Gilbert J. Rose
Between Couch and Piano
(2004)
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...
... Throughout life the boundaries of our separateness and identity keep being dissolved and recreated as we repeatedly dip back and re-emerge from looser and earlier arrangements of reality. We continuously fashion new syntheses between ourselves and the outside, creating areas of relative constancy and temporary balance in the midst of change.
It is from this pool of early fluid boundaries of self and reality that each person draws to "create" his own identity and construct viable forms of reality for himself. Growth is a form of self-creation.
The ego's coordinated functioning is a garden variety of creativity. And it is from this same pool of early fluid boundaries of self
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and reality that the artist draws to create imaginative forms. This is not to say that imagination is synonymous with the infant's efforts to distinguish himself from the external world. Imagination is the ability to make images and elaborate memories and combine them playfully with new ingredients as they are observed. The point is this: the greater the mobility of elements, the less sacrosanct the categories, the freer the imaginative play. And these conditions are most fully met in the flexibility of early boundaries of self and reality toward which the artist is drawn in his irredentist urge to regain the lost unity with mother and separate out anew...
...
Chapter 3
Whence the feelings from art:
communication or
concordance?
In the Beginning was the Word.
Words?
Not according to contemporary understanding of the development of communication. The first communication system is affective. The second communication system of words and language is based on the earlier one of affects.
...
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...
Language works well but far from perfectly. Modern philosophers have been rediscovering for some time what poets knew and complained about 2000 years ago: the improbability of conveying anything more than very partial truth by language. ...
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... language is not only too coarse a rake to reproduce thought and feelings faithfully, but it is at the same time too broad and flexible in scope. It leaves out more than it includes, yet it includes so much that any number of connections can be made among the elements that are encompassed,...
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...
Even without the power of transference and the therapeutic alliance, the very fact that a proposition has been stated serves this need [for therapeutic "closure and certainty"]. If the proposition is plausible, familiar, and frequent, it becomes "true." It orders the data of the present and exerts a pressure on the anticipation of the future and the reordering of the past.
In this connection something further should be mentioned regarding the retroactive power of the present to discover or even create the past . Gestalt psychology has helped us understand the principles underlying our perception of formal line patterns. If transposed to cognition and recollection, these principles of pattern perception may help us understand the retroactive power of the present.
For example, in the perception of patterns, other things being equal, a shape tends to persist in its initial mode of operation. But the mind, continually striving for completeness, stability, and rest, tends to regularize irregularites and complete what was incomplete. Thus, a system left to itself tends to lose asymmetries and become more regular. Memory reinforces this tendency; less good shapes tend to be forgotten.
It is possible that these principles governing the perception of forms are applicable to the ways in which we tend to rework the past. That is to say, the tendency toward regularity, symmetry, and completion in our perception of formal line drawings might well be analogous to our tendency to rework the past in terms of our needs for narrative flow, plausibility, and certainty. In both areas, we might be dealing with the aesthetic need for "good shape."
...
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...
* * * Since fantasy and language both appear at about 18 months of age, it was easy for psychoanalysis to assume that thought began with language and that fantasy would provide a key to early thinking. However, the study of severe language impairments due to neurological disease shows that thinking can remain essentially intact despite the loss of language (Damasio, 1999), suggesting that thinking takes place prior to the acquisition of language . There can
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be little doubt that language and verbalization can immeasurably enhance fantasy and thought, but it is also easy to imagine the possibility of simple fantasies in the form of nonverbal imagery. Be that as it may, the capacity for feelings certainly precedes both fantasy and thought. Indeed, Melanie Klein and her followers insisted back in the 1930s, 1940s and 1950s that the psyche constantly endeavors to relate to feelings by concretizing them in the form of internal objects: fantasies and story-telling were primarily vehicles to articulate feelings. In other words, feelings come first and fantasies are elaborated in order to tell their story (Riviere, 1936; Isaacs, 1943; Klein, 1957: 88).
To put it a little differently, fantasy is a way of packaging affective tension retroactively ; it imposes a cognitive structure of "explanatory" plausibility and narrative coherence onto otherwise unbound affect. Now that the developmental priority of affect over fantasy is once again coming into focus, nonverbal art may be viewed as representing ongoing attempts to bind intense perceptual and emotional stimulation that would have exceeded the capacity of the infant to contain. For the future artist, for example, aesthetic form offers a means of externalizing and transforming unmodified, emotional and perceptual intensity into highly elaborated, nonverbal structures of dynamically balanced tension and release.
In the moment by moment pendulum-like movement between primary and secondary processes — imagination and knowledge — affect normally enlivens knowledge as knowledge imposes realistic boundaries upon imagination in a smoothly working partnership. Less normally, affect becomes blocked, distorts thought and perception, and may find bodily outlets. In contrast to both, art may be thought of as a separate developmental path whereby affect becomes differentiated into novel expressive forms that help illuminate self and world.
All well and good, and quite plausible. The dialectical fissure being, as always, that as soon as we become merely aware of such an intensely instrumental understanding of art , the party is over real fast.
Ironically, this illumination takes place despite the fact that at the core of art lies illusion. Picasso said: "Of course art is a lie. But a lie that helps one experience truth."
UGH.
The question is, "Whose truth?"
Good question.
For psychoanalysis the "truth" in art consists of the "communication" by the artist through the work to the recipient. The fact of the matter is that the possibility of such communication retains little credit in the field of aesthetics (Dufrenne, 1953). Nevertheless, communication of regressive fantasies of infantile wishes embedded in the art remains the cornerstone of established psychoanalytic theory about the emotional
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appeal of art.
Gee, that's too bad.
