Art Psychotherapy and Primary Process

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Document (1970). The Hands of the Living God: By Marion Milner. London: Hogarth Press; New York: Int. Univ. Press. 1969. Pp. 444.. Int. J. Psycho-Anal., 51:531-540.
(1970). International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, 51:531-540
The Hands of the Living God: By Marion Milner. London: Hogarth Press; New York: Int. Univ. Press. 1969. Pp. 444. I
After reading The Hands of the Living God twice, the second time with most careful attention to the details, I am convinced that this account of the 20-yearlong analysis of a gifted schizophrenic girl is the most beautifully written book on psychoanalytic themes that has ever appeared in English (and, as far as my knowledge goes, in any other language); that it conveys in an unparalleled fashion the rewards and agonies of practising psychoanalysis and the miseries, perplexities and fears of schizophrenia; and that it appears to me (writing as an interested layman) to have very important implications for the modification of some psychoanalytic techniques, perhaps particularly in treating psychotics, but certainly not confined to them. I will try to justify these large claims for one of the very few books published in the last 30 years which I consider a masterpiece. Mrs Milner and 'Susan' were singularly well matched. Both have a lively sensitivity to and appreciation of all the arts, though Mrs Milner gives her chief love to painting and Susan to music; both have a deep feeling for the English language (Susan's account of her 16 'years of blackness' given on pp. 3756 is a most moving and insightful short piece of English, worthy of inclusion in any anthology of English prose; poetry gave Mrs Milner not only her title but many clues in the course of treatment); both have a deep awareness of the body and its potentialities for modifying perception through relaxation and internal awareness, Susan apparently intuitively during the four years she worked on a farm before her first breakdown and the administration of ECT which robbed her of 'her soul' and 'all that beauty', Mrs Milner as a discursive interest for much of her life which she discussed in A Life of One's Own and On Not Being Able to Paint. Her articulateness about her awareness of her own body-states and their effect on Susan in the psychoanalytic sessions is one of the major technical innovations described in this book. Very slowly I came to suspect that this pondering would have to have a deeply physical aspect; in fact I was beginning to believe more and more that what I said was often less important than my body-mind state of being in her sessions. As the years went on I began to think that before there could be a real change in her there would have to be a change in meand not only by coming to understand more and give better interpretationsfor slowly I found I had to give up trying so hard to provide her with explanations, a giving up which I found difficult, since she was always clamouring for them (p. 42). how slow I had been to see that what she was urgently concerned with and trying to tell me
about was not yet the satisfaction of instinct but the establishing a sense of being (p. 404). Susan's lack of a physical 'sense of being', her inability to feel her body supported by the couch or her feet in contact with the ground, is one of the recurrent themes throughout the book, as are her physical symptoms, her involuntary blushing and turning aside her head, the continuous pains in her neck, the feeling of constriction in her head. With extremely few words Mrs Milner is able to keep vivid her feeling for Susan's great physical beauty; I know of no other study where the bodies of both the analyst and the patient are so solidly present. There is one aspect of Susan's physical deprivations which I think Mrs Milner might have stressed and examined in more detail than she does in this book. Apparently Susan's very disturbed, schizogenic mother prevented her walking until she was two years old, by keeping her forcibly strapped in her pram. Mrs Milner does wonder: if it were true that her mother did stop her walking, strap her in, could this impeding of the exercise and development of the ego function of standing on one's own feet and going where one wants to go, have resulted in a regressive activation of the sucking wish. And did all that energy go next into passionate looking? (p. 331). But she does not pursue this further, does not consider the possible effects of such an experience
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on her attitudes towards being supported and controlled, both the unbearable tension where unwanted support is provided, and the panic of what one may do or suffer when such support is withdrawn. The late John Rickman and I explored some of the possible sequels to interference with the use of the striped muscles by swaddling in The People of Great Russia (G. Gorer & J. Rickman, 1949) and I believe some of our observations are relevant in Susan's case; certainly many of her drawings have very great emphasis on constriction and immobility, on being nailed up, as well as on the importance of the eye as a grasping and suffering organ. During two periods of her analysis Susan was able to communicate through drawing significant doodles, more than 4, 000 of them; 154 of these are reproduced, and the discussion and analysis of them make up a large portion of this remarkable book. Here the reader and the analyst can share the same material; Mrs Milner provides her associations and interpretations (often tentative) but they by no means exhaust the richness of the material. Besides being gifted with an awareness of her body, Mrs Milner has cultivated her powers of seeing in a way which is, to say the least, very rare among psychoanalysts who learn almost entirely through their ears and communicate with their mouths. Leaving aside the analytic interpretations which Mrs Milner makes, her comments on the drawings (and a few paintings) could teach a great deal about how to look at and explore works of art. Although this is not her primary intention, I think, this book could be a most useful training in aesthetic sensibility for any attentive reader. Because she provides so much of the evidence, this book also provides much of the pleasures of a detective story, if the reader tries to interpret the drawings before reading Mrs Milner's comments; very occasionally the reader may find a clue which Mrs Milner has missed, or at least not pointed out. For example, the figure of a duck first appears on p. 114 and keeps reappearing in subsequent drawings, and I hypothesized that this was Susan's reference to herself because somebody had given her the pet-name of 'Little duck'; on p. 203 Mrs Milner mentions that her mother had addressed her so. There are a few other symbols for example, the flagsfrom which I think Mrs Milner could have made more deductions than she has thought fit to print.
