The Dream, Artistic Practice, and Shattered Time

Introduction

As an artist/researcher interested in psychic causality in artistic practice, I look at how and why artists identify with other artists/artworks, and what processes are at work when this occurs. In this text I aim to show, through describing the process of “finding” an associative connection in a painting by Peter Paul Rubens, Minerva Protects Pax from Mars (“Peace & War”), 1629–1630 (Fig. 1), how this may be seen as analogous/equivalent to the analysis of the dream in psychoanalysis. In doing so, I suggest how the dream and the artwork might share the same processes. It should be noted that the form of this text is fragmentary in nature (fragments that carry a narrative), in keeping with the processes I am trying to describe.

Shattered time

For André Green, the dream “clearly indicates” the existence of what he describes as “shattered time,” that is “a notion of time which has very little succession according to the tripartition past/present/future, everything in my dream is pure present.”¹ This demonstrates how the dream-work unites the different periods, past/present/future, in the here and now, or what Green describes as the “pure present.” I propose this uniting of different periods of time in the “pure present” can be seen in relation to analysis, and in the construction of a painting: artistic practice.

Time and a language of the image

In a later text (2008), Green, citing Freud, states that:

[d]reams are connected with what Freud calls topographical regression. It is not a regression in time; you are not pushed back to the past. It is a regression in the way the meaning is expressed. It is expressed through images. It is a language of the image but still keeps its connection with the ordinary language.²

As Evelyne Sechaud points out (2008), Freud employs the term handling [Behandlung] to refer to the art of practicing dream-interpretation in the course of analytic treatment (1911), and that in German, Behandlung means literally “what the hand does.” Freud’s use of the term handling designates a strategy in the service of a policy.³ If this is transposed into artistic practice, the handling of the analysis of the artwork would mean making, literally: what the hand does, as part of a response to an artwork.

The analytic process

I use Sechaud’s description as it uses the dream as its model, includes topographical regression as referred to by Green above, and finds easy analogy with art practice:

In Freudian analysis based on the model of the dream, the analyst’s free-floating attention follows the movements of thought, deconstructs the discourse, carrying out, in the reverse direction, the work of secondary elaboration in order to discover, via a formal and topographical regression, the functioning of the primary processes and the unconscious representation. This is the dream-work in reverse.⁴

Again, if transposed into artistic practice, this free-floating attention would be visual “listening” and its resonance. This is followed by a process of interpretation, again quoting Sechaud:

Interpretation takes place against the background silence of listening; it is never a response to the manifest discourse. It gathers together material from diverse origins, laid down at different moments: fragments of dreams, of associations, of childhood stories, of things said at other moments in the analysis, and of different forms of acting out.⁵

If I continue the transposition into artistic practice, this can be seen as the practice of “listening” to a painting – by this I mean listening to myself “listening” to the painting, through making, as a way of gathering, exploring, and elaborating on any of the associative material (Fig. 2). This includes biographical details, art-historical references, site-specific engagement, and pictorial sources that might relate to the work’s construction. Also, who and what is being represented (both psychologically and in paint), in relation to the models used, and how this might resonate, in an autobiographical sense, over time (including musical associations/references). Essentially, to continue the listening analogy, what Gerald Edelman describes as “whatever matches is what’s amplified.”⁶

Analysis

This idea of using pictures to make an analysis (see Fig. 2) is described by Chris Hart:

Analysis is the job of systematically breaking down something into its constituent parts and describing how they relate to each other – it is not random dissection but a methodological examination. There is a degree of exploration in analysis. You can play around with the parts, rearranging them in various configurations to explore possible leads.⁷

This is the ability to create and play with images in your mind or on paper, reawakening the child in the adult. This amounts to thinking using visual pictures, without any inhibition or preconceived ideas and involves giving free rein to the imagination.⁸

Hart’s “giving free rein” finds an echo with Sechaud’s “free floating attention” of the analyst, and his “thinking using visual pictures” resonates in Freud’s “Thinking in pictures is, therefore, only a very incomplete form of becoming conscious. In some way, too, it stands nearer to unconscious processes than does thinking in words.”⁹ The idea of problem solving through the use of images can also be found in Watkins & Watkins, describing the process of “dreamwork,” how images (can) represent wishes:

According to Freud dreams represent fantasied wish fulfilments of unresolved strivings for pleasure. We are inclined to view them as the culmination in mental picture form of attempts at all kinds of problem solving. […] “Dreamwork” […], translates original motivations into images that can be acceptably perceived […] Through the tracing of this dream work process, we can understand better how these psychodynamic transactions serve to protect the individual from both inner and outer threats.¹⁰

These correlations between Freud, Hart, and Watkins & Watkins suggest the oneiric processes might be at play (to some extent) during waking hours.