What is at question here is not whether these same constituents may account for the power of neurosis, the nature of wit, the ubiquity of dreams, and the universality of religion and myth, but whether they are communicable from artist through art to audience.
A recent authoritative article on the aesthetic illusion claims exactly that. It bases itself on the clinical fact that we all have unconscious infantile fantasies and wish to regress to enjoy them with the least possible amount of guilt. Less guilt for more regression should yield most pleasure, the argument goes. The truth of art supposedly lies in the artist's specialized talent to "communicate" typical unconscious fantasies in such a way that we can have a guilt-free regressive ride. It exempts abstract art, dance and music from consideration because that entails unspecified "controversial issues" that are "profound" and "numerous," though my work is recommended (Balter, 1999).
It states:
Typical fantasies are not only the emotional-instinctual foundations of the daydreams communicated through works of art. They also help to make that communication reliable . . . . [They] are the lingua franca of artistic communication . . . [that] allow beholders of a work of art to find personal relevance . . . . For example, Oedipal fantasies of rivalry and romance; "primal fantasies" of seduction, castration and the primal scene; rescue fantasies of the phallic woman; the fantasy of sharing a woman; beating fantasies; power acquisition fantasies, dismemberment fantasies; the fantasy of the maimed avenger; fantasies of intrauterine life; fantasies of dying together; three typical fantasies deriving from primal scene schemata: crucifixion fantasies, machine fantasies and banquet fantasies; oral incorportion fantasies; fantasies of having a double. This list could be extended. (Balter, 1999: 1299-1300; citations omitted)The thesis postulates a regression of the ego function of reality testing back to the magical omnipotence of thought: we deny the reality of the artist as author of the art work, and sign on to accept his imaginary world as our own. The aesthetic illusion is said to involve an "emotional withdrawal from [one's] own immediate personal life . . . [and] from the social surround . . . . Art ... is
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therefore fundamentally asocial and antisocial " (Balter, 1999: 1320). The author adds, parenthetically, "It may, however, secondarily take on social and socializing functions," but this later turns out to be "social regimentation" (Balter, 1999: 1328).
Among the difficulties raised by this grim and classic formulation are the following.
There is first of all a structural problem, both in the nature of language and in the nature of the aesthetic experience. The theory is based on fantasy. To the extent, however, that any but the simplest fantasy depends on language, language is deeply disadvantaged in dealing with art. That is because language makes a clear distinction between subject and object, while art and the aesthetic experience do not. As Marion Milner (1957: 161) wrote: "We are trying to talk about a process . . . in which the 'me/not-me' distinction is not important [art], but to do so at all we have to make the distinction."
Milner elaborates. In art and the aesthetic experience, subject and object interpenetrate within rationality. They are drawn into the experience of the movement of felt time in music, felt space in painting, and their mutually influential motion. In formal, logical thought, on the other hand, subject and object are separate. Accordingly, from the point of view of formal logic the whole area of symbolic expression is irrational since the nature of a symbol is that it is both itself and something else.
But art and the aesthetic experience are not necessarily illogical or irrational ; rather, they are nonlogical and nonrational ; they follow other laws and yet the result is not chaos; it is another form of order: dynamic, harmonious, organic, simultaneously regressive and progressive, knowledgeable and imaginative, primary and secondary processes so balanced that unsuspected meanings may unfold in the course of time. (More of this later: see pp. 98-99.)
Another basic problem: the theory does not differentiate the structure of art from the other phenomena mentioned above neurosis, myth, dream, religion, humor.
Thirdly, since the aesthetic experience of pleasure often involves a hyper-clarity of feelingful awareness rather than regressive instinctual gratification or defensive escape from reality, the regressive fantasy theory of art does not account for any progressive healthful aspect in the experience of art.
Nevertheless, if communication of unconscious fantasy does take place in art, one would suppose that the literary experience would
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be the most likely place to search for it. Reader response studies, however, appear to show that each reader uses the given narrative as material from which to form his own fantasy.
In an empirical study, Holland (1975) examined five advanced English-major undergraduates in regard to their understanding of Faulkner's story, A Rose for Emily. ...
... The reader who reacts in a positive way puts the elements together so that they tend to reflect his own lifestyle.
For this to occur, the defenses of the reader must mesh — in some subtle balance — with the work; from material in the work one creates wish-fulfilling fantasies characteristic of oneself. Finally, one transforms those fantasies into a literary interpretation that is also the product of personal style. In short, one takes from the work what is most consonant with oneself, rewrites it in one's own mind and becomes its coauthor.
This is in line with thinking going back to Descartes, Diderot and Kant, who held that art does not "communicate" meanings; it generates them in the receptive mind. It engenders much that is not contained in the object itself. Perhaps even better, T.S. Eliot said. The more it urges the mind beyond experience, the more it opens up the realm of the possible. And what is possible in one age is not possible in another. Which is why new generations will "bury" old art or rediscover it in the light of the current Zeitgeist and experience it in a new way.
There is one form of communication, however, that all artists engage in and that analysts generally tend to ignore. Van Gogh commented in his diary on the work of no fewer than 1100 artists. Other artists are one's critics, exemplars, cautionary signposts. Matisse and Picasso used each other's work as jumping-off points for their own. Matisse wrote that when either died there would be some things the other would never be able to talk of with anyone else.
If language arts do not "communicate" fantasies but rather stimulate the receptive reader to generate his/her own fantasies and
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then complete the work in his/her own way, it is even less likely that nonverbal, non-narrative, abstract art will succeed in transmitting the artists' fantasies. There is much anecdotal evidence in this direction.
