Arnaldo Chuster[1]
Freud, in an interview with the New York Times (1926) emphasized, in several moments, the contribution of art, poetry, literature, and philosophy to psychoanalysis, their reciprocal influence in these areas is immeasurable. This fact fully justifies the tribute to the Week of Modern Art of 1922, paid today by the Psychoanalytic Society of Rio de Janeiro, which I thank for the honor of the invitation to represent it on this occasion.
However, I understand that my contribution as a psychoanalyst is limited within the universe and the importance of the theme, and I regret that I cannot discuss it in the same terms as the illustrious participants.
At the starting point, I already find myself with the difficulty to evaluate what might have been the direct influence of psychoanalysis on the Week of Modern Art, and vice-versa, above all because it occurred at a time (February 13/18, 1922) when it was practically unknown here in Brazil.
However, there was a time before the Week of Modern Art, when there were already in many countries, countless artists, directly or indirectly influenced by psychoanalysis, and it is not difficult to conjecture that Brazilian artists, in some way, had contact with this international production, at different levels of depth. I will come back to this question later on.
In historical terms, although we had some precursors, such as Juliano Moreira[2] who, in 1900, cited Freud's scientific articles, when the practice of psychoanalysis had not been well established even in Vienna [3], the real pioneer of psychoanalysis in Brazil was Durval Marcondes, a graduate from the Faculdade de Medicina de São Paulo.
Paulo in 1924, as a psychiatrist, an erudite and humanistic personality, introduced, in 1925, the ideas of psychoanalysis in the Brazilian clinical activity.
In 1927, Durval Marcondes wrote to Freud communicating the foundation, together with Franco da Rocha, of the Brazilian Psychoanalytic Society - the first in Latin America, which became, in June 1944, the Psychoanalytic Group of São Paulo.
It seems then that São Paulo had the function of being the vanguard of psychoanalysis in Brazil, just as the Week of Modern Art of 1922 - five years earlier - had shown the vanguard of our intellectuality. I hope that some of the participants of the table can explain why these facts occurred in such a specific regional context, or can dispel what can be another Brazilian parochial myth.
But before I get lost in historical controversies, I will express myself in psychoanalytic terms by pointing out that the Modern Art Week of 1922 is a caesura.
The term comes from a quote by Freud in a 1926 article, Inhibition, Symptom, and Anguish. He said: “There is much more continuity between uterine life and early childhood than the impressive caesura of birth allows us to believe”.
The phrase, exemplary of the influence of German romanticism on Freud, was a "message" to Otto Rank, an Austrian analyst of the pioneer group, who claimed to locate the origin of all psychic conflicts in the trauma of birth.
Freud, with the phrase, questioned Rank's ontological position, subtly asking him for an epistemological position.
However, in any case, the allusion to birth is still an allusion to something disturbing, that causes an upheaval, and that can be called a catastrophic change.
It should be understood here that catastrophe does not mean disaster, but a transformation with a significant change of direction, mental states, and purposes. We can say that it is a change that makes one leave the usual comfort zone, by exposing a limited situation between making choices or being led by chance, or, in other words, between changing reality or running away from it.
We can say, at the risk of generalization, that if a person does not take the reins of change and choices in his or her life, life inevitably changes that person, and always for the worse.
This is not - although it may sound like it - a threatening warning, but a proposal to think, from the field that is the thinking itself presenting itself as an analytic experience. In this field, fundamental ethical questions such as social responsibility, verbalization, and publication are put into question.
Thinking never occurs spontaneously as thoughts do. To think, it is not enough to want to think. It is necessary to learn how to think. And one can only learn to think by waiting for the unexpected which requires tolerating the freedom that emerges. In this field of uncertainties, to lead us to the security of thinking, patience is almost all that we need.
The above phrases may sound enigmatic or complex, and in fact, while they translate the truth and the challenge present in a search, they refer to a mystery that transits between the positions of patience and security that, in turn, are dependent on a third, which is interpretation, whose function seeks to integrate a multiplicity of observable elements, including the interpreter, the analyst himself.