Space and time (site specificity)

The making of a response (to the painting) included my visiting the National Gallery Archive (situated below the main picture galleries). The significance of site-specific engagement is described by artist Andrea Fraser:

What the concept of enactment can bring into focus, in art as in psychoanalysis, are the structures of relationships that are produced and reproduced in all forms of activity. These may include intra – or inter subjective psychological relationships – particularly relationships to objects in a psychoanalytical sense, that is, anything that becomes a focus of emotional investment […]. What enactment implies above all is that in the production and reproduction of these relationships there is always an investment, and that the meaning of the enactment, its significance, function, and effect, is intimately and inseparably tied up with that investment.¹¹

National Gallery sessions are pre-booked, and subject to conditions in relation to access and the art materials allowed (see Figs. 3, 4). The archive contains all the gallery’s contextual material surrounding the Rubens painting, including: museum correspondence, scholarly texts/articles, catalogs, press cuttings, and detailed records of conservation work, documented in photographs, diaries, and (prints of) X-rays. Site-specific engagement consisted of making drawings over a period of fifty-three sessions, usually of seven hours’ duration, punctuated by breaks. This equates to around three hundred and seventy hours on site, physically “making” a response, over a two-year period, in relation to all the material (part of this is included here).

This excessive (and unpaid) response to the painting included the re-making of the conservation documents (life-size to the painting), including the “panchromatic photograph, taken in raking light before cleaning,” 1938 (Fig. 6). This image highlights Rubens’ paint marks/brushstrokes, through the ingrained dirt.

I also re-made X-rays of the painting from 1985 (the full X-ray mosaic of the painting is made up of seventy-two plates). The X-ray gives a picture of what is beneath the surface of the painting, showing its physical history – not only Rubens’ painting process (the X-ray reveals the painting is made up of seven pieces of canvas), but also the damaged areas.¹² By a process of transference, facilitated through use of a transparent grid placed upon the research documents, I transferred the image – square by square (inch by inch) – onto my paper, through the process of drawing (see Fig. 5 for the set-up of the drawing, next to the acetate sheet with a grid, which would have the image to be copied beneath it). I eventually completed forty-eight of the plates. These pieces included the child eating fruit: plate Xxx44 (see Fig. 7). This process eventually found art-historical echoes in the child and the pose, amongst other pictorial elements (see Figs. 8, 9, 10), and, through combined biographical/pictorial associations, over time, I formed an idea, in both the psychological and imaginal senses, as to what was behind the creation of the painting.

Time in deconstruction

The existence of “shattered time” as described by Green (above), an idea of temporality that has little to do with the orderly succession of past/present/future, might be seen in relation to my making associative connections to Rubens’ “Peace & War.” First, my drawing of 2016–2017 of the X-ray made in 1985, of the 1629–1630 painting, that goes back to before the final image of 1629–1630 (as it reveals the underpainting/changes of mind by the artist), and also where damaged areas have been restored. It may also be seen in the time registers signaled through the reappearance of the pose of the figure, from the time of Rubens’ copy of the Titian painting The Worship of Venus of 1518–1519, c. 1628 (see Figs. 11, 12), which I suggest is then re-presented in Rubens’ painting of 1629–1630 (see Figs. 8, 9, 10). The latter association evokes contradictory aspects in relation to time, in relation to art historians, and to art-historical time. These include Jeremy Wood (2010),¹³ who suggests dating Rubens’ copy after Titian, after 1629–1630, and David Freedberg (1998),¹⁴ who suggests dating Rubens’ copy after Titian, but before 1629–1630.

I suggest that Rubens’ copy after Titian’s The Worship of Venus (either made from the original or another copy of Titian’s painting) influenced the pose in the 1629–1630 work (see details: Figs 8, 9, 10), and therefore, through my pictorial association that suggests its later use in a different context, I locate/shift the “art-historical time” backward.¹⁵

An association appears here in relation to the reappearance of images, as Freud suggests:

[w]e may rest assured that every wishful impulse that creates a dream to-day will re-appear in other dreams as long as it has not been understood and withdrawn from the domination of the unconscious.¹⁶

Perhaps the same can be applied to the idea of return in an artwork as I describe above (and below), in the sense of the reappearance of fragments, as a result of not being understood first time around. There is also my time in the making: around three hundred and seventy hours, through fifty-three returns to the National Gallery Archive, over a two year period. This work also generated visits to the Warburg Institute, the British Museum print room, and the V&A Museum, London, necessitated through finding/following associative pictorial references to elements in the Rubens painting. These include finding a reference in a figure from the Raphael cartoon The Sacrifice at Lystra, 1515–1516 (see Figs. 13, 14), which I suggest has been reversed in its reappearance in the Rubens painting.