I would think there would also be much relief at the prospect of being spared subjection to such fantasies . But alas, there is only further angst.
In music: Hindemith (1961) commented that the second movement of Beethoven's Seventh Symphony "leads some people into a pseudo-feeling of profound melancholy, while another group takes it for a kind of scurrilous scherzo, and a third for a subdued pastorale. Each group is justified in judging as it does" (p. 47).
In painting: Gombrich (1972) pointed out that Van Gogh intended Bedroom at Arles (1888) to depict a haven of tranquility and in a letter to his brother stresses that there was no stippling or hatching, nothing but flat areas in harmony. Gombrich (1972: 96) concludes:
It is this . . . that Van Gogh experiences as being expressive of calm and restfulness. Does the painting of the bedroom communicate this feeling? None of the naïve subjects I have asked hit on this meaning . . . . Not that this failure of getting the message speaks against the artist or his work. It only speaks against the equation of art with communication. [my italics]Here is a final, semi-serious example of non-communication in art. I own a nonrepresentational oil painting entitled Burning Sky. It is composed of violent reds and oranges bursting out of a field of blues and blacks, securely contained by the compositional balance.
The artist, an old friend, said: "I was thinking of that violent volcanic eruption in Hawaii, but between you and me, this was also the first painting I did right after my open heart surgery and aortic valve replacement." I had known of his visit to Hawaii and of his aortic surgery. Now that he told me and linked them together, it was easy to imagine both the volcano erupting and his own fears of the aorta rupturing.
Then, after some more chatting: "Well, don't you see something else, perfectly obvious?" I admitted I did not. "Huh!" he snorted. "And you call yourself an old friend, let alone a psychoanalyst!" I squirmed.
After knowing me for more than forty years don't you realize I'm still an Hungarian? Think of my accent — almost as fresh as when I came over before the war. Now look at those hot[46]
reds: don't you know paprika when you see it? Can't you even taste it?Whence the feelings from nonverbal art, such as nonrepresentational art and music unassociated with a verbal program such as opera or ballet? My thesis is: the concordance of formal patterns of virtual tension and release in the nonverbal art appear to be attuned to actual patterns of tension and release in the structure of affect, resonating back perhaps all the way to the earliest nonverbal holding environment.
Consider the following: A line is not just a line. "It is a certain disequilibrium [my italics] . . . within the indifference of the white paper" (Matisse, quoted in Merleau-Ponty, 1961: 184).
And this: A series of tones are not just flat acoustic sounds hanging in a void; they are dynamic impulses that strive toward completion (Sessions, 1950; Zuckerkand1, 1973).
It can be argued that neither statement can be literally true Lines and tones are inorganic; they are not alive any more than a color, though vibrant, is really vibrating. It must be that they are so close in form to certain of our own living, breathing qualities that we automatically attribute our own vital qualities to the outside object, inspiriting it with our own. Enhancing it even, we may go on to feel inspired by it.
...
While the discussion of the possible ways in which music may affect the listener's emotions is centuries old, two significant theories have emerged in the past fifty years: the theory of isomorphism by Suzanne Langer (1942) and C.C. Pratt (1952), and the theory of ego mastery by H. Kohut and S. Levarie (1950). Both are probably valid, but the former accounts for more instances.
According to Langer and Pratt, every affect has a specific form or shape; any message used in human communication that is isomorphic (i.e. similar in form) may activate this particular affect. The visceral organic patterns make emotion; the auditory contours evoke emotion directly by means of their formal shapes, which are similar if not identical to the visceral bodily patterns that are the basis of actual emotion.
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Noy believes that a person's response to the recognition of the close similarity of visceral and auditory contours is based on a preverbal, constitutional, sensitivity and responsiveness to an other's emotions — a "primary empathy." (This receives support from current neuroscience: the infant early on learns to read and express primary affects through facial musculature.)
Kohut and Levarie (1950) claimed that music associated with frightening sounds stimulates the ego to deal with the resultant defensive anxiety by organizing and transforming it into recognizable forms; thus the pleasure of mastery indirectly becomes the pleasure of listening to music. This mode of receiving pleasure calls attention to how art provokes the recipient into being a participant and doing active work to deal with the stimulation. Noy is probably correct that all the higher arts provide pleasure in part by enticing the brain into more widespread organizational activity involving both primary and secondary processes.
In the light of clinical psychoanalytic experience and inter- disciplinary readings, I came to adopt the Langer and Pratt theory of isomorphism and in the course of time have expanded it with psychoanalytic dimensions. To distinguish it from its antecedent in the philosophy of aesthetics, let us refer to my psychoanalytic elaboration as a theory of "concordance." Here is how it came about.
Where art had long shown that self and object interpenetrate in feelingful experience, this runs counter to long-standing psychoanalytic teaching: in the course of self-differentiating from the original psychological union with the mother, the infant comes to establish firm boundaries between Self and World. Where Id was, Ego shall be. Primary process gives way to secondary process, fantasy to reality, illusion to truth. So runs the canon.
***lasch minimal self***
My own clinical experience, however, taught me that there were a large group of individuals, often gifted and neither psychotic nor borderline, for whom reality and the sense of self retained a degree of sensitive fluidity. Reality was neither self-evident nor monolithic, let alone average or necessarily expectable; it could be refreshingly expansive. It is not a given; it is constructed. As one person said, "Reality is negotiable!"
a+a+a+I described a group of patients whose sense of identity depended in part on a sense of partial fusion with others, seeing themselves and others, for example, as extensions of each other, termed "narcissistic identity disorders" (Rose, 1963, 1964, 1966). Later, I
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came to appreciate Winnicott's description of the child's transitional object and expanded this idea into that of an ongoing transitional process related to creativity (Rose, 1978).
