Mother and child. A psychobiographical portrait of Mary Cassatt

The noted American impressionist, Mary Cassatt is remembered for her intimate portrayal of women, children, and the mother-child relationship. In this paper I have attempted to highlight some of the psychological forces impinging upon the artist, feeling that the artist's work is highly overdetermined. Mention was made of some of the difficulties that a psychobiographical study engenders. Nevertheless, it is hoped that such a study leads to enhanced understanding and appreciation of the artist, her work, and her rich inner world. An examination of the artist's life indicates that difficulties in the family of origin impinged upon her and deeply influenced her work. The loss of several siblings during critical developmental subphases may have produced intense survival guilt in Mary, motivating her to "recreate" her siblings on canvas and to devote her life to care of survivors. Lack of confirmation of Mary's talents by her father may have hindered her development, propelling the child toward a profoundly libidinalized and enmeshed relationship with the mother. Mary's intense relationship with her mother may have led the artist to develop particular stylistic nuances in her productions, contributed to her inability to become a wife and mother herself, and led to frequent episodes of depression. A case was made that Mary suffered from narcissistic disturbance, never completing the recognition of herself as a person outside of the orbit of her mother. Finally, the role of Edgar Degas in the artist's life was described. He seems to have played a major role in the evolution of Mary's style as well as being an important influence in her making a partial separation from her mother in adulthood. In spite of Mary's deep personal suffering, she was able to epitomize in her paintings the most tender and nurturant of relationships. By painting the mother-child theme, she sublimated her own wishes to become a mother as creator of art. Within her family system, she appropriated the position of mother; as the artist, she became the interpreter of this experience. By developing her talent, she communicated her wish to be a mother, and expressed the need to find, if only on canvas, a more truly empathic mother. In essence, her work allowed her to conceive of a life different from the one external reality imposed upon her. It also served as an indispensable adaptive function, allowing the artist to communicate with others, achieve recognition, and play.(ABSTRACT TRUNCATED AT 400 WORDS)     

Sylvia Plath and the failure of emotional self-repair through poetry

Creativity serves not only an aesthetic function but also psychological self-repair for the creative artist. The authors examine the failure of Sylvia Plath's efforts to control her suicidal violence and to bridge her isolation from others via the shared affective experience of poetry. At first, she used traditional forms and mediated images, but when she abandoned them for a more personal expressive art, she lost the shaping, controlling devices she had been using for self-containment and self-repair. They were no longer available to her when she underwent a sweeping narcissistic regression following some very stressful life events. Her emotional deterioration ultimately cost her her life.     

MARION MILNER, MYSTICISM AND PSYCHOANALYSIS

It is unusual to combine mysticism and psychoanalysis. Marion Milner, however, achieved precisely this. Through her self-analysis and analytic work with children and adults—and using as an illustration her own and others' imaginative ideas, paintings, doodles, drawings and pictures—she drew attention to the potential for health and creativity of undoing the obstacles to mystical experience of oneness with what is beyond or other than the self, which she sometimes called God, the unconscious or the id. This article seeks to explain and highlight this aspect of her contribution to, and continuing importance for, psychoanalytic theory and practice—particularly that associated with Winnicott—through detailing her early life and diary-keeping experiments, some of her psychoanalytic case histories during and after the Second World War, her work as an artist, ending with her travels and her involvement during the 1980s and 1990s with the Squiggle Foundation and British Association of Art Therapists.     

Memories of Donald Winnicott

Barbara Dockar-Drysdale, founder and original therapeutic adviser to the Mulberry Bush School, is now in her eighties, and living in retirement. Her writings make frequent reference to her indebtedness to Winnicott, whom she used to meet monthly over the last seventeen years of his life to discuss their ideas and work. Winnicott wrote of her: ‘Here was someone who knew’.     

Seeing the Unseen: Pastoral Insights Drawn from James Turrell’s Artwork

According to Charles Sanders Peirce’s framework of semiotics, an individual’s life can be regarded as a work of art that as a sign continuously generates meaning by using various life experiences as its art materials. Here the individual plays a role both as an artist and as a viewer of his or her life. This semiotic implication of one’s life reshapes the general goal and function of pastoral care and counseling. In terms of art, the pastoral caregiver’s role is defined as that of a curator who facilitates the overall environment for aesthetic experience by helping an individual to see the unseen in his or her life as a work of art and does so in a didactic but unobtrusive way. As an example, a series of James Turrell’s art installations suggests how the role and function of the pastoral caretaker can be redefined. This aesthetic perspective also reflects the existential and psychospiritual dimensions of pastoral care and counseling.     