There is also the reappearance of elements of an earlier drawing made by Rubens, c. 1608, after a lost work by Titian, The Allegory of Brescia, 1568 (see annotated details for reference: Figs. 15, 16). The source for this copy is unknown, as the work by Titian was destroyed by fire in 1578, and Rubens’ drawing is the only known pictorial record of the lost work, so in a way, through this return, or re-transcription, it also performs a bringing back to life.¹⁷ (I do not explore these further associations fully here, but I note them to show the excessive, indirect nature of the associative process.)

Rubens’ circumstances (timeline)

David Lomas, in The Haunted Self, maps the theoretical position of the Surrealists in relation to Freud:

Where the Surrealists were prepared to marvel at the products of the unconscious, for the psychoanalyst their only value was as the raw material of interpretation. Freud declining Breton’s request for a contribution to a collection of dreams, cites as his reason:

“that which I called the ‘manifest’ dream, is not of interest to me. I dealt with the search for ‘latent dream content’ which one can extract from the manifest dream by analytic interpretation. A collection of dreams without enclosed associations, without the dreaming’s circumstances, says nothing to me, and I can hardly imagine what it could say to others.” Freud to Andre Breton 8th Dec 1937.¹⁸

In relation to Freud’s comment: “the dreaming’s circumstances,” I include Rubens’ circumstances (and my associations), to sketch a context in relation to the creation of the painting “Peace & War,” 1629–1630:

Rubens paints the portrait of his daughter Clara Serena, c. 1616 (see above: Fig. 17).

In 1623, Clara Serena dies shortly before her 13th birthday.¹⁹

1623–1624. Rubens paints the portrait of Clara Serena (Fig. 18); some experts suggest that it may have been painted just after Clara Serena died in 1623.²⁰

In 1626, Rubens’ wife, Isabella Brant, also dies (see Fig. 19).

In 1628, Rubens travels to Spain on diplomatic duties, and identifies in an extreme way with the work of Titian, allegedly copying all the works by Titian in the Spanish royal collection.²¹ Of Rubens’ encounter with Titian in Madrid in 1628, Julius Held writes,

One cannot stress sufficiently the extraordinary aspects of this event: the very idea of a great and famous artist making, without being asked by anyone, one copy after the other, and choosing the works of only a single artist – I cannot think of any similar occurrence in the entire history of art […] His decision to copy, and to copy only Titian, could hardly have been accidental; forces more compelling must have prompted him to engage in the act of copying.²²

After leaving Madrid (by way of Antwerp), Rubens’ diplomatic duties took him to London in 1629. Rubens lodged with Balthasar Gerbier at York House, on The Strand, and set up a studio there (coincidentally, near to the site of the National Gallery, where the painting would later reside). Mark Lamster suggests that, “as a token of respect Rubens painted a portrait of Gerbier’s wife, Deborah, and their four children.”²³ Three of the Gerbier family’s children also served as models for “Peace & War.” However, the portrait of the Gerbier family, which was supposedly to be a gift to Gerbier for his hospitality in London, was never received. An inferior reproduction was made, while the original intriguingly returned with Rubens to Antwerp in 1630, remaining unfinished in his studio until his death (Fig. 20).²⁴

On returning home from London in 1630, Rubens married Helena Fourment, and an important echo appears here, in that they named their first child Clara Johanna (b. 01/18/1632, see Fig. 21). Another association is that both of Rubens’ wives shared the same day and month of death: Isabella: 07/15/1626; Helena: 07/15/1673.

Identification with the work

Rubens’ identification with the work of Titian, in the sense of re-making his works (as described above), might be seen as an example of the idea of the work identified for study being representative of the person performing the study. Intriguingly, this is proposed by psychoanalyst Sarantis Thanopulos, in relation to Freud and his text “Leonardo da Vinci and a Memory of His Childhood” (1910). Thanopulos uses the example of Freud’s “slip”: the mistranslation of the word “vulture” for “kite,” made while translating an early childhood memory of Leonardo’s (written on the verso of a sheet relating to his studies on flight). Leonardo recalls an incident where, while in his cradle, a kite came down and struck him several times in the mouth with its tail, and cites this as the origin of his concern with flight.