Instead of firm separation or fixed structures, more and more I saw ongoing fluidity and permeable boundaries as part of growth and openness to change. This was in accordance with Von Bertalanffy's (1968) thinking about the advantages of an open system theory over a closed one. I began to appreciate that behind our clinical predilection to see psychopathology there is also garden-variety creativity. One example is the gradual formation of one's self and identity from the original symbiotic unity with the pre-Oedipal parent. Yes, this may of course become a potential source of later pathology, but it may also be viewed as an early stage of a mundane creative process.
That is to say, "the creativity of everyday life" is the healthy counterpart of the psychopathology of everyday life. Not only long-term adaptation, but also each moment of perception — scanning, screening, affectively coloring and appraising each sensory datum in its everlasting mix of inner and outer — is the silent work of the ego maintaining homeostasis creatively.
As for major creativity, it perpetuates the child's imaginative, restless probing of reality, resampling early, less differentiated stages of imagination and reintegrating them with the realistic perspective of the adult in order, finally, perhaps, to recompose reality refreshingly. The artistic work, itself, highlights the shifting qualities of self and reality that went into its creation, projecting a delicate balance between inner and outer, regression and progression.
Another example of the fluidity of an open system is the constant interplay between primary and secondary processes rather than their isolation as separate entities. An example of this is the joining of primary process configurations such as condensation and displacement with the delayed discharge of the secondary process. In this way the terms of perception, itself, can be slowed down, magnified and made manifest. Primary process configurations can be rendered conscious and shown in the course of their unfolding. Think of the stretching out and unfolding of Bach's (based on primary process configurations) or Picasso' bold visual condensations of multiple viewpoints simultaneously. Transposing the terms "primary and secondary process" into everyday "imagination and knowledge" make their interplay inherently plausible.
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As art helped to sensitize me to certain kinds of clinical experience and the awareness of the permeability of boundaries intrapsychically, it was analytic theory that allowed me to glimpse the possibility of a bridge between art and affect. That bridge was based on the idea of fluctuations of energy.
Freud's central idea about affect was that felt emotions are the conscious perceptions of an internal process which may be triggered by either external or endogenous events. Contemporary psychoanalysis and neuroscience agree that when an external event evokes affects, "the felt emotion is a perception of the subjective response to that event; it is not a perception of the external event itself" (Solms and Nersessian, 1999: 6).
In other words, the source is projected. When we listen to music we enjoy,
We are not just emotionally moved by the music we enjoy, but the emotions actually appear to flow directly from the music. Even as we recognize that the information triggering the feelings is encapsulated within the well-interpreted score, the resulting mood changes arise from the dynamic responses of our brains . . . . In short, our brains are designed to project affect (as well as perceptions, of course) back into the world . . . . This is the way the brain generates its highly adaptive illusions of emotional realities. (Panksepp, 1999: 33)What then, according to Freud, is the internal process? Affects are perceptions of "oscillations in the tension of instinctual needs [that] . . . become conscious as feelings in the pleasure-unpleasure series . . . [though] it is hard to say . . . by what means . . . these perceptions come about" (Freud, 1940: 198). He attributed the quality of the feelings to temporal factors: "the amount of increase or diminution in a given period of time" (Freud, 1920: 7-8). More specifically: "It is probable . . . that what is felt as pleasure or unpleasure is not the absolute height of . . . tensions [produced by stimuli] but something in the rhythm of the changes in them" (Freud, 1940: 145-146).
Though Freud tied oscillations of tension to instinctual needs lying behind conscious pleasure and unpleasure, we do not necessarily have to subscribe fully to instinct theory in order to retain the usefulness of the notion of energy.
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Consider that, according to analytic theory, secondary process, logical cognitive thought entails a long-circuiting buildup of the tension of bound energy, until finally achieving delayed gratification. Primary process imagination, on the other hand, works with unbound, mobile energy pressing for immediate release of tension.
Returning now to the idea of a more open system of relatively fluid boundaries, intrapsychically we would expect a continuous interplay between primary and secondary processes: imagination stimulating knowledge and knowledge disciplining imagination. Such an interplay would involve a flux of energy; knowledge, increase of tension; imagination, release.
I speculate that this interplay of tension and release either generates affect, reflects it, or is otherwise closely related to the nature of affect. Thus, without dissociating ourselves altogether from instinct theory, the energic connotations of the constant interplay between the tension and release of knowledge and imagination offer an approach to Freud's question as to how the perception of affects comes about. (More of this later.)
If a dynamic of tension and release indeed lies at the core of affect, it is precisely that which is ready and available to respond to art, for central to each art there is a similarly dynamic balance of tension and release held together by formal means within a secure and sensitive frame (G.J. Rose, 1980). This is especially clear in nonverbal art like nonrepresentational painting and music, where the absence of narrative content highlights the abstract form.
In music, for example, one does not have to go back to eightenth century formulations for the musical expression of certain typical emotions that characterized so-called affectenlehre of Quant and P.E. Bach. According to the music theoretician, Schenker (1935: 189):
The highest principle that is common to all the arts: the principle of inner tension and its corresponding fulfillment . . . .***romanticism (how vapid!!)***
If a differentiation is to be made between "classic" and "romantic" only the degree of tension and fulfillment should be considered.While many others could be cited in all the arts, in music Hindemith (1945) graphically presents the rise and fall of tension in both the melodic and harmonic realms, with an almost mathematically
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developed thesis on the tension produced between various melodic intervals and between various harmonic permutations.
