reveal its eroticised
underpainting by Gilje. In this installation parody of art historical, psychoanalytical and
museal conventions, our desires for origins and truths behind layers of obscuring amnesia
are played off against the projections and fantasies in play in scholarly interpretation. Mieke
Bal raises here the questions of sexuality and sexual difference to allow a mobility that
responds to the invitation to play that allows the artist to perform art history with
psychoanalysis.
It was precisely because psychoanalysis emerged in the hybrid space between
modernist aspirations for verifiable, valid, scientific understanding of its object: the human
subject, and, on the other hand, a consciousness that the subject is far more complex and
fissured by its own aporias and repressions, projections and phantasies : that it was a figure
of oblivion and memory, that we can learn from Freud ways of working self-critically, with
the necessary reserve of inevitable self-exposure and blindess. The monitory example of
Freud and the undoing of fixed forms of knowledge that saw Freud ranging for his resources
over art, literature, anthropology and archaeology as well as in dialogic intimacy with actual,
suffering individuals who lay upon his carpet-covered couch amidst his collection of
antiquities has been exceptionally fruitful for feminist practice. Without real intention, this
collection is written about women by women in the strange affectionate, respectful and
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never uncritical engagement with the still open, challenging and productive legacy of the
psychoanalysis Freud founded writing it in the presence of so many images - but that so
many others have taken up, extended and made vivid in relation to the challenges of
understanding not only the image in contemporary culture and cultural analysis but the
image-makers and the image-readers.
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1

One example might be a fellow volume in this series, After Criticism: New Responses to Art and
Performance edited by Gavin Butt, Malden and Oxford: Blackwell, 2005 who raised in his introduction
the query as whether theory was any more a fertile ground or had in fact become a new prisonhouse of
2
For a critical countering see Jane Flax, Can Psychoanalysis Survive in the Post-modern West? From
Disputed Subjects: Essays on Psychoanalysis, Politics and Philosophy, ( New York; Routledge,1993)
3
This position is argued here by Mieke Bal and others, but see Mieke Bal, Louise Bourgeois Spider: the
Architecture of Art-Writing, (Chicago: University of Chicago, 2001)
4
Griselda Pollock, ed. Generations and Geographies in the Visual Arts: Feminist Readings, London:
Routledge, 1996.
5
The strongest case for this cross reading between post-colonial theory and psychoanalysis is put forward
in Homi Bhabha,The Other Question: The Stereotype and Colonial Discourse, Screen, 1983, vol. 24.
No.6, 18-36.
6
Her matrixial theory has been published in many arenas over the last ten years. For a long introduction
and a key paper see the special issue of Theory, Culture and Society, 2004, Vol..21. Griselda Pollock,
Thinking the Feminine:Aesthetic Practice as an Introduction to Bracha Ettinger and the Concepts of
Matrix and Metramorphosis, 5-69 and Bracha L. Ettinger, Weaving the Woman Artist with-in-the
Matrixial Encounter-Event, 69-94.
7
Bracha Ettinger, Matrix and Metramorphosis, Differences, 1992, Vol.4, no. 3, 176-210; The Matrixial
Gaze, (University of Leeds,: Feminist Arts and Histories Network Press, 1994) reprinted in Bracha
Ettinger, Matrixial Gaze and Borderspace: Essays on the feminine and the artwork, ed. Brian Massumi,
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005)
8
The founding text of this tendency is Gayle Rubins ever influential The Traffic in Women: Notes on the
Political Economy of Sex, in Rayn a R. Reiter, ed. Towards an Anthropology of Women, New York:
Monthly Review Press, 1975, 157-210.
99
Freuds own reading of Jacob Burckhardt, himself influenced by Nietzsches The Birth of Tragedy is a
case in point. For further details on Freuds reading see Sander L. Gilman et al., Reading Freuds
Reading,(new York; New York University Press, 1994) See also Henri Ellenberger, The Discovery of the
Unconscious:The History and Evolution of Dynamic Psychiatry, (New York: Basic Books, 1970)
10
On Roger Frys ambivalent response to psychoanalysis and art history see Roger Fry, Art and
Psychoanalysis, (London: Hogarth Press, 1974) and my Does Art Think? in Dana Arnold and Mrgaret
Iverson, ed. Art and Thought , (Malden and Oxford: Blackwells, 2003), ppp. 129-156.
11
Many of these are collected in Volume 14 of the Penguin Freud Library, Sigmund Freud, Art and
Literature, trans. James Strachey, ( London; Penguin Books, 1985). See also Sarah Kofman, The
Childhood of Art: An Interpretation of Freuds aesthetics, trans Winifred Woodhull, (New York; Columbia
University Press, 1988) Julia Kristeva, Desire in Language: A Semiotic Approach to Literature and Art,
ed. Leon Roudiez, (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1979). Melanie Klein, Infantile Anxiety-Situations Reflected
in a work of art and in the creative impulse, Love, Guilt and Reparation and other works 1921-45,
(London: Vintage Books, 1998) 210-18
12
I recommend Darian Leaders and Judy Groves superb Lacan for Beginners (London: Icon Books, 1995)
or Elizabeth Grosz, Jacques Lacan: A Feminist Introduction, (London: Routledge, 1990)
13
This group was the inspiration in part for Juliet Mitchells decisive intervention Psychoanalysis and
Feminism, (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1974)
14
The key text here is Christian Metz, The Imaginary Signifier, in C. Metz, Psychoanalysis and Cinema:
the Imaginary Signifier, (Basingstoke: MacMillan, 1982)
15
On the necessity for going beyond the word /image opposition see Mieke Bal, Reading Rembrandt:
Beyond the Word-Image Opposition, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991)

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16

On the problems of seeing and knowing in these Freudian texts see Stephen Heath, Difference Screen,I
1978, Vol.19, no.3, 51-112. On the feminist implications of theChild is being beaten see Mary Ann
Doane, The Desire to Desire: The Womans Film of the 1940s, (Basingstoke:MacMillan, 1987).
17
On the perplexities of the original essay, The Mirror Stage as formative of the function of the I as
revealed in psychoanalytical experience,[1949] in Jacques Lacan, Ecrits trans Alan Sheridan,
(London:Tavistock Books, 1977,) pp 1-7, see Jane Gallop, Where to Begin? Reading Lacan, (Ithaca:
Cornell University Press, 1985), pp. 74-92.
18
Jacques Lacan The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis , [1963] ed. Jacques Alain Miller,
trans. Alan Sheridan, (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1977. Bracha Ettinger defines the objet a as
residing on the borderlines of corporeal, sensory and perceptive zones, but it eludes them all, itself being a
psychic entity produced and lost according to the lanes carved by libidinal energy invested in the drives. It
is a borderline mental inscription of the residues of the separation from the partial object.The Matrixial
Gaze, op.cit. p.1.
19
For the strong explanation of the move from theories to concepts produced by theories see Mieke Bal,
Travelling Concepts in the Humanities: A Rough Guide, (Toronto; University of Toronto Press, 2002.
20
For a world perspective on psychoanalysis in an international frame of analysis se Gananath
Obeyesekere, The Work of Culture: Symbolic Transformation in Psychoanalysis and Anthropology,
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990)

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