I can name the basis of this experience as the Ethical-Aesthetic Principle of Uncertainty. The Principle informs us that the unexpectedness of experience, the surprise, is always an encounter with distinct degrees of emotional turbulence that puts into question or in check our usual ways of thinking.
Uncertainty informs us that we cannot observe the whole of an experience, and also that the observer alters the observed fact, which makes all observations always incomplete. On the other hand, the sense of incompleteness is that of creation, which although it has an indeterminacy in its whole, will place new determinations through our imagination.
Imagination is what allows us to create the universe of meanings, that is, to present something, of which without imagination we could say nothing and,
without which, we could know nothing. Imagination begins with sensorial, begins radically, in intrauterine life.
Every caesura creation brings turbulence that puts us in contact with something even more surprising that is the mysterious existence of true thought, but this being always a thought decentered from someone, it has no thinker and shows us that we don't think naturally, that is, we are forced to think to account for the thoughts that assail us at any moment.
How can we think today about that amazing week of 1922?
The terms art and history are linked in the question. As history, I can know the record of the facts, but I cannot know what those people were seeing or feeling to bring out the movement. I can only conjecture that it was a brave movement that inspired a lot of creativity. Perhaps to this day it does. However, courage is not synonymous with being fearless, it meant a choice for modernity generating and seeking more modernity.
Modernity is that which requires us to create to experience it. This is valid for any movement, any manifesto, and constitutes a half answer to what psychoanalysis is: we only experience it to the extent that we create it in each session.
Psychoanalysis shows that there is something that resists historicizing, something that is always creating where we least expect it, something that Bion called "O", and that refers us to a caesura to be crossed. In this case, between today and that week, we have a common point: the mystery that leads us to create. Psychoanalysis is not a task for historians, but for those who doubt history.
As a psychoanalyst, I understand that history is also the history of interpretations, of narratives, that try to deal with some caesura that we are given to observe. In this way, the psychoanalyst understands that whatever the reading, there is always an ineffable and inaccessible core, which does not contain any meaning, whatever the "truth" of the interpretation may be.
The caesura of 1922 is no longer our reality, and whatever our proximity or even intimacy with the subject, no knowledge, no ethos, no techné poiétiké restitutes that moment to us. We can’t live it here and now, as a function of our present life, but we have how to take the reins of thinking and observe what happens; perhaps feel something of the vigor of that infinitely plastic moment.
Speaking of Infinitude, the term caesura comes from poetry with the meaning of a pause within a verse, but it is a pause that separates and connects at the same time, and this meaning was extensively developed by the British psychoanalyst Wilfred Bion. The importance of a pause is immense in any creative activity.
For example, there are occasions in the psychoanalytic clinic when the patient mentions, very fleetingly, some anxiety, fear, or a physical fact such as blushing or turning pale, or sweating hands, as if nothing much had happened. However, the psychoanalyst may think that the patient has no other way to express feelings that have intensity, temporal extension, and a strong capacity to obstruct thinking, and which cannot be compared with those feelings that most people regard as normal or trivial. They often spend a lifetime without an answer to that suffering until they arrive at an analytic process.
Similarly, the patient may express a fear of the future that has so many characteristics of the past that they supposedly could not remember, nor could they remember the future because it hasn't happened yet. However, if we move out of this "can't" way of thinking and move to think about complexity, we can say that these elements, so weakly manifest, can actually be very powerful, but are minimized or ignored by what we know as psychic determinism.
W.R. Bion, introducing complex thinking into psychoanalysis, suggested that we can imagine that there are ideas that cannot be more vigorously expressed because they are buried in the future that has not yet happened or buried in the past that is forgotten, and that can hardly be said to belong to what we call thought. They are still intrauterine ideas even though the individual is distant from the event 40-week generator. However, thinking in complex terms, we cannot say that they do not exist. Using a metaphor, I think of a fishing net that only catches fish above the size of the holes in the net. However, this does not mean that in the sea there are no smaller fish or fish that are so big that the net cannot catch them.