Few from the field of music have specifically explored how music conveys affect. The work of Epstein (1993, 1995) is an exception. After closely examining excerpts of Mendelssohn, Mozart, and Wagner, he concludes that the sense of motion unites form, structure, and affect. "It is the nuances of motion that effect, modulate, and ultimately control musical affect . . . . Affect is deeply and intrinsically wed to structure, and structure inseparably tied to motion" (Epstein, 1993: 119).
He joins his musical thesis relating musical motion to affect to my idea that art and affect share the common dynamic of tension and release:
It is but a small and logical step from the dynamic buildup and release of tensions . . . to the factor of motion, as it operates in music as the carrier of these tensions and as the means through which tensions are controlled, modulated, and ultimately resolved. For our sense of musical motion is in part felt physically (muscularly) and psychologically in terms of tension and release. Tension/release may indeed be the essential factor, conveying the sensation of movement, of motion, in the absence of true physical motion in space.(Epstein, 1993: 99)
A composer knows that simple repetition, ornamentation, minor keys, modulation, remote harmonies, and dissonance may be used to increase tension. Conversely, returning to the central tonality of the "home" key, for example, after wandering in other keys, will always bring a relief of tension.
The foregoing discussion of tension and release in relation to affect in music is given substantive backing by the finding that motor areas of the brain are activated in the course of listening to music (cited in Benzon, 2001). The two come together in Nietzsche's remark somewhere that one listens to music with one's muscles.
Turning to tension and release in visual art, an artist knows how to highlight the dramatics of everyday visual experience and express them more energetically and clearly than is customary in daily life. How? For example, by knowing that oblique lines and rectangular or oval shapes are more tension-producing, and that
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horizontal or vertical lines or square or spherical shapes are more stable and tension-releasing. Knowing such matters, he can enhance the expressive qualities inherent in ordinary perception.
Now from the aspect of the viewer or listener and, more generally, perception itself, a perceptual sensitivity to the qualities of tension and release inherent in (or attributed to) any situation is at the root of that most basic aspect of perception, namely, affective perception. This is the capacity to have an immediate emotional gut reaction to any situation. It underlies the biological necessity that an organism be able to make an on-the-spot appraisal of the outside world's perceived hostility or friendliness in order to know how to respond: advance, withdraw, or wait. Needless to say, affective perception gives a first-alert signal. It must be evaluated and contextualized in the light of long-term memory and symbolization so that hair-trigger emergency actions may be aborted.
If there is a linkage in the tension-release deep structure of art and that of affect, their common dynamic of patterns of tension-release forms the affective bridge between art object and viewer. More precisely, the patterns of virtual tension and release in the artwork are concordant with the patterns of actual tension and release that constitute a person's capacity for nonverbal affective responsivity. It makes it appear that the artwork is attuned to the recipient, who thereupon responds with affective resonance.
By another route, starting in clinical experience, we have arrived at Langer and Pratt's theory of isomorphism. Note, too, that this has not required that the art-work communicate feelings; only that it generate them in receptive minds.
Does it matter? Yes, for reasons that are sufficiently significant to warrant calling it by a new name, "concordance." (1) It opens up a psychoanalytic developmental perspective on art; (2) it relates itself to neuroscience which may shed further light on our subject; (3) both points of view, psychoanalytic and neuroscientific, accord to art a weighty biological significance.
Not really; and saying so is quite the ironic recapitulation of the garden-variety communicative fallacy which was rightly and summarily dispensed with at the outset.
From this account alone I'm not seeing how mere concordance has any demonstable developmental importance. It comes out rather more like Pinker's "auditory cheesecake."
Regarding the first: The fit between virtual and actual patterns of tension and release can be so finely attuned that it can lead to a preconscious illusion that art is providing an emotionally responsive, witnessing presence. As in any intimately attuned encounter (like love or treatment) the aesthetic emotional experience may encourage one to feel more consciously what was always latent but inexpressible.
Sure. Why not?
But is this why you listen to music, Doctor?
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This mobilizes deeper emotional resonances from the past, perhaps even drawing upon the earliest nonverbal affective signaling that took place within the holding presence of the relationship between parent and infant.
drawing upon ≠ development
Ideally, this was geared towards the modulated buildup and resolution of tension in a finely-tuned dance of mother's attunement and infant's responsiveness. At that time it promoted a graded differentiation of feelings within the very beginnings of a sense of self.
Art, too, provides a holding presence of reliably balanced tension and release; it, too, allows affects to build up with modulated intensity to differentiate further. Thus, art continues a biological function of early mothering, namely, helps elaborate transformations of affect on higher, abstract levels of the same resonating emotional responsiveness that existed in the beginning.
Hmm. Is that "development" or "arrested development?"
The foregoing provides a theoretical rationale for a fundamental role of the arts in accessing affects blocked by trauma, and facilitating their differentiation irrespective of whether they eventually achieve verbalization.
Ok sure, then we'll all just chill on the art til some serious trauma comes along to force the art down our throats. We can use it to wash down the pills.
Art theorist and therapist Dr Ernest Zierer pioneered a related line of thinking to art therapy in the 1950s. His work was largely unrecognized, perhaps because there was as yet no body of theory to receive it. (For a first-hand personal account, see Finn, 1992.)
Believing that the task of integrating a painting paralleled overcoming situations in daily life, he applied his ideas of art theory to art therapy. He deliberately imposed obstacles ("push marks") onto the canvas that a patient was working on. The patient's task was (1) to integrate the imposed obstacle into a finished art-work, which at the same time (2) achieved a high level of aesthetic tension. The level of tension (he developed a scale of fourteen different levels) was determined by the size of a color area, the degree of color contrast, and skillful brush work. Success in the task indicated an improvement in both creative ability and coping capacity.