The lives of Mary Foote: painter and Jungian

Mary Foote (1872‐1968) was a successful early twentieth century American artist who suddenly closed her New York studio in 1926 to go to Zurich to study with Jung. There she joined his ‘Interpretation of Visions’ seminars (1930‐1934), which she recorded and edited. This work won Jung's praise and his friendship, but all too often Foote was seen merely as a secretary or background figure. Deirdre Bair's biography of Jung suggested that Foote's life and work deserved fuller study, if only to rebalance our view of Jung's early women followers. This paper takes up that work to ask how Foote's early life and career led to her important work in preserving and describing Jung's earliest attempts to apply his theories to clinical practice.     

NAVIGATING NATION,SIGNIFYING SIKHISM: THE WORK OF ARPANA CAUR

This article situates the artwork of Arpana Caur within national and global contexts through such topics as the nature of the aesthetic process for Caur, the relations among affect, activism, and politics in her life and work, and the ways in which Indian art can be supported and made more visible on the Indian and global scales. The article presents The article presents the artist's views – the longest and most in-depth she has given to date – on topics central to her work, including Sikhism, Buddhism, Kabir, feminism, human rights, environmentalism, and the nature of time. This piece explores in particular how art can represent the timelessness of spirituality alongside the exigencies of contemporary issues and tragedies, such as communal violence. Central throughout this article is the concept of nation, exploring how an artist can represent nation both aesthetically and politically, and the ways in which nation can be both attractive and challenging.     

Psychologism and Completeness in the Arts

When is an artwork complete? Most hold that the correct answer to this question is psychological in nature. A work is said to be complete just in case the artist regards it as complete or is appropriately disposed to act as if he or she did. Even though this view seems strongly supported by metaphysical, epistemological, and normative considerations, this article argues that such psychologism about completeness is mistaken, fundamentally, because it cannot make sense of the artist's own perspective on his or her work. For the artist, the question is not about his or her own psychology, but about the character of the work and the context in which he or she works. A nonpsychological account of completeness, on which completeness is a question of whether the work satisfies the conditions implicit in the artist's plan, avoids this problem and is equally or better able to explain the metaphysical, epistemic, and normative phenomena which appeared to support psychologism.     

“My Spiritual Journey to Know and Find Myself”: An Interview with Manisha Roy

In this interview, Manisha Roy shares how she became interested in Jungian psychology and how the concept of the shadow became a living help in her life. She relates how she has dealt with the heritage from her native country of India and shares her experience with marriage and divorce. She expresses her opinions about the future of depth psychotherapy.     

The Father's Body-Shadow and Creativity in the Female

There is in the female a relationship between a positive connection to the father's body and the development of a creative life. Conversely, if a woman has experienced only a negative connection to her father's body, then a life of creative fulfillment will often chide her. In this case, she must be willing to assert her own creative bright shadow in order to rescue her creative life from the dark cave of her father's shadow. Lastly, the inner union of heroic man and creative feminine bright shadow is necessary if a woman is to experience her life as creatively meaningful.     

A Living Life, A Living Death: Bessie Head��s Writing as a Survival Strategy

This paper explores Bessie Head's writing as a survival strategy through which she transformed her lived experience into imaginative literature, giving meaning and purpose to a life under permanent threat from the dominant group first in South Africa and later in Botswana. This threat included the destructive effect of the many fixed labels imposed upon her including: a 'Coloured' woman, the daughter of a woman designated mad, an exile, a psychotic, a tragic black woman, and a Third World woman writer. Her endeavours to avoid and defeat such limited, static definitions produced work characterised by contradiction and paradox, through which she asserted her right to survive and determined, like Makhaya in When Rain Clouds Gather, to establish 'a living life' in place of the 'living death that a man could be born into' (Head 1989, 136). Through a combination of Head's personal letters and papers and her published work, it can be seen how her particular preoccupations and experiences including her life in exile, her beliefs about her origins, her relationship to her absent mother, her distress, her madness and her need for love and for work were transformed into writing which expresses not only the destructive circumstances of her life but also its life-affirming aspects. Her writing was also a means by which she could create identities to express the dangers she encountered from the all-pervasive power structures which influenced her life and her sense of self, as well as ways to transcend them, enabling her to say in the last years of her life 'I am no failure' (20.2.1986 KMM BHP).     

The Divine,The Deviant and the Diabolical: A Journey Through An Artist's Paintings During Her Participation in a Creative Process Group: An Evolution of "Developmental Mourning"

Participation in writing and creative process offers a unique window to view the evolution of the mourning process. This study traces how a painter's work as shown to such a group reveals and interacts with her developmental progress as she goes through the mourning process in individual therapy with the author, who is also the leader of the writing and creative process group to which the artist belongs. Through these mutually beneficial exchanges, the patient is able to relinquish her constructed false self-identity for an authentic female identity, as seen in the evolution of her painting over her two-year participation in the writing and creative process group.     