What, however, I think most important about these drawings is that they were gifts from the patient to the analyst, which the analyst accepted gratefully and treasured, even though some of the early drawings were almost faecal smears, tight drawings of turds. In classical psychoanalytic treatment the gift-giving is all one-way: the analyst gives interpretations based on the patient's productions, which the patient can either accept or reject; but the patient does not give the analyst anything concrete, except his fees, though the analyst may make use of the material the patient has produced. In our society, and in a large part of the world, to be always the recipient and never the donor (except perhaps in a symbolic fashion) is to acknowledge inferior status, like a child or a servant; equality demands that gifts should be reciprocal. I think it is arguable that this change in technique on Mrs Milner's part was in large part responsible for Susan's return to the world, from being so disturbed that she could not even walk a few yards in the street unaccompanied to being married and holding down a job; for the acceptance of these gifts finally enabled Susan to consider herself not entirely worthless. I saw it [drawing] also as a touching that was reparative, not just a way of seeking comfort in loneliness, but seeking to do reparation for all her destructive intentions or actions. Also I saw her as, through her drawings, constantly creating a bridge between me and herself, a basis for communication, since I believed her drawings did all have meaning potentially; even if I did not as yet understand more than a small part of them I had at least made the attempt to relate them to what had gone on between us during the years. Thus these so many bits of herself that she had given me had, I thought, been modified by my capacity to see her as a whole continuing person, even if she could not yet see herself or me as that (p. 240). In the passage just quoted Mrs Milner is using Mrs Klein's concept of reparation as a theoretical tool, and many of her technical concepts are lucidly based on Mrs Klein's work; but I should like to call attention also to the unemphasized assumption about her equality with the patient. One accepts gifts from an equal (we are told that Susan brought Mrs Milner flowers, even when she was living on national assistance); and one of the qualities which makes The Hands of the Living God such a refreshment to read is Mrs Milner's humility, giving the word its traditional religious value. Throughout, there is a complete absence of arrogance, a conscious
rejection of omnipotence (e.g. p. 255). Her doubts, her uncertainties, her frustrations and even her anger are faithfully recorded, so that when the final breakthrough does come, on 8 January 1959, and Susan is 'in the world' for the first time in 16 years, the reader can share Mrs Milner's emotions of thankfulness at contact finally being achieved. This is one of the many pleasures and insights The Hands of the Living God so richly provides. GEOFFREY GORER
II
Mrs Milner's new book is an extraordinary and often deeply moving account of the psychoanalysis of a schizoid young woman that lasted for over 20 years. In this work she not only offers the unique opportunity to study the clinical course of such an extended treatment, but has also detailed with remarkable candour her own inner probing and her ceaseless struggle to understand her patient and to attain a technical approach and level of conceptualization that would foster a favourable development. The patient, Susan, a girl of 23 in 1943 at the outset of the treatment, had been badly traumatized in an early protracted symbiotic1 relationship with a very disturbed, inconsistently seductive, impoverished mother, which laid the
groundwork for a crippling deficiency of coherent self-object differentiation. Yet Susan also possessed the narcissistic charm that such persons sometimes radiate, a wistful beauty that periodically evoked the wish in people (including the reader) to shelter and protect her. When one of these shelters failed, with the death of a mother-figure, Susan 'broke down into reality', was hospitalized and further damaged by a catastrophic encounter with ECT. She was then brought in for analysis by a rescuing pair who had offered her a new home. For the first seven years the analyst struggled dedicatedly in spite of a most discouraging lack of palpable therapeutic response (except for faithful attendance at the sessions!). It is fascinating to see how the author, beginning with the analytic model she knew best, was able gradually to evolve a technique that had real meaning for Susan. The original model, strongly influenced (but not entirely) by the Kleinian practice of making early interpretations both of transference and of deep unconscious content, seemed only to confuse a girl who clung desperately to a hypercathexis of reality and could not dare surrender herself to a recognition of the unconscious. When Mrs Milner finally elected a 'change in technique' (Chapter 6) and decided to conduct what was essentially an ego analysis, close to the surface, of the patient's thought disorder, she felt impelled to justifyalmost to apologize forwhat many would consider the correct analytic approach in the opening phase of treatment. Yet she had very early grasped the basic need in this patientto reactivate her symbiotic tie, this time with a reliable, consistent empathic mother-surrogate who would then allow her to internalize the benign experience and gradually to strengthen a differentiating self, and hopefully to reach a viable separate