<p>Aneta Grzeszykowska, <em>Untitled</em>, 1993/2006. Courtesy of the artist, Raster Gallery and Lyles & King</p>
<p>Aneta Grzeszykowska, <em>Untitled</em>, 1993/2006. Courtesy of the artist, Raster Gallery and Lyles & King</p>

No. 35: Visualising Psychoanalysis

Managing editors: Katarzyna Bojarska, Joanne Morra

Aneta Grzeszykowska, Untitled, 1993/2006. Courtesy of the artist, Raster Gallery and Lyles & King

This issue was supported by the Film School in Łódź, SWPS University of Social Sciences and Humanisties, Warsaw, and the Ministry of Education and Science in the framework of "Development of Academic Journals," project number RCN/SP/0698/2021/12.

Table of Contents

Introduction

  1. Visualising Psychoanalysis

    ”Visualising Psychoanalysis”, View. Theories and Practices of Visual Culture 35 (2023), https://doi.org/10.36854/widok/2023.35.2711

    Introduction to the issue on visualising psychoanalysis, taking as its point of departure the cover photograph by Aneta Grzeszykowska depicting a wounded eye / I.

    keywords: eye; psychoanalysis; image; art; visual culture

Viewpoint

  1. Body-Mind-Soul

    Joanne Morra, Heather Agyepong
    Joanne Morra, Heather Agyepong, ”Body-Mind-Soul”, View. Theories and Practices of Visual Culture 35 (2023), https://doi.org/10.36854/widok/2023.35.2708

    A visual essay by Joanne Morra on the work of multidisciplinary artyist Heather Agyepong

    keywords: photography; ego; self; body; performance; shadow; imagination; psychoanalysis; cathartic method

CloseUp

  1. Moses, the Egyptian and the Big Black Mammy of the Antebellum South: Freud (with Kara Walker)

    Joan Copjec
    Joan Copjec, ”Moses, the Egyptian and the Big Black Mammy”, View. Theories and Practices of Visual Culture 35 (2023), https://doi.org/10.36854/widok/2023.35.2697

    Polish translation of a chapter from Joan Copjec's Imagine There Is No Woman devoted to the reading of Kara Walker's art with Sigumnd Freud's Moses and Monotheism.

    keywords: Kara Walker; Sigmund Freud; racism; Antebellum; trauma

  2. From “Lure” to “Cure”. From Critical Spectatorship to a Relational Space of Reverie

    Maria Walsh
    Maria Walsh, ”From “Lure” to “Cure””, View. Theories and Practices of Visual Culture 35 (2023), https://doi.org/10.36854/widok/2023.35.2685

    In her article, the author proposes to address the psychic ‘work’ of the moving image by aligning it with aspects of post-Bionian psychoanalytic theories that allude to virtual spaces as sites of reverie that, in enabling pre-linguistic ‘feelings’ to find expression, might produce shifts in thinking about disturbing or traumatic conditions and experiences. Her approach to psychoanalytic theory and the moving image is tested out in relation to one case study: Jeamin Cha’s artists’ film Sound Garden (2019), a film that refers to practices of counselling engaged in by four female protagonists who, on the soundtrack, reflect on their work and well-being in the context of neoliberalism in South Korean institutions.

    keywords: moving image; art; psychoanalysis; Jeamin Cha; immaterial labour; counselling

  3. The Gaze Through Which I Am Photo-Graphed: On Writing with Light in Agnieszka Brzeżańska’s Photography

    Katarzyna Oczkowska
    Katarzyna Oczkowska, ”The Gaze Through Which I Am Photo-Graphed”, View. Theories and Practices of Visual Culture 35 (2023), https://doi.org/10.36854/widok/2023.35.2683