Renewal of object relations through dream-work

In this paper I describe my work with a suicidal patient. The patient was a woman who failed to realize her creative potential in a much wished for and unattainable profession of teacher and transferred all her energy and desire for leadership into her family life. The slogan of her life was the pathetic phrase: 'Everything or nothing!' Her views on life differed from those of her husband who, at the age of 48, started a love affair with a 25-year-old woman. In relation to this, the patient became depressed and attempted suicide twice (by poisoning) in two years. From the Toxicology Department she was referred to the Psychiatric Department where she was treated as an out-patient.     

The Wounded Counselor: Battle for the Soul at an Elite Private School

A Jungian analyst describes her experiences as a counselor in an independent school. Inspired to work in a nontherapeutic setting by James Hillman's call for “a depth psychology of extraversion,” she initially finds the school tolerant of human vulnerability and shadow and receptive to her efforts to engage with psyche on the individual and group levels. However, under new leadership the school goes through a radical change and certain forces ascendant in the larger collective—technology, globalization, rationalism, and stepped-up demand for measurable outcomes—come to dominate the school's values and culture. The author explores the impact of these changes on her own role as well as on the social, emotional, and psychological lives of the students. Although tempted to despair over the marginalization of psyche in an increasingly dehumanized world, she also finds cause for optimism in the upcoming generation of young people, which she sees as possessing remarkable psychological and relational intelligence. She ventures some observations about the unique struggles and gifts of the millennial generation, coming of age in the hyperconnected era of the Internet and largely outside the purview of the adults in their lives. Given the culture's failure to provide the psychological eldering these young people crave, she suggests that Jungians are uniquely qualified to fill this role and urges depth psychologists to consider the possibilities that exist in schools for fostering individuation, initiation, and other forms of soul-making. Finally, she explores some ideas for “emotional intelligence” programs grounded not in the standard cognitive-behavioral approaches but in imaginal, archetypal, and psychodynamic perspectives.     

Out of Darkness: Reverberations of Trauma and its Creative Transformations

Traumatic experiences have a ripple effect, which continues throughout life and function as a powerful inner force that draws the survivor like a magnet to situations and events that allow him or her to work through pain; to give it shape, to release it, to express it to others, to make sense of it and to find some meaning in it. Self-expression through the creative arts can be one of the most effective means to healing. By externalizing what is experienced internally as overwhelming and fragmenting, and by fashioning it into a creative product, the artist brings the traumatic experience into the light of day for a new viewing. This enables reflection and integration of what is internally chaotic to be defined, mastered, and integrated into a coherent meaningful narrative. The artistic product, which can be shared with witnessing others, facilitates connection and fosters a healthy narcissism. The transformation of trauma into creative self-expression is illustrated here by an analysis of three generations of survivors—the author, her father, and her daughter—who each turned to the arts as a means of self-healing.     

Agnes Arber: form in the mind and the eye

Agnes Arber (1879–1960) was a British botanist who was a leading plant morphologist during the first half of the 20th century. She also wrote on the history and philosophy of botany. I argue in this article that her philosophical work on form and on how the work of the mind and the eye relate to each other in morphological research are relevant to the science of today. Arber's unusual blend of interests—in botany, history, philosophy, and art—put her in a unique position to examine issues of form. Even her unorthodox ideas on evolution can now be seen as fitting in well with discussions of natural selection as the predominant engine of evolutionary change. Arber's views also throw light on present work dealing with developmental plant genetics and with the study of protein form. I will further argue that her marginal position relative to institutional science, while it may have left her vulnerable to criticism, also made possible her deep philosophical reflections on morphology.     

Otto Rank's art

Abstract

Otto Rank's work has had an indirect influence on much of existential‐humanistic psychology, yet his contribution has been unevenly acknowledged. Seeing Rank as a developing artist helps to put his creative contributions to psychoanalysis, post‐psychoanalytic critique, and existential‐humanistic psychotherapy, in perspective. After his separation from Freud, Rank's innovative thought blossomed; his later works have deep and lingering humanistic import. A look at convergences and divergences between Freud and Rank shows that Rank's art (of living, of theorizing, and of practicing therapy) is an uncannily familiar and inspiring model of humanistic practice in the world. The continuing relevance of Rank's ideas about art and artists is explored, and Rank is re‐introduced to humanistic psychologists who may recognize aspects of his work as consonant with their own.