existence. After seven years, Susan suddenly began to produce doodle drawings hundreds of them, dozens in a daywhich she would bring to the session, and the analysis of which played a major role in the treatment. Although the drawings appeared mainly in the year 1950 and only sporadically thereafter, their discussion provides the bulk of the volume. Why Susan began the drawings at this time is not clear. Intriguingly, they appeared only a few months before the publication of Mrs Milner's book, On Not Being Able to Paint, which also deals with doodle drawings. However, Susan did not know of this consciously, and it is idle to speculate that she perceived unconscious cues rather in the uncanny way that some patients dream of subjects that are currently of theoretical interest to the analyst. Besides, Susan had an interest in drawing that antedated the analysis and, shortly after the ECT, made a poignant little sketch (Fig. 100) that was later transformed almost triumphantly in the beautiful semi-abstract Madonna and Child that appears on the dust-jacket of the American edition (Fig. 141). It would seem more likely that the mother-analyst having been faithful for seven years was now entitled to this amount of trust and controlled unconscious communication. Perhaps the 'change in technique' had strengthened Susan's ego to the point where she could tolerate this degree of communication with herself. At any rate, the drawings appear to have functioned as vital intermediary agents, not only as transitional objects in Winnicott's
sense, but as forms of a 'transitional self' which, when studied by the analyst and patient together, provided a prestage of a 'mirror transference', 2 a way-station towards a stabilized self-cathexis and individuation. Mrs Milner's brilliant interpretation of the content of these drawings gives a compelling picture of Susan's unconscious fantasies and anxieties, for Susan was never very free in her own associations. For this reason the formulations are exposed to the same kind of vulnerability that applies to the interpretation of the manifest content of dreams, and the fascinated reader will inevitably develop his own alternative hypotheses, often of equal plausibility. But when Mrs Milner's
interpretations are carefully pondered in the totality of their unfolding, they induce an empathic sense of rightness that, Winnicott notes, 'rings true in every detail'. But to return to the analytic treatment of the patient herself: the author, who had begun with a technique of interpretation of unconscious content and early fishing for transference, gradually felt the inutility of deep interpretation and came to realize that the 'transference' had to consist of a kind of benign merger that depended more on an attitude than verbal intervention. Thus she states beautifully: Often, all that I could do at these times seemed to be to sit quietly 'holding' her, warmly, in my attention, which was not always easy but even though what I actually said in these sessions did not seem to reach her at all, what I felt, if I could keep it to this warm 'holding' mood, did seem to reach her. (p. 28). In view of this insight and the fact that the rather florid interpretations in the Kleinian mode were not effective, one cannot help wondering why the latter were clung to and gradually relinquished only after a long period of working through in the analysis. Perhaps the answer lies in a remarkable passage, which arises in a discussion of the pathetic post-ECT drawing: It became an intensely rich symbol, too, of what I felt I had to become able to achieve in myself, while with her in sessions, if I were to help the healing process to start functioning again in the area of her deepest splitsespecially the mind-body split. Thus it was here that I had to think once more about my own capacity to achieve, knowingly, a partially undifferentiated and indeterminate state, in her sessions, to hold in myself a blankness, an empty circle, emptiness of ideas, not always pushing myself to try and find an interpretation. And how difficult this still was! I thought again of how constantly she would produce in me a feeling of empty-headedness, the feeling of nothing to say; and how I still fought against this feeling, or sometimes used it as a basis of interpretations to do with her envy of me, her wish to make my brain impotent, uncreative, like the devil 'crushing under foot what isn't his'. But I remembered, too, how interpretations of this kind had not seemed to produce any psychological movement. (p. 253). Thus, when one considers the enormous strain in treating patients of this kind, the ordeal of resonant regression, the painful emptiness, the absence of any satisfying libidinal feedback, then the need becomes perfectly understandable to engage in a kind of self-feeding, a need to rely on interpretation to fill the void with some kind of structure that at times would be superhuman to resist. This hazard for the therapist of schizoid patients is often accompanied by another that in the opinion of this reviewer leads to an unfortunate theoretical confusion, that is, the tendency to elevate the id to a level of hierarchical value on a par with the ego'separate but equal'. The author here seems to be influenced by the thinking of Rycroft and Bion in glorifying the primary processes as the locus of creativity. Certainly as a necessary stance in the treatment of deeply disturbed people, one must abjure any tendency to derogate their primitive fantasies and impulses, but these are primitive nonetheless, and the ultimate goal remains to strengthen the realm of the ego. Without a hierarchy of value in the psychic apparatus, there would be no art worthy of the name, and probably no sanity either. Actually, the doodles of Susan are a case in point. Almost from the first, these drawings exhibit a rare sense of form, delicacy of line, and unerring taste in balance of spatial arrangement that demostrate an unusual artistic gift, surely an innate ego capacity that transcended the vicissitudes of her pathology. When the frequent flashes of tenderness and subtle humour are considered as well, these drawings could not be called 'schizophrenic art '. The fact that the content derived from primitive instinctualized fantasy no more proves their primary process nature than the rhyme, cadence or metaphor of a lyric poet. True,