Just as art therapy is directly related with the ability to cope, music has an intimate relevance to socialization. Ethnomusicologists note that dance and music probably evolved together; in almost all premodern societies members of the social group dance and make music for and with others (Feld, 1974).
The social action of singing and dancing together can lead to an altered mental state characterized by increased malleability, and trusting, cooperative group behavior. Rhythmic behavioral
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activities that are induced by the beating of drums and music can lead to altered states of consciousness. In extreme form, trance states help to break down established habits and beliefs.
Thus, far from being a private individual matter, originally the action of dancing and singing together served an opposite function, namely, socialization. It probably played an important and perhaps primary role as a wordless means of bringing about deep emotional social bonding (Freeman, 2000).
Returning now to the isomorphism or concordance of patterns between art and affect, a bridge toward current brain neuroscience begins to appear possible.
According to Damasio (1999), from whose text the following is abstracted, there are six primary emotions: happiness, sadness, fear, anger, surprise, disgust. They are associated with a repertoire of facial expressions and varied temporal profiles. Some tend to "burst" patterns of rapid onset, peak of intensity and rapid decay.
There are also secondary or "background emotions" that reflect the organism's ongoing physiological process or interactions with the environment, or both. These consist largely of reflections of body-state changes associated with musculoskeletal changes like body posture and movements. They are practically inseparable from the continuously generated "pulses" of core consciousness. Their patterns are more "wavelike" and are present continuously like an ongoing melodic line (Damasio, 1999: 93; my italics). They are: well-being/malaise, tension/relaxation, fatigue/energy, balance/imbalance, harmony/discord.
It is worth emphasizing at this point that one of the background emotions, tension-relaxation, appears to be a common attribute or underlying feature of all. This conforms to the central dynamic we have postulated regarding both aesthetic form and affect, namely, a pattern of interplay between tension and release in their virtual and actual forms. Further, musculoskeletal elements play an important role in the affective response to art - as they do in background emotions.
When the organism interacts with an object, Damasio continues, neural images map the organism, the object and the interaction between them. The maps pertaining to the object cause changes in the maps pertaining to the organism, which in turn enhance the object. All these changes can be re-represented in yet other, nonverbal, second-order maps. The neural patterns of second-order maps can become mental images describing in wordless but feeling
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stories of how all this came about. While these can be converted immediately and automatically into language, it is again worth emphasizing that they exist initially in nonverbal form.
The experience of feelings is achieved in two ways, either a "body-loop" or an "as-if body" loop. May this correspond to the distinction we have made between the actual tension and release of affect and the virtual tension and release in the formal structure of art?
The experience of feelings through a "body-loop" is achieved through neural and chemical signals which change the map of the body landscape. It is represented in somatosensory structures of the nervous system on many levels.
In the experience of feelings by an "as-if body" loop, the representation of body-related changes due to feelings is represented in changed body landscape maps via direct sensory body maps under the control of other neural sites such as in the prefrontal cortices. They bypass the body proper, partially or entirely, indicating "as if" the body has really been changed but it has not; they bypass the body and create "as-if" body states based on empathy, mirroring, fantasy.
"As-if body" loops are important for internal simulation (Damasio, 1999: 281; my italics). Further, "The brain can get direct neural and chemical signaling from organism profiles that fit background emotions" (Damasio, 1999: 293).
Either route — body maps registering body-state changes or simulated "as-if body" loops — gives rise to a full gamut of feelings. Again, while these exist initially in nonverbal form, they can readily be converted into language. They include, for example, the emotional "chills" induced by music (Panksepp, 1995; Blood and Zatore, 2001; as cited by Damasio, 2003: 137).
Let us extend this in a way that attempts to approximate psychological discourse. The stimulating yet secure holding environment of balanced tension and release inherent in aesthetic structure is a profile that fits "background emotions." As such, it provides the brain with direct neural and chemical signaling. The experience of feeling evoked by nonverbal art like music would be registered via an "as-if body" loop involving "internal simulation."
This interdisciplinary exercise offers a lure and a limit. It offers a neural basis for the power of imagination — "as-if" loops and "internal simulation" — but it also highlights a limit. For a neural map of the power of imagination encompasses both the benign
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illusion of an empathic presence lying embodied in aesthetic experience, and the intensity of non-organic hallucinatory imagery and animistic fetishism, for example. So-called "reality testing" remains to a significant extent on the uncertain ground of judgment which, as we all know, is captive to the transient spirit of an age.
In other words, the interactive nature of mental contents in the form of body-based neural maps induced by real or simulated body-states necessarily involves an irreducible element of subjectivity. Hence, the nonveridicity of perception, the inevitability of ambiguity: a potential formula for pathology —and art!
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Put simplistically, the dominant hemisphere speaks, the nondominant one sings. ...
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Langer's distinction between discursive and presentational symbols is a helpful one. Discursive symbols are readily translatable and have fixed definitions. Music, on the other hand, like all the arts, expresses the quality of emotional life through presentational symbols. Presentational symbols are untranslatable; they are understandable only through their relations within the total structure of the work. The meaning of a piece of music lies entirely within the work — that is, in its own formal structure and inner
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relations. Unlike ordinary language, presentational symbols capture the flux of sensations and emotions.
For example, music can express opposites simultaneously and so capture the ambivalence of content better than words or language. In addition to such simultaneity, the linear unfolding of music in the course of time also mirrors the "shapes" of emotions. Music sets up expectations, interposes delays, and grants hidden recurrences before reaching a final resolution. The frustration of expectations is associated with rising tension, its gratification with release of tension. Tension-release embodies feeling. And it is precisely this element — the balance between tension and release - that has been called the specific dynamic of musical form (Toch, 1948: 157).
