Thinking as a partner

Original painting by Stefano Frassetto (6).

“Why is it so horrifying the idea that removing is an experience of lying ?” (1)“  

Maybe is still correct the above quotation by Giacomo B. Contri about a common experience, the anguish : about which we come to know very soon, already in early childhood, and towards which an initial, but disadvantageous defense is the removal of the experience given rise by anguish.

The exceptional talent of Edvar Munch in painting, and of only a few painters indeed (2), surely is in being able – that is infact the power of thinking – to go up again the origin of one’s anguish, untieing it up to weave a more profitable defense instead of the removal itself.

“I was walking along the road with two friends when the sun was setting, the sky suddenly coloured in blood red. I stopped, and really tired I leaned against a fence. On the black-blue fjord and on my own town there were blood and tongues of fire. My friends kept on trembling, and me too was still trembling with fear… And I was feeling that a big scream was pervading the nature…” (3)

In the shape of a visual hallucination which turns away the reality, Munch was describing in a note from his diary the experience of the ‘return of a removed memory’, the feared and hard-fought satisfaction, unsustainable indeed… The removal, as a matter of facts, still remains irresolute also if practiced, even it does menace a subject and his, or her own physical integrity too.

The 1893 painting belongs to the maturity of Munch who had already developed a competence not only in painting but also in his own relation with it. He sensed in painting, to which he applied himself by chance, a privileged and very personal way, but definitely alternative, to anguish. At school he had realized he could excel in psysics, chemistry and mathematics and chose to specialize at the ‘Drawing School‘ of Oslo, and then at the ‘School of Arts and Crafts‘ of Christiania in 1881 : but it was maybe only when Munch met Hans Jaeger (4), a not excellent writer and even psychologically disturbed in comparison with the reserved and discreet Edvar, that the writer did kick-start again a favourable, personal intuition into Munch’ thinking.

That was infact a real change of course for the painter and not at all ephemeral towards a sincerity he hadn’t known before, which approached him to the very reason of his past submissions, and also pointed out easily and precisely the point where he could correct his mistakes, and his ingenuity too that now became corrigible then : into Munch’ work, into his many repetitions of the same few pictures - not just ‘The scream‘, as a matter of facts - is therefore evident that his own deep interest was not the approval by the public.

There isn’t any pedagogical aim infact in his works, any attempt ‘to explain’ to the spectator, who could  imagine everything when being in front of one of his pictures. Munch’ evident goal is to get to touch the tangle he himself was living in order to untie it, without any uncertainty and without any doubt.

Anguish flows into horror when it is not processed, Munch had seen such epilogues among his own relatives too, and had realized that it couldn’t be due to a motionless fate.

With the surprising lucidity of a surgeon, he could be building a very personal and favourable path of work, not to be reproduced but for its peculiar practicability.

Marina Bilotta Membretti / Cernusco sul Naviglio – October 26, 2019

(1) ‘Lavoro dell’inconscio e lavoro psicoanalitico‘, by Giacomo B. Contri, 1985 SIC Edizioni.

(2) I’m going to dedicate an editorial to Renè Magritte, Belgian painter lived between 1898 and 1967 and considered one of the best interpreter of Surrealism.

(3) This is a memory, which Edvar Munch (Loten, Norway 1863 – Oslo 1944) managed to bring back on the frame of one of the four versions of ‘The scream’, the one of 1895.  “The scream” (1893) is a work exhibited at the ‘National Gallery’ of Oslo.

(5) Hans Jaeger (1854-1910), wrote “Between Kristiania and Bohemen“ (1885) and became famous due to his raw controversies against the Norwegian culture rather than to his real value as an author and writer.

(6) Stefano Frassetto is born in Turin in 1968. After his degree in Architecture at ‘Politecnico’ he begun as graphic novelist for local magazines. In the ‘90s he edited in France too, on ‘Le Réverbère’ and on ‘Libération’ : then he created ‘Ippo’ for ‘Il Giornalino’ and then the stripe ‘35MQ’ for the swiss magazine ‘20 Minuti’. In 2000 he came into ‘La Stampa’ as portraitist for cultural page and the insert ‘Tuttolibri’, then for the weekly ‘Origami’. Today he works also for the swiss magazine ‘Le Temps’.

To benefit from one’s calling/1.

