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Sciborg_S_Patel
Psychoanalysis, Art and the Occult: Cutting Up a New Conversation
...Each piece seems to be created at the boundary of meaning and meaningless-ness, chaos and order. Some, like Sinclair’s or Eyfjord’s work explicitly invoke symbolic systems. Others evoke concepts inherent to the visual medium, raising the oppositional and inextricable ideas of negative and positive space, color and line, content and form. Together, the works of these artists raise a question about meaning and madness. These artists create from this edge, a line their work crosses, it seems, in order to define. The positioning of Dr. Sinclair’s work next to her mother’s situates this question within a psychoanalytic context. If Rawlings’ paintings represent two infinitudes divided by a line—the boundary between one color and another, one self and one other—Dr. Sinclair’s work represents the system of meaning which must emerge in this space between two bodies.
For Freud, this space is demarcated by the bodily drive, and by the repression of it, which invokes the division between self and other. For Lacan, a theorist who followed him, it is organized in language punctuated by grammar and syntax. For Jung, it is to be found in projections—in images. If Jung’s focus on the imago as the domain of subjectivity invites a discussion of the occult, the theoretical implications of mapping the mind at the level of both the body and language are perhaps helpful to consider when to traversing the space between these two disciplines, one embodied, the other ideational.
The historical exclusion of the occult, from psychoanalytically informed discourses, has its origins in the split between Freud and Jung. The cause and consequence of this split was addressed by two panelists, Dr. Steven Reisner, a clinical psychologist and activistcurrently running for President of the American Psychological Association, and Gary Lachman, a writer formerly of the band Blondie. While Lachman believes that Freud’s resistance to the occult stemmed from his personal neurotic fear of the dissolution of rational thought, Reisner argues that Freud’s hesitation was ethical and concerned the occult being incorporated into his theoretical system as a rejection of the death drive—a fear which, in Reisner’s estimation, was “practical and temporary.” As a creator of discourse, Freud was very concerned with the integrity of the system he was creating. Interestingly this discursive dimension is also that which lends an entrance point for this new discussion.
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