Necessary Illusion: Art as Witness: Resonance and Attunement to Forms and Feelings - Hardcover

Rose, Gilbert J.

9780823635108: Necessary Illusion: Art as Witness: Resonance and Attunement to Forms and Feelings

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0823635104 ISBN 13: 9780823635108

Publisher: International Universities Press, 1999

Necessary Illusion is the last volume of a trilogy aimed at redressing the reductionism inherent in the traditional psychoanalytic "take" on art as being essentially a struggle with illness and self-healing. In contrast, the trilogy views aesthetic form as evolving within a theory of reality and perception. Art is as amenable to promoting progressive adaptation and differentiation as regression and defense.
The Power of Form (1980 [1992]) focused on the correspondence between aesthetic form and psychic process, in that each involves an interplay between holistic imagination and realistic thought and perception. Art, like ego, may serve an adaptive function of aiding orientation in an inconstant reality.
Trauma and Mastery in Life and Art (1987) concluded with the interaction between art and mind - based on their corresponding structures - as a form of resonance associated with currents of affect.
Necessary Illusion draws on both books and explores the emotional resonances to art in the light of psychoanalytic perspectives on affect and the prospect of a non-reductionist psychology of art. Tension and release constitutes the dynamic core of aesthetic structure and emotional response. This leads to an apparent attunement of art to emotion and fosters the illusion of a "witnessing presence." This amplifies responsive emotional resonances that range from the present back to the remote past. Rooted in the biological function of early mothering, it encourages further differentiation of feeling, and thus ongoing emotional development.
The trilogy as a whole returns us to art with added appreciation for its relevance to life and growth.

"synopsis" may belong to another edition of this title.

From the Author:

My musings evolved into a trilogy on psychoanalysis and art
When I undertook to examine a number of my previously published papers to see what overriding themes lay between the lines I had no idea this would lead in the course of time to a trilogy on psychoanalysis and art, deepening the view of each in the light of the other.

The trilogy shifts the traditional psychoanalytic perspective on art from content to form, and from motivation and defense toward perception and reality. It views art as an ongoing growth process rather than as a privileged regression related to neurosis. This places art in a normative instead of a pathological and reductionistic framework. For psychoanalysis, it helps place affect back in the center of theory, emphasizing the permeability of intrapsychic boundaries, and the importance of external feedback for the advancement of id an primary process.

Volume I: The power of Form (1980); expanded edition, 1992; International Universities Press). My full-time clinical practice of psychiatry and psychoanalysis (now approaching forty-five years) as well as life-long involvement with the arts, convinced me that reality is far from monolithic and self-evident; it is constructed out of relative fluidity, not given. In order to keep the organism oriented in such a dynamic field, the mind processes data in two different styles simultaneously, namely, imaginatively and cognitively. It is the task of the ego to keep regulating this interplay to form an intelligible whole. It does this in its moment by moment functioning as well as in the course of larger time frames. Art aids this task by promoting a freer flow of traffic between imagination and knowledge.

This is spelled out in terms of the apprehension of time, space and person. Since art helps to keep calibrating these coordinates of orientation, the conclusion follows that art serves a biological function.

Volume 2:Trauma and mastery in life and art (1987, expanded edition, 1996; International Universities Press) continues the argument for the biological basis of art and the mutual relevance of art and psychoanalysis.

The wear and tear of everyday life, including trauma and the threat of trauma, causes feelings to be bleached out of thought and perception. Psychoanalysis, through verbalization, recovers repressed memories and isolated feelings, art, through sensuous forms, undoes the denial of the emotional aspect of perception Both reintegrate what was defensively split off, thereby helping the individual to think and perceive with more feeling. Thus each contributes to the ongoing mastery of inner and outer reality.

I set up the background for this discussion by exploring the parallels and differences between creative and psychopathological responses to traumatic events. By comparing the childhood of a real-life murderer I examined while a psychiatrist in the U.S. Air Force with that of Dostoevsky I show that both were traumatized by a strikingly similar childhood memory of seeing a horse beaten to death; while this experience dominated the life of the murderer, Dostoevsky used it at a pivotal point in Crime and Punishment.

I then compare the creation of imaginary characters in a case of multiple personality with the splitting and reintegration that a novelist uses to create characters, as in John Fowles's novel, The French Lieutenant's Woman. Finally, I present a clinical vignette about a woman whose sense of time became altered following the sudden death of her daughter and show how such modern unpredictability may be related to the altered sense of time in the music of Arnold Schoenberg and Charlie Parker.

Volume 3, Necessary Illusion - Art as Witness (1996; International Universities Press) draws on both books and explores the emotional resonances to art in the light of new developmental perspectives on affect.

Patterns of virtual tension and release lie at the inner structure of art; patterns of actual tension and release lie at the inner structure of emotion. This congruence between art and feelings makes it feels as if art is attuned to one's own personal emotional resonance. The fit between virtual and actual patterns of tension and release can be near perfect, leading to a preconscious illusion that art is providing an emotionally responsive, witnessing presence. This mobilizes deeper emotional resonances from the past, perhaps even drawing upon the earliest nonverbal affective signaling that took place in the holding presence of the relationship between infant & caretaker. At that time, it served to modulate the intensity of affects and aided their differentiation of to higher levels.

Art, too, offers a holding presence of reliably balanced tension and release; it, too, allows affects to build up with modulated intensity and further differentiate. Thus, art continues a biological function of early mothering, namely, help elaborate transformations of affect on higher, abstract levels of the same resonating emotional responsiveness that existed in the beginning. The foregoing also provides a theoretical rationale for a fundamental role of the arts in accessing affects blocked by trauma and facilitating their reintegration.

The Trilogy as a whole returns us to art with added appreciation for its relevance to life and growth. At the same time it expands the scope of psychoanalysis by making it applicable to nonverbal art such as music.

Synopsis:

Draws on the author's previous works, The Power of Form (1980) and Trauma and Mastery in Life and Art (1987), to explore the emotional resonances to art in the light of psychoanalytic perspectives on affect and the prospect of a non-reductionist psychology of art. Discusses tension and release as th

"About this title" may belong to another edition of this title.