”Psychoanalysis… is certainly not the whole psychology, however that is its essential structure, maybe even its fundamental… Then any analyst must have learned, first of all, that psychology, or depth psychology, or even better the psychology of the unconscious.”[2] 

“…After fortyone years of activity, the knowledge I got of myself tells me that I have never actually been a doctor. I’ve become a doctor having been forced to turn away from my original purposes, and the success in my life is in finding again indeed, after a tortuous very long deviation, the guidance of my own beginning…”[3] 

We see that Freud was getting late to his own calling, in his maturity : and he realized it was already a profession, but original and new, that is never started before. 

“…The aim for us analysts is making an analysis as complete and in-depth as possible together with our patient, whom we don’t like to bring relief welcoming him, or her, into a community, be it Catholic or Protestant or Socialist; instead what we like to do is enriching him, or her and get that richness from his or her own unconscious just making flow to his, or her ‘I’, both the hidden and therefore unapproachable energies due to the removal, and any further energy the ‘I’ is forced to waste without any fruit…”[4] 

Freud effectively tells about psychoanalysis in economical terms : en enrichment which the removal makes unapproachable to the patient who, on the opposite, dissipates many energies just to keep an ineffective defense from the removal. Less than fifty years later, Jacques Lacan welcomes Freud.

 “…And, about richness, why not starting indeed from the rich ? The rich owns a property. He buys, he buys eveything, eh! We can say that he buys a lot. However… the rich doesn’t pay…

First of all, we know very well that the surplus he everytime adds to himself, or herself… But, mainly, there is something he, or she, never pays for – the knowledge… The rich is no more a master, if not because he redeemed himself, or herself… 

Since he is enriching himself, why he can buy everything without paying for it ? Because he, or she has nothing to do with enjoyment… Such knowledge the rich can buy as a surplus. But he just doesn’t pay for it…”[5] 

Then the knowledge from psychoanalysis is a surplus, a benefit and a profit then, not just an enjoyment : Freud named ‘the benefit’ in his special work “Beyond the principle of pleasure”[6] as something profitable, quite different from the removal. 

“The theory of removal is then the pillar on which the building of psychoanalysis does stands. It is the most essential element of psychoanalysis and it is nothing but the theoretic expression of a repeatable experience at will, if you proceed the analytical work with a neurotic patient without any hypnosis… It happens there to feel his, or her own resistance opposing to the analytical work and giving as a pretext the failure of memory, unfortunately with the aim of making it unuseful. 

Hypnosis is hiding any resistance; so that we can say that psychoanalysis begins only with the technical innovation of giving up of hypnosis.”[7] 

After attending, since 1886, the university lessons of Jean Martin Charcot in which, as in any future ‘direct’ therapy the work of the patient is not essential and his or her own guidance in the care too, Freud did favour the analytical work as it could be conducted by the patient only using his, or her own memory in the presence of the analyst. 

“…The theoretic judgement if the resistance agrees with an amnesia, is leading inevitably  us to conceive an unconscious psychic activity which is owned by psychoanalysis itself, and anyhow it is quite different from any philosophic speculations of unconscious.”[8] 

Here it is why the conflict of interest between doctor and patient, not charging with the analytical work, can be on the other hand an obstacle in any said ‘direct’ therapy.

                                                Marina Bilotta Membretti - Cernusco sul Naviglio, October 1 2019 

[1] ‘Il progresso in psicoanalisi’, Morris N. Eagle in ‘Psicoterapia e scienze umane’, Franco Angeli editore – Anno 2018, Vol.52, n.3

[2] S. Freud, , “Il problema dell’analisi condotta da non medici. Conversazione con un interlocutore imparziale”, 1925 : you can wonder how rarely they draw from that specific work by Freud.

[3] S. Freud, ibidem

[4] S. Freud, ibidem

[5] J.Lacan, “Il seminario – Libro XVII, Il rovescio della psicoanalisi 1969-1970” with an afterword by Jacques-Alain Miller – Giulio Einaudi editore SpA 2001 / “Le seminaire de Jacques Lacan, Livre XVII. L’envers de la psychanalyse” 1991 Edition du Seuil, Paris

[6] S.Freud, “Aldilà del principio di piacere” 1920, Bollati Boringhieri Vol.9 p.242 : “…that the benefit from the amphimixes has been then picked up and used in the following evolution”.

[7] S. Freud, , “The item of the analysis conducted by not doctors. Conversation with a fair interlocutor”, 1925.

[8] S.Freud, “For a history of the Psychoanalytical Movement”, 1914.

There is a fresco at Villa Maser¹ near Treviso, where avarice is represented by an old and nake man,  vaguely grinning, who waves a large key at a blonde woman representing generosity, much taller than him and protagonist of the scene : the woman carries a bunfle of ears of mature corn. Between the two it’s clear there is no link, though he tends to her, almost desperately, to be heard. Perhaps she hears him, but is not looking for him. 