Artist-analyst Marion Milner's On Not Being Able to Paint (1957) and musician-philosopher Victor Zuckerkandl's posthumously published Man the Musician (1973) provide important insights into the relationship of language to nonverbal art. Both make a clear distinction between formal, logical thinking, on the one hand, and creative or aesthetic thinking on the other. According to formal logic, all thought which does not make a total separation between what a thing is and what it is not is irrational. Thus, according to formal logic, the whole area of symbolic expression is irrational, since the point about a symbol is that it is both itself and something else. Formal logic, then, gives a false picture in aesthetics; this false picture is avoided, Milner writes, only "if we think about art in terms of its capacity for fusing . . . subject and object, seer and seen and then making a new division of these" (p. 161).
Similarly, Zuckerkandl spells out the differences between objective hearing and musical hearing. The "I" that hears music, he writes, is different from the "I" who is the subject of a sentence, who is going to attend to outside signals in order to react to them in one way or another. The listener to music is more like the swimmer who allows himself to be carried by the water as he swims. Language, being firmly tied to subject-object predicate structure, fails us here. The "I" that listens to music is no longer something that "does" — that is, hears and now "has" the results of what it has done; namely, the sensations of tones. Hearing music involves hearing not only tones but also their direction, tension, motion, organic structure. It is the kind of hearing that moves with the tones and draws the hearer into their motion. Thus, it involves an interpenetration of subject and object, within rationality, drawn into the experience of the movement of felt-time (Zuckerkandl,
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1973: 160-162). The similarity to psychoanalytic listening is so striking as to require no comment.
Both Milner and Zuckerkandl make it clear that aesthetic hearing or viewing is more like creative, nonlogical thinking; also, that both are quite different from objective perception and cognitive, logical thinking. The difference lies in the opposition between subject and object (their separateness) in the case of cognitive, logical thinking, and in the togetherness of thinker and thought (their mutually influential motion) in aesthetic, creative thinking.
Milner summarizes the problem neatly:
Clearly the great difficulty in thinking logically about this problem is due to the fact that we are trying to talk about a process which stops being that process as soon as we talk about it, trying to talk about a state in which the "me/not-me" distinction is not important, but to do so at all we have to make the distinction. (p. 161)...
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At the core of trauma is a breakdown of adaptive mental functoning and consequent flooding — whether triggered by a loss of trust in a functioning external "other" or to the incapacitation of a part of oneself, namely, the observing ego. Without the observing ego's capacity to reflect on what one is experiencing on a primal, often somatic, level there is no possibility of representing the trauma to oneself. Indeed, the sense of self itself is fractured.
Without self-witnessing and self-representation, the massive overstimulation that the individual has undergone can only exist as a wordless emptiness, or else as chaos that at best can only remain
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sequestered. The experiencing ego has been flooded, its connection to the observing ego disabled, and thus the possibility of self-representation and subsequent reintegration ("mental synthesis") of these two aspects of the ego destroyed (Laub and Podell, 1995).
Hence the relevance of the illusion provided by music (and art) for the therapy of traumatic stress. By enabling the person to recognize and feel what had been unformed and therefore inexpressible, as if by a responsive empathic presence, it helps repair the loss or damage to a reflective inner "other." As we will discuss later, like mourning it facilitates internalization. By enhancing mindfulness it helps to "create symbolic representations of past traumatic experiences, [the better to] tam[e] the associated terror and desomatiz[e] the memories" (van der Kolk et al., 1996: 205) and reunite the self.
The interplay between the experiencing and observing ego lends itself to cautious correlation with data concerning the factual (declarative/explicit) and emotional (procedural/implicit) memory systems (cf. Damasio, 1994; LeDoux, 1996; van der Kolk et al., 1996; Yovell, 2000).
The hippocampus and the amygdala are bilateral structures deep inside the medial part of the temporal lobe, connected to the orbital frontal cortex. The factual memory system is hippocampal-based and primarily neocortical; the developmentally older amygdala-based system is subcortical.
Building a bridge between psychoanalysis and neuroscience, the significant point has been made that, while neurobiological findings are incompatible with the structural model of ego-id-superego, the hippocampal-based system is congruent with the earlier (prestructural) theory of the ego; and the amygdala-based system is congruent with the dynamic unconscious. Further, "the prefrontal cortex is the crucial locus of interplay between intellect and feelings" (Slap and Brown, 2001: 113).
Normally the two memory systems synchronize intellect and feelings. This suggests that they are, in part at least, also neuro-anatomical loci underlying the observing and experiencing aspects of the ego; like the hippocampus, the observing ego is able to moderate emotional triggering.
The amygdala triggers rapid response survival reactions such as hyper-vigilance (by releasing ACTH — adrenocorticotrophic hormone). These emergency reactions can be modified or aborted by neocortical and especially frontal lobe systems as well as the hippocampal system. By processing comparable events cognitively and
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relating them to each other in a spatial and temporal context, the hippocampal system provides a more objective and narrative understanding of emotional experience and enables one to discriminate and learn to avoid danger rather than have hair-trigger responses to each perceived "danger." Thus, in the presence of emotionally alarming data, it evaluates and is then able to abort or slow down emergency reactions (by regulating the amount of ACTH that is released).
Under extreme emotional arousal the integrated functioning of the amygdala and hippocampus falls apart. Acute panic can cause instant breakdown. Also, in chronic stress the stress hormone, cortisol, in the course of time overstimulates the amygdala and reduces the size of the hippocampus, impairing its operation. The hippocampus and related structures (the observing ego?) are then prevented from evaluating incoming information from the amygdala and its related structures (the experiencing ego?).