    The text is an analysis of Agnieszka Brzeżańska's photographs from the How To Shine In Public series, created in Tokyo in 1997–2001 in the context of the gaze theory as an objet petit presented by Jacques Lacan in Seminar XI of 1964 and the feminist deconstruction of psychoanalysis. I refer to the practice of écriture féminine as conceived by Hélène Cixous and its reformulation within the parler femme concept by Luce Irigaray. Both Lacan's theory and its feminist reformulation serve to rewrite the visual field of photo-graphics and the photographic series by Brzeżańska. I see in it the potential for the gaze to manifest itself as objet petit a, however, intercepted by the female subject, who is both the sender and the addressee of the visual expression.

    keywords: psychoanalysis; feminism; objet petit a; photography; Agnieszka Brzeżańska; Luce Irigaray; Hélène Cixous; écriture féminine; parler femme

  4. Sphinx and Gorgons: The Evolution of the Psychoanalytic Bestiary - Reinterpretations

    Małgorzata Stępnik
    Małgorzata Stępnik, ”Sphinx and Gorgons”, View. Theories and Practices of Visual Culture 35 (2023), https://doi.org/10.36854/widok/2023.35.2680

    In 1924 Beata Rank de domo Minzer (1886 – 1967) publishes an essay whose title translates as: The Role of a Woman in the Evolution of a Society. The text written by an eminent Polish born psychoanalyst is largely devoted to the (very early) reinterpretation of a specific bestiary developed by Freudians. In this constellation of figures, borrowed from the ancient imagery, a special place is occupied by female-animal hybrids and monsters: the Sphinx, Medusa, or Chimera. The main aim of this article is to trace how these character have been filtered through the prism of interpreting the écriture féminine - above all, in the spirit of Hélène Cixous, somehow foreshadowed by the early thought of Beata Rank. The considerations taken up in the text will be illustrated by chosen examples of oeuvres by contemporart Polish artists.

    keywords: psychoanalysis; monstrosity; écriture féminine; mythology; visual arts

  5. Between a “Poetical Phrase” and Being “Led into Error” in "The Interpretation of Dreams"

    Mischa Twitchin
    Mischa Twitchin, ”Between a “Poetical Phrase” and Being “Led into Error””, View. Theories and Practices of Visual Culture 35 (2023), https://doi.org/10.36854/widok/2023.35.2700

    The aim of this essay is to explore various instances of visualisation not only of psycho-analysis but in psycho-analysis – with respect to both the dynamics of transference and translation. The principal examples considered are: antiquities in Freud’s consulting room; gifts in the Freud Museum shop; the Rosetta Stone; and the translation of the “Fool’s Tower” dream in chapter six of The Interpretation of Dreams. How are relations between literal and metaphorical enacted in these examples, informing questions concerning relations between visualisation and conceptualisation in psycho-analysis? How might Freud’s claims concerning the “poetical” and “error” in the interpretation of dreams inform a reading of The Interpretation of Dreams itself?

    keywords: metaphor; transference; translation; Sigmund Freud; Interpretation of Dreams

Panorama

  1. Excreta. Psychoanalysis as Coprophany

    Katarzyna Przyłuska-Urbanowicz
    Katarzyna Przyłuska-Urbanowicz, ”Excreta. Psychoanalysis as Coprophany”, View. Theories and Practices of Visual Culture 35 (2023), https://doi.org/10.36854/widok/2023.35.2703

    The article addresses a theme that has been present in psychoanalytic discourse almost since its inception (more precisely since Sigmund Freud's Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality from 1905), and therefore intrinsically linked to it: the depiction of the repressed (and which at the same time demands to be present in the therapeutic relationship) through the figure of faeces. The metaphor of coprophany proposed in the article — literally: "the manifestation of faeces" — refers to the insertion of the repressed, and thus visually anathema-laden, into the realm of the visible, which takes place during the analytical process. If the analysis is to proceed, the therapist, and behind her the patient, must notice the existence of 'faeces', give them meaning, take a specific position towards them, and sometimes - allow them to act. Hence, the text is at the same time an attempt to describe the therapeutic experience as a confrontation with one's own 'excrement' and as a process of 'endorcism' (integrating the repressed, rather than removing it from the system, as in exorcism).