Without the use of imagination, we can never think that there are levels of prenatal thinking that have a relationship with postnatal thinking. This non-deterministic fact has for psychoanalysis an immense connection with the processes of creativity in general, and allow me at this point, paraphrasing Freud and Bion, to state: There is much more continuity between what was before and after modern art week than the impressive caesura it caused allows us to believe.
What were the pressures that produced it and what could it predict? What were the prenatal pressures? What was the prenatal of modern art week, and how have its elements grown to the present day[4]?
I will give an unsophisticated example of what a "prenatal" experience would be. If we apply pressure to the eyeball we will see bright spots as a response from the optic nerve. If this happens why can't we think that any of our senses (smell, hearing, touch, movement) respond sensitively to pressure variations in the amniotic fluid caused by rhythmic intrusions from the outside world?
Why can't we think that embryonic development suffers constant pressures from the mother, whose internal rhythms mix with those of the fetus, and that this mother suffers external pressures from her cultural environment?
Such complex pressures later in life can be called preferences, idiosyncrasies, personality, uniqueness, style. Of course, psychoanalysis also considers that these characteristics are formed by emotional and symbolic pressures of the post-natal encounter with the mother, with the parental couple, and successively with other figures in the environment, which always has Culture as a background.
Symbols have an intense sexual activity, heteronomous symbols (which come from the outside, from culture, from other cultures) copulate with autonomous symbols (which come from inside, which are from home, which are personal transformations) and generate transitive ideas that sustain pressures or try to get rid of them. This relationship is anthropophagic, provoked by a process of seduction between ideas that come from outside and those that have emerged here inside, they meet until one penetrates the other, and end up speaking another language, which apparently provides a third party, but which keeps something that is the same as always: mystery.
The analyst's role inevitably involves the use of transitive ideas. The analysand, in the same way, is trying to formulate an experience of which he is aware through the chain of free associations. This chain connects to another medium of which he is not conscious, but unconscious. All the ideas that I formulate as a psychoanalyst are transitive or transitory, without any intention of classification, evaluation, or diagnosis, because they are ideas that express a living, whole human being, changing all the time and talking directly to another human being that changes all the time.
How can we think of curing anything if we always reach a difficult point that we don't know where it belongs?
With so many variables and uncertainties, giving an interpretation means that the analyst has to be able to verbalize a formulation that has been produced by his feelings, his intuition, and his primitive reactions to what is being said by the analyzer. The effectiveness of this formulation has to be similar to that of a physical act.
A physical-like act is a psychoanalytic act, and although clearly poietic, it is not poetry, for it must have an epistemological criterion, which Bion described as the integration of three areas that provide insight into what he called the psychoanalytic object.
That is, what for the artist could be a blank canvas, for the writer a paper with nothing written on it, an empty musical score for the composer, for the psychoanalyst is the psychoanalytic object. There are other objects, according to different authors, but this is not the subject of our dialogue.
Myths------------senses----------passions
Psychoanalytic object
Knowing –Interpretation- Being
The experience of art can provide many possibilities for integration between the three areas in which the psychoanalytic object is applied. For example, as a method, art through a poet like T.S.Elliot teaches us that if we go after an object using the memory we have of it, we will most likely fail to notice the changes it has undergone within us. The poet Keats teaches us that we need to use the negative ability, which made Shakespeare a successful man in literature.
These artistic acts and methods occur in any production of a work of art, with any text or book that by some necessity drags us to a rereading, or research, or an inspiration. Such acts and methods also occur in the analysis sessions.
For example, the text that was inside us, as a memory, prevents another text from being made available to our experience. But if we deliberately forget what we had read, another text appears. The original text will always be the present experience. This is why Bion suggested that we should try to work without memory and without desire, or with negative capacity.