Thanopulos shows how/why this “slip” was performed, through a chain of associations: Egyptian symbolism of the vulture – Immaculate Conception – Leonardo’s paintings – Freud’s and Leonardo’s biographies – the prophecy of an old peasant woman – destiny – the relationship between a mother and her son.

Thanopulos suggests Freud’s slip “is an important slip made during his analytical work and gives us the opportunity to examine his unconscious desires in action within this work,”²⁵ and that Freud’s “identification with Leonardo’s phantasy allowed him to grasp his own phantasy and indirectly confer it with meaning on the level of a theoretical construction.”²⁶ Crucially, Thanopulos goes on to say: “all of us consider it almost obvious that, when an analyst chooses a particular issue of applied psychoanalysis, his choice reflects one of his unconscious phantasies.”²⁷

If I take what Thanopulos is saying and transpose it into the art practice of Rubens, it would read as: when an artist chooses a particular image for analysis/remaking, “his choice reflects one of his unconscious phantasies.”²⁸ The phantasy (or wish) I propose here for Rubens being the return of his lost daughter Clara Serena. I propose that Rubens identified with Titian’s painting because it reminded him (unconsciously) of the image of his own lost child. So, I would suggest, through these examples, Rubens carried out the same operation as Freud did, but as a visual artist, in images that represent wishes, as opposed to Freud’s words that convey those wishes.

Artwork analysis and psychoanalysis

In the paper Freud submitted anonymously to the journal Imago in 1914, in relation to Michelangelo’s sculpture Moses, he mentions a Russian art-connoisseur, Ivan Lermolieff (a pseudonym that hid the identity of an Italian physician named Morelli). As Freud says, “It seems to me that his method of inquiry is closely related to the technique of psycho-analysis.”²⁹ This was done for the purpose of:

[q]uestioning the authorship of many pictures, showing how to distinguish copies from originals with certainty […] by insisting that attention should be diverted from the general impression and main features of a picture, and by laying stress on the significance of minor details, of things like the drawing of the fingernails, of the lobe of an ear, of halos and such unconsidered trifles which the copyist neglects to imitate and yet which every artist executes in his own characteristic way.³⁰

With Freud’s comments above in mind, the “minor detail” I notice in Rubens’ work is the hairstyle – a prominent “bun” made of a plait, at the top/back of the child’s head. This detail in Rubens’ portraits of his daughter Clara Serena (Figs. 22, 23) is, I would suggest, carried (transferred) from the early paintings of his daughter, then, I would argue, can later be seen in the detail of the hair in the two paintings featuring Susan Gerbier (see Figs. 25, 26). Note that it is not present in the study for Susan Gerbier (Fig. 24), but has been embellished, and appears to be an addition.³¹

This “carrying,” or transference, in relation to images, finds analogy with Evelyn Sechaud, in relation to the dream-work:

From the outset, in Freud’s work, the transference is at once intrapsychic and intrasubjective. But in this first period of discovery, it designates, purely and simply, a displacement. Within the psyche this displacement occurs from one idea to another, or from one affect to a trivial idea. Thus Freud, in The Interpretation of Dreams, noting the importance of waking residues, writes:

“An unconscious idea is as such quite incapable of entering the preconscious and it can only exercise any effect there by establishing a connection with an idea which already belongs to the preconscious, by transferring its intensity on to it and by getting itself covered by it. Here we have the fact of transference” (Freud 1900, 562).³²

If transposed into musical terms, this could mean to cover another’s composition, or again, if transposed into the realm of painting, would be equivalent to a copy of another artist’s work, the resulting work being a symptomatic action – a formation of the unconscious, in pictorial form, akin to the dream.

As to the painting’s use of allegory (Minerva Protects Pax from Mars [“Peace & War”]), Freud states: “In the manifest content of dreams we very often find pictures and situations recalling familiar themes in fairy tales, legends and myths.”³³ In relation to Rubens’ art practice representing a “wish” through a displacement in a painting, in relation to his daughter, I find echoes in Israel Rosenfield describing how we react to loss:

Depression during the time of a loss […] may be a period when the brain is “searching” for a new solution to problems that cannot be solved, at least in a relatively brief period of time. New connections are being sought. Eventually, we may find a way of accepting a substitute for the person we have lost.³⁴

Rosenfield above provides a reason as to “why” the image/child was selected by Rubens in the painting, and Freud provides an example of “how,” in relation to problems in real life: “When a dream deals with a problem of actual life, it solves it in the manner of an irrational wish and not in the manner of a reasonable reflection.”³⁵ Rubens’ irrational wish for the return of his lost child might be seen in his finding a substitute, in/through a work of art.