    keywords: psychoanalysis; repression; lower body stratum; psychotherapy; repulsion; shame; abject

  2. Images in a Skull

    Jakub Momro
    Jakub Momro, ”Images in a Skull”, View. Theories and Practices of Visual Culture 35 (2023), https://doi.org/10.36854/widok/2023.35.2706

    In the middle of the 1930s an unusual encounter took place. During one of his public seminars devoted to psychotic imagination and a structure of psychotic dissociation, Winfred Bion met young Samuel Beckett who made the clinical image presented by Bion a landmark of his writing practice. Abundant in his works are psychotic voices that cannot merge into one, disperse and return like traumatic acoustic specters. The image of psychosis as an experience, however, almost completely escapes him.  The author discusses attempts at grasping psychotic visuality which accompanied by the following questions: why can't psychotics be cured? Why do all the great projects of psychoanalysis lose their clashes with the images of psychosis? Above these questions, after all, hovers one more fundamental one: are we able to perceive psychotic visuality? 

    keywords: psychosis; imagination; bizarre objects; partial objects; symbolic order; imaginary; psychic catastrophe; hallucination; symptom; absence; psychoanalysis

Perspectives

  1. The Dream, Artistic Practice, and Shattered Time

    Gavin Edmonds
    Gavin Edmonds , ”The Dream, Artistic Practice, and Shattered Time”, View. Theories and Practices of Visual Culture 35 (2023), https://doi.org/10.36854/widok/2023.35.2694

    What can the coded structures of psychic representation (such as the dream-work) offer us in our understanding of the visual field? I look at how these mechanisms might be seen to operate outside of dreams, and what they might share with artistic practice. I propose to show how aspects of the oneiric process are at play in relation to a painting by Peter Paul Rubens, through a detail from another artwork long past, reappearing reconfigured in Rubens' represent. This association has other temporal implications, including art historical time through questioning the dating of previous work by Rubens, also the material mark of time, in my “making.” I suggest how the excessive nature of (my) associative artistic practice that generated this “find,” is analogous to the method of dream interpretation in psychoanalysis, and by engaging in this way, through a practice of “listening” & making a response to a work of art, I evoke unresolved affect located in the artwork and biography of Rubens.

    keywords: artistic practice; dream-work; analysis; association; shattered time

  2. Inexhaustible Looking: Photography with Psychoanalysis

    Abigail Solomon-Godeau, Katarzyna Bojarska
    Abigail Solomon-Godeau, Katarzyna Bojarska, ”Inexhaustible Looking: Photography with Psychoanalysis”, View. Theories and Practices of Visual Culture 35 (2023), https://doi.org/10.36854/widok/2023.35.2690

    A conversation with Abigail Solomon Godeau on her experience with psychoanalysis as critical tool for working with photography as a critic and curator.

    keywords: photography; psychoanalysis; looking; feminism

Snapshots

  1. Portraitists

    Katarzyna Bojarska
    Katarzyna Bojarska, ”Portraitists”, View. Theories and Practices of Visual Culture 35 (2023), https://doi.org/10.36854/widok/2023.35.2707

    A critical discussion of Laura Poitras's documentary All the Beauty and the Bloodshed (2022) on the life and work of North American photographer Nan Goldin. The author focuses on the parallels between the practices and politics of portraying the two artists, their activism and the production of memory through the visual media of photography and film.

    keywords: Nan Goldin; Laura Poitras; photography; addiction; activism; P.A.I.N.; slideshow

  2. Smashing Monuments as a Counter-Monument

    Ernst van Alphen
    Ernst van Alphen, ”Smashing Monuments as a Counter-Monument”, View. Theories and Practices of Visual Culture 35 (2023), https://doi.org/10.36854/widok/2023.35.2692

    Critical analysis of Sebastián Díaz Morales' Smashing Monuments presented within documenta fifteen.

    keywords: monuments; Sebastián Díaz Morales; documenta 15; lumbung; memory