Does this proposition also bring the question similar to the process of differentiating, for example, a true picture from a false one? I am referring to whether the known past is false or irrelevant to today's experience.
Freud once quoted an art historian, Lermolieff, who recommended that one should look away from the overall impression, or the general lines of a picture, and emphasize the importance of the details of the session.
Details such as the representation of fingernails, earlobes, breast aureoles, and other such things that the copyist is unable to see and imitate, and yet every true artist executes in a manner that characterizes him.
Freud underlines the kinship of this procedure in art with the technique of psychoanalysis: "It is also accustomed to intuiting secret and hidden things from understated traces, from the refuse, the debris, from observation”.
Psychoanalytic observation has benefited greatly from art. The visual field is immense in this contribution, but the analytic field is certainly not unifiable by theories nor by art.
For example, between a painter's observation of the object from a distance, and the contemplation of the object transformed on canvas, the difference is striking. There are transformations in the field of observation, and they can have different meanings. The problem is broad, ranging from the experience of observation that transforms us into ourselves, to varying degrees, to that which transforms the observed into a kind of moral context to prove that someone is superior or inferior.
Therefore, to observe means to caveat, not to have harmonious, smooth, and balanced solutions. It seems that the Week of Modern Art had this intention and so it never ended. But when did it actually start? Wouldn't it have been a myth to take the Week of Modern Art as the birth of modernism in the country?
We, as psychoanalysts, always make a reservation for questions such as admiration, respect, evidence, intuition - and everything that Freud's enlightenment bequeathed us. But we don't stop having them. Respect for life is intrinsically linked to respect for truth.
Freud himself made the caveats so that the analyst is able to find a blank canvas, where he keeps observing the flaw in the discourse, the detail that appears there.
The analyst cannot interpret without caveats the "visions" that a fetus has had when subjected to intrauterine pressures. Is there a method of communication that is sufficiently penetrating to cross the caesura in the direction of postnatal conscious thought and go back to the prenatal in which thoughts and ideas have their counterpart in "times" or "levels" of the mind in which they are not yet thoughts or ideas?
This penetration needs to be effective in both directions. It is easy, psychoanalytically speaking, to create a metaphor to illustrate this situation by saying that it is like penetrating inside a woman in a sexual relationship or coming out of her as in a birth. We occupy two positions and an infinite universe of possibilities in between.
However, this illustration is primitive and makes a generalization, making it very difficult to see what can be said in a specific moment. This is the analyst's problem: not to make a copy of the picture, because he has to make the original under the pressure of the moment.
The analyst continually searches for the exact word. But this does not mean an obsessive preoccupation, because fortunately we have dictionaries that can provide meanings, and fortunately they always give more than one. Long live polysemy, the instability of words, and of ordinary language. The "exact word" is the word that does justice to the moment, revealing the emotional experience, becomes psychoanalytically successful language.
Seeking the exact word for the moment is what the Modern Art Week of 1922 seems to have done, and this seems to be one of its legacies.
There are difficulties analogous to those associated with the caesura of birth. A similar caesura seems to exist between inhabitants of Portugal and Brazil. Some of these similarities/differences are spectacular and striking, particularly in time. However, we know that there are, scientists, writers, poets, and some mystics, who express themselves in very similar terms although separated by hundreds and sometimes thousands of years. How do we penetrate this temporal obstacle, this caesura?
It is not appropriate to tell a joke about East and West relations, but Tupy or not Tupy, I once simply asked the receptionist at a hotel in Lisbon if it was possible to go to address X on foot. The reply, with undisguised indignation, was: Well, of course, the street is free to walk on. Who has ever heard of one not being able to walk in the street?
Well, well, long live the anthropophagy that finds imaginative solutions for East and West.
The fact is that as long as there are texts, that is, examples of different readings for the same fact, no one will ever have the last word. What is expected of a successful analysis is that it has an endless beginning, that it is a memory of the future, a legacy that comes from the modern future ahead of us, without which life is not a life worth living.