This association finds further echoes in a later portrait of the Rubens family, by his pupil Philip Fruytiers: Four Children of Rubens and Helena Fourment with Maids, c. 1638–1639 (Fig. 27). The Royal Collection (who own the work) states:

The group portrait was very likely to have belonged to Rubens himself […] This scene depicts a group of four children accompanied by their maid. They have been identified as Clara-Johanna, Frans, Isabella-Helena and Peter-Paul, children of Rubens’s second marriage, to Helena Fourment, who was known as “the most beautiful woman in Antwerp.”³⁶

Since finding this related image after initial research, other (retrospective) associations appear in both visual and verbal echoes: in that their first child (left of image: Fig. 27), Clara Joanna, and her hairstyle, show a striking resemblance to other paintings I describe above (Figs. 18, 19, 20), and that Helena Fourment, the “most beautiful woman in Antwerp,” suggests a link to Venus and the Titian painting referenced earlier.

Reasoning through shared examples

To conclude, I will provide selective echoes/associations found in (my) artistic practice with the dream-work process, using the terms: Condensation, Displacement, and Secondary Revision (as described by the Freud Museum, London).³⁷

Condensation: Is the process that describes how a number of dream-elements (themes, images, figures, ideas) are combined into one, such as two images overlaid onto one another. Rubens has “overlaid”/combined his lost daughter with the Titian cupid (the past), and the child of his friend and host in London (the present), Susan Gerbier. Similarly, the use of a feature common to two or more disparate elements, such as the children, the fruit about to be eaten, the pose, details in hairstyle, amongst other pictorial associations. This may also be an example of how a single fragment of a dream (or painting) can carry several latent (dream-)thoughts, even contradictory ones – in this case art and life, dead and alive.

Displacement: Freud found that important things in the latent content were often represented by seemingly insignificant things in the manifest content, and vice versa. I would suggest there are a number of displacements at play here, including, from one idea on to another: art and life, male to female, one child to another – and another – and also in relation to time: from the past to the present. Also, the relative importance of the dream elements have undergone a displacement. The emotion associated with one idea or experience has been detached from it and attached to another. An effectively neutral representation has been substituted for another – in this instance, a child from an image (Titian’s Worship of Venus), a face in a crowd of cupids, is “exchanged” for his lost child (another association here is to the 1989 song by Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers: “A Face In The Crowd”).³⁸

As a dream might seem to be about one thing, but dream-thoughts can show it was really about something else, here again: the painting “Peace & War” could really be about Rubens’ conflict, in accepting the loss of his child; it also alludes to a marriage,³⁹ possibly his own, in the near future, or the loss of his first wife, in his recent past.

Secondary Revision: Finally, Freud says that it is the function of secondary revision to create the appearance of a coherent narrative. This revision occurs at the end of the process of dream-construction, and can basically be thought of as the application of conscious thought processes to the dream material. It can be linked to a tendency of the ego to try to gloss over inconsistencies, making things appear to make sense. These aspects might be seen in the way that Rubens incorporated different sources into the composition of his painting (as I describe), including historical models (or times long past), models from the “dream-day” (local children), and also in a literal sense: the pieces of canvas were literally stitched together to form the final picture, and the joins were concealed/covered over by a thick layer of paint, applied with a palette knife.⁴⁰

Through a subjective associative practice of making and “listening” in relation to a work of art, I show how, for the artist and the dreamer, ideas are transformed into visual pictures, where latent thoughts are dramatized and illustrated through the categories of condensation, displacement, and secondary revision. This suggests the coded structures of psychic representation can be seen to operate outside of dreams, through finding correspondence between artistic practice and the work of shattered time.

To expand on this practice from the specific/particular (of Rubens), to think about how it may be seen to operate outside of this framework, in relation to subjectivity and chance encounters in the cultural environment, Arnold Modell states: “Perception activates categorical affective memory, which in turn colours current experience.”⁴¹ One only has to think of Psychodynamic Assessment Tests: the Rorschach Inkblot (Herman Rorschach, 1921) and the Thematic Apperception Test (or TAT, Henry A. Murray and Christiana D. Morgan, 1930s) to get an understanding of what this can mean in relation to associations to images.

With this in mind, I would suggest that on the psycho-social level, any meaningful engagement with the cultural environment may be seen as performing the same associative process/function as I describe above (in relation to Rubens), through the work of art activating categorical affective memories, which will in turn color the current experience. This suggests that the associative response of the spectator might be seen to work in the same way as the analysis of the dream, my associative artistic practice, and shattered time.