The result of new information not being categorized in time and space or integrated with existing mental schemata is that traumatic memories are dissociated: the emotional memories of the trauma remain ready to be triggered while the factual memories of the trauma are only spottily recalled, if at all. Hence, too, the familiar clinical finding that traumatic memories are timeless and ego-alien. Not being collated and transcribed into personal narratives , they come back as concrete emotional and sensory states with little verbal representation. This failure to process information symbolically and integrate it with other experience is at the very core of the pathology of post-traumatic stress disorder (van der Kolk et al., 1996: 295-296).
It is striking that this is the converse of the effect of art. Precisely those functions that one finds damaged or failed due to trauma are those we have long postulated as being enhanced and even ideally realized in the dynamics of aesthetic structure and experience. Art succeeds, above all, in helping one process information symbolically and relating it in novel ways to the self and world at large. While art is not "traumatolytic," it aids in transforming private trauma into ego-syntonic and more universal experience.
Neither art nor psychotherapy can always undo all the devastating effects of trauma. What it can do, however, is to help restore the synchronous operations of the experiencing and observing ego — the destruction of which is the structural source of the effects of trauma.
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... Like poetry, the affective power of music most likely has its origins in the infant's earliest vocal experience of the mother. Not that vocal experience can ever be simply vocal: the attributes of mother's voice are indistinguishable from her touch and movement; all become fixed in the rhythm of the baby's body and comprise a rich medley of sensorimotor and affectomotor components, linking mother and infant prior to the latter's differentiation.
The sensorimotor and affectomotor components of music are likewise indistinguishable. The affectomotor response to music comprises many physical concomitants of affects or preverbal affect precursors — tactile, kinesthetic, rhythmic, respiratory. It can be no coincidence that listening to music is often accompanied by subvocal singing along with the music, perhaps harking back to one's earliest musical interplay. (Recall the earlier example of singing to elicit the illusion of two-ness to relieve loneliness.)
Pablo Casals, Glenn Gould and other instrumentalists were famous for being hardly able to restrain their singing accompaniment to the music they were performing; they seemed merged with it. It is possible that for them, explicitly, as for others in the audience of music, less overt and more implicitly, the interaction with the music becomes itself internalized as a more or less silent and perhaps enduring affective presence.
If it is possible as I suggest that music (and art) may not only evoke but perhaps embody internal representations of significant relationships, how may we conceptualize the relationship between music and internalization?
This question is intimately connected to the more basic one as to how we distinguish inside from outside, subjective from objective. A review article on developments in neuroscience cites the
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prevailing consensus that current perception requires comparisons with the past:
The separate features of the environment stimulate particular patterns of neuronal activity in the brain. The brain does not perceive the external environment, nor the separate stimulus features. Rather, the brain recognises the patterns of neuronal activation within the brain itself. For perception to occur, the brain searches for a match between the current pattern of neuronal activation and patterns stored in memory from prior experience . . . . The brain . . . makes a quick assessment of just enough details to find a "good enough match." When a "good enough" match is found, perception occurs. (Pally, 1997: 1025)How well this "matches" Freud's repeated assertions (in the 1895 "Project" (pp. 327-330) and the "Dream Book" (1900-1901: 565-567)), foreshadowing the following:
All presentations originate from perceptions and are repetitions of them. The antithesis between subjective and objective . . . . only comes into being from the fact that thinking possesses the capacity to bring before the mind once more something that has once been perceived, by reproducing it as a presentation without the external object having still to be there. The first and immediate aim, therefore, of reality-testing is, not to find an object in real perception which corresponds to the one presented, but to refind such an object. The reproduction of a perception as a presentation is not always a faithful one; it may be modified by omissions, or changed by the merging of various elements . . . . A precondition for the setting up of reality-testing is that objects shall have been lost which once brought real satisfaction.(Freud, 1925a: 237-238)
As we have repeatedly discussed, the "good enough" match between the virtual tension and release dynamic of art (music) on the one hand and affect on the other, recalls early affective attunements and stimulates affective resonance; the underlying concordance between art and affect may be so close that it leads to a preconscious illusion that one's emotional responsiveness to art is mutual and
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reciprocated, that is, that music itself is a witnessing presence. This facilitates further affectomotor responsiveness (G.J. Rose, 1996).
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Needless to say, viewing a documentary film of the Holocaust cannot be equated with the actual and sustained physical traumatic experience of the Holocaust. The film was thrice removed from actual experience; at most, Giacometti had a mediated "traumatic" experience. Secondly, the typical outcome of massive psychic trauma is to precipitate or aggravate a creative block. Giacometti's experience rather seems to have allowed him to overcome his
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Massive and prolonged psychic trauma, on the other hand, leading to excess cortisol secretion, ultimately destroys the hippocampal memory system. This impairs the capacity to reflect, contextualize and experience and leaves only the now unregulated and over-stimulated amygdala to flood the organism with unassimilable memories. Thus, instead of finally working through memories to a successful conclusion, their repetition leads to the opposite retraumatization (for a review, see Yovell, 2000).
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An early overall view offered by Kramer was that meaning results from a complex interaction of composer, score, editor, performer, performance, recording engineer, playback system, and — above all — listener. A striking example of why "above all, with the listener" is how two professionally trained musicians heard a particular passage from one of Kramer's compositions (Serbelloni Serenade, 1995): one heard Russian contrapuntal music like that found in some Shostakovich fugues, and the other heard Mexican bullfight music.
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