Visiting the nice exhibition about Auguste Rodin² at Treviso, cared by Marco Goldin who offered to the public the works of a Master till now hosted only in France, his native country, I’ve thought that a few little statues, well lit and placed but not central in the place, or maybe even considered a little obscure in Rodin’s production, reveal what the artist really thinks of, and with a descriptive precision which the big statues presented at the entrance and in the centre of the exhibition, and representative by now of his whole work at the general public, didn’t have, as a matter of facts.³

The two little statues are : “Je suis belle", of which there seems to be more than a subject, and "Fugit amor"⁴ : even if both are small in size, they are very elaborate statues - as I hope you can understand from the photo I chose for this article. Unlike the portraits commissioned to him⁵, these two sculptures reveal a commitment of the author, sincer passionate but dimed by despair. 

In "Je suis belle", the undefended naked shape of a man leaps forward holding up in the air a young woman curled up in the fetal position, but escaping his own kiss. An unusual subject indeed, mainly for the years when Rodin lived, who fed on the vital explosion of impressionist painting, open to the disruptive experience towards tradition and enthusiastic of a work ‘en plein air’ and among people, in antithesis to solitary heroism, generous but unsatisfied, of Romantic literature⁶.

Rodin uses the enthusiasm of Impressionism to slip back into a Romantic illusion, giving up a new solution where indeed Matisse at first, and Picasso⁷ then involved themselves. 

He’s a man full of virility, the one of "Je suis belle", who looks sideways at the woman-foetus who escapes him, so curled up and shown just above his own abdomen : banner of a presumed power which is not given to man, tempting him to an envy that by avarice is generated ?

The representation is plausible of a defense as impetuous as it is naive of sexual authonomy, phallic and romantic, condemned to impotence by the sole refusal from her, who distances her own face from the face of him. 

All Rodin’s production revolves around a thought involved, even obsessively, by the creation⁸ and however also by the human possession which the biblic Creation nothing has to do, because God creates man free to produce one’s own destiny. 

Rodin instead fears to miss what he creates, his own biography tells about a greedy humanity and not available to let itself be inherited : his recurrent theme are the hands, yes shaping but also intrusive, possessive, envious of others. 

Just like in “Je suis belle”, good title indeed for what the author thinks of the woman who dismisses the man leaving him defenseless to his passions. A melancholy and envious thought which Rodin offers again in “Fugit amor” where the two lovers, like mermaids floating in the sea, elude each other – she always a little ahead of him – in a likewise damned, deadly, unreasonably desired conception of loving thought. 

In his melancholy, Rodin envies that presumed sexual autonomy which woman would find in motherwood, an exclusive and coveted place of satisfaction that Nature denies to man.

It surprises the emotional grip which Rodin maintains on contemporary audiences, albeit hyper-connected, algorithmic and digitally cultured but which also testifies the strength of a resistance to judge that goes on to spread naivety, and an easy envy. 

Favouring emotion which removes judgement, as a matter of facts Rodin knocks out any solution, human and possible : which Henry Matisse, on the other hand – and shortly after, Picasso too – came to propose profitably.

                               Marina Bilotta Membretti / Cernusco sul Naviglio - May 28, 2018

1 ‘Villa Maser’ near Treviso, by Andrea Palladio (1508 - 1580), Renaissance highly regarded architect and scene designer, considered one of the most influential personality in Western architecture history.

2 The exhibition (February 24 – June 3, 2018) which rounds off the celebrations for the death’s centenary of Auguste Rodin (1840-1917) was promoted by the Municipality of Treviso, by Marco Goldin and by "Linea d'ombra", which also produced it and organized, with a fine setting at the Museum of ‘Santa Caterina’.

3 "The Cathedral" (1908), "Adam and Eva" (1881), "The thinker" (1880), "The kiss" (1882).

4 "Je suis belle" (1882), "Fugit amor" (1887).

5 "Madame Vicuna" (1884) and other portraits commissioned to Rodin, remain timid and vaguely celebratory works.

6 Ugo Foscolo (1778-1827) in Italy, J.W. Von Goethe (1749-1832) in Germany, V.Hugo ((1802-1885) in France.

7 H.E.B.Matisse (1869-1954); P.Picasso (1881-1973)

8 "The Cathedral" (1908) is represented by two large hands, approached in a singular way to form a welcoming and protecting place.