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as doodles they are somewhat closer to the unconscious than carefully reworked art would be, but even here it is the preconscious artistic ego that fashions the material from the deeper layers. Actually, Mrs Milner also uses the phrase 'unconscious integrating aspect of the ego', and it is likely that the other authors really mean this when they use the term 'primary process' which should refer to the most primitive operations of condensation and displacement and is never seen in pure form. On the other hand, some non-verbal 'non-discursive' creations of the imagination are products of the most sophisticated, controlled capacities of the human mentality, qualifying in every respect (except verbality) for the designation 'secondary process'. To lump such achievements in the same category as primitive archaic symbolizations seems to impose an unfruitful flattening on that creative continuum so felicitiously described by Ernst Kris.3 In this connection the reviewer feels that Kris's old phrase 'regression in the service of the ego' is still useful and meaningful, and that 'regression'a metapsychological termneed not be deemed pejorative in the sense of a social evaluation any more than normal sleep. But perhaps this is too digressive in viewing a book that is so bursting with material and ideas, and so full of insight both clinical and poetical. Mrs Milner grinds no theoretical axes and is quite eclectic in using any conceptualization that seems to fit, including the ideas of Jung and Zen. Thus I would agree with Winnicott that this work will stand as an important source book for anyone interested in this area of mental life, and it is quite likely that clinicians of various persuasions will find all manner of evidence to support their views. One very sound insight that should be emphasized is that narcissism is a normal growthphase with a developmental line of its own, which the patient is entitled to relive and to develop in a healthier way, and not necessarily a pernicious form of defence. Thus she quickly noted that interpretations of Susan's omnipotence produced a feeling of despair and that such interventions, although widely recommended, were a disservice to the patient. In granting respect to the patient's right to a narcissistic position that could then move in a new direction, Mrs Milner takes sides with a point of view that was perhaps first articulated by Paul Federn4 and more recently in definitive form by Kohut. (See previous references.) In conclusion, particular attention should be called to the impressive stages leading to Susan's 're-entry into the world' on 8 January 1959, the drawings which heralded this step with their interesting use of the diagonal and circle as symbols, and the author's extremely sensitive handling of the whole phase of termination. Susan ultimately married a man who was quite protective of her, and in a sense continued the symbiotic kind of tie she required. Naturally, although there were many ordinary neurotic components in Susan's personality, a classical transference neurosis and its resolution were hardly imaginable, and her object relations were still mainly of a narcissistic kind. Mrs Milner herself expresses the modest speculation that perhaps Susan could have been more completely analysed if she had been allowed to regress more deeply in a more protective environment. This would be very difficult to judge. But it seems to this reviewer that a deeper regression might have led to a dangerous fragmentation, and that in the long course of their work together, the analyst maintained a remarkably empathic level of response to her patient's needs. For Susan to discover her self again, to separate from the analyst, to live in a life that included a heterosexual marriage, amounted to a truly great achievement. Freud stated in 'Analysis Terminable and Interminable' that 'the business of analysis is to secure the best possible psychological conditions for the functions of the ego'. Unswayed by technical rigidities, Mrs Milner managed, by consistent application of an analytic attitude in a warm human setting, to create the conditions in which her patient could attain an optimal opportunity for self reclamation. CHARLES KLIGERMAN
III
The issue facing psychoanalysis today is how to solve the therapeutic problem that emerges as it delves deeper than the well-defined oedipal problems of ambivalence and conflict, into the the earlier primitive area of the origins of egoor self-formation, or its failure. With Winnicott's 'basic ego-unrelatedness', Balint's 'basic fault',
Fairbairn's 'withdrawn, isolated, apathetic, schizoid ego', the intellectually clear technique of interpretation is often irrelevant or inadequate. As Balint says: 'It cannot be understood as interpretation, only as attacks or gratifications'. We are plunged into