In 1922, Freud wrote a short essay: The Head of Medusa. Freud says that the horrifying decapitated head can be easily interpreted: decapitate=castrate. The terror produced by the decapitated Medusa is a fear of castration.
Medusa's hair is often represented in works of art in the form of serpents, which points to the castration complex. For Freud, it is a noteworthy fact that, as frightening as they may be in themselves, in reality, the multiplicity of serpents serves as a mitigation of the horror, by replacing the single penis, whose absence is the cause of the horror.
This is a confirmation of the technical rule that multiplication of penis symbols means castration. That is, excess always takes away or inhibits pleasure.
In the myth, the sight of Medusa's head makes the spectator rigid with terror, that is, the sight turns him into a stone statue. Freud notes that here again, we have the same origin of the castration complex and the same transformation of affections because to become rigid means an erection. Whoever saw Medusa felt a huge erection, but why the representation of collective fear?
For Di Cavalcante, the modern art week "would be a week of literary and artistic scandals, of putting the stirrups into the bellies of the little bourgeoisie of São Paulo. It would be like showing the head of Medusa to the people of São Paulo.
Graça Aranha opens the week with his speech saying: for many of you, the curious and suggestive exhibition that we gloriously open today is an agglomeration of "horrors". That genie in torment, that yellow man, that hallucinating carnival, that inverted landscape - if they are not the fantasy games of mocking artists, they are certainly wild interpretations of nature and life. Your amazement is not over. Other "horrors" await you. In a moment, joining this collection of nonsense, liberated poetry, and extravagant but transcendent music, will come to revolt those who react moved by the forces of the Past. For these latecomers, art is still beautiful.
What is the horror of showing the ugly as art instead of the beautiful? Is it because Narcissus finds ugly what is not his mirror? Or is it because he had to get out of his comfort zone and think?
Medusa's head, as a symbol of horror, was worn by the goddess Athena on her robes, as an indelible mark on her clothes, as if it were a tattoo on her skin. With this symbol she became a frightening, unapproachable woman, who repels all sexual desires, presenting the terrifying and forbidden genital organs of her mother. Athena presents in her robes the taboo, her connection with the ancestral evil spirits through the tattooed garment, terrifies the incestuous and parricidal who want to break the social rule to possess her.
If the head of Medusa takes the place of a representation of the female genital organs, or rather, if it isolates its horrifying effects from those who escape pleasure, one can remember that showing the genital organs is by all accounts an apotropaic act: that which has the power to ward off an evil influence.
What awakens horror in us, will also occur in the enemy we are trying to defend ourselves against. For example, a person who is terrified by his specific phobia is not aware that he unconsciously has its opposite, which is the will to terrify, to cause panic.
The word panic comes from the god Pan, whose lower half was a goat, upper half-man, lived in the forests terrorizing the unwary and whoever dared to enter.
Di Cavalcante
One analyst who has an airplane phobia, after a few sessions where we talked about her constraint of options between helplessness and omnipotence, shifted to the airplane situation, had a dream where she was inside an airplane having fun terrorizing the passengers with the phrase; the plane is on fire... In place of the omnipotent god Pan, she was no longer afraid, the helpless were the others. She used to say emphatically that she hated those silent people on the plane.
Rabelais writes a curious passage in which the Devil, as a representation of the evil spirit, rises when a woman shows him her vulva: apotropaic effect.
Melanie Klein said that the sexual act besides being restorative drives away the scary monsters.
The erect male organ also has an apotropaic effect. To show the penis is to say, "I'm not afraid of you, I dare you. I have a penis. "
Filled with sexuality, the works of the modern week put the evil spirits to flight. But what would these evil spirits be? The conservative past? But one day that past was just as revolutionary. What happens, why is it the natural history of the revolutionary to become conservative?
I think that cruel revolutionary like God Pan becomes conservative and criminal. The revolutionaries who never stop being revolutionaries, like Freud and Gandhi are generous and respect the ethics of life, as well as the love of truth.
February 15 represented the peak of the Week, in the most scandalous terms. The new literature provoked irritation and uproar among the public present. Noteworthy were the lecture by Mario de Andrade, whose text would later become the publication A escrava que não é Isaura (The Slave that is not Isaura), in which the author emphatically defended the Brazilianization of the Portuguese language, and the lecture on modern aesthetics given by Paulo Menotti del Picchia, which provoked the spirits of the audience, causing boos to echo from the four corners of the theater.
Controversial, confusing, noisy, interpreted as "too festive" and "not very modern", there is no denying that the Week of Modern Art of 1922 was a milestone, a watershed in the Brazilian art scene. It opened the doors to great freedom in terms of aesthetic production and research in the country, contributing to intellectual and artistic flourishing. It was a Brazilian rebirth, as was the Renaissance.
In Di Cavalcanti's view, the week's event extrapolated the cultural field and also had repercussions in the political area. But I am unaware of any politician today who is an heir, even if distant, of this knowledge produced. For, at the very least, it is necessary to read and have respect for those who produce and think.
The Week played the role of disseminating modern art, which, in turn, cultivated the ground for the consolidation of an artistic and literary revolution that took shape after 1922, when Oswald de Andrade's manifestos and the fundamental works of the First Brazilian Modernism were launched, such as Macunaíma (Mario de Andrade), Memórias Sentimentais de João Miramar (Oswald de Andrade), and Ritmo Dissoluto (Manuel Bandeira).
There was before the Week of Modern Art a tragedy that is called difficulty in thinking. This tragedy continued to exist after the caesura. There was no change in this tragedy or in its authoritarian pseudo-resolution. However, the Week informs us that each one of us can live the historical moment in which tragedy left the cult that was made of it, fought the apology of ignorance, faced the servitude imposed by authoritarianism, demoralized political Manichaeism, and went to the theater. It was with all the poetic charge in its favor, as well as all the loving gaze that this transformation allows.
The Week of Modern Art was a theater, but as such, it left the religiosity of the cult of tragedy promoted by authoritarian fundamentalism, and thus left the presence of the political gods and the academic lords of knowledge. The gods withdrew during the Week, or perhaps it was men who abandoned them, just as Sophocles did back then, with the play Oedipus the King, making men pass from simplism to complexity, from manipulative seduction to rhetoric, from words to writing. He made men think in his tragedy as men in the absence of gods.
The Week of 1922 was and still is an example of the history of Brazilian men and women, a green-yellow history that was worth living for having the most precious asset embedded in it: freedom of expression. This one is still quite apotropaic in our country.
Meanwhile, as a psychoanalyst, every workweek is a modern art week, and here I close my exhibition with a poem by one of the participants of 1922, to whom I was introduced personally by my father when I was 10 years old.
Beauty
Menotti Del Picchia
The beauty of things devastates you
like the sun that fascinates but blinds you.
The luminous delivery of them
is never given, better, never enough for you.
And the immense peace that drags you beyond
the more it eludes or denies you...
Peace so high up and peace of that mace
which in the fields shines in the most chaste light.
Beauty wounds you, and yet
an emotion (always the first and never repeated) that drives you
repeated) that leads
your dazzle to a day
to the blended night, in the clearing
where you feel night in full light
[1]Full Training and Teaching Member of the Psychoanalytic Society of Rio de Janeiro (SPRJ, FIPA) and Newport Psychoanalytical Institute, Irvine, California; Full Professor at The Bion Institute, Porto Alegre.
[2] Full professor at the Faculty of Medicine of Salvador
[3]This was Freud's so-called period of splendid isolation (1898-1902).
[4]The Anthropophagic Manifesto (1928) is an important example of the fruits. Another outstanding example is Tarsila do Amaral's painting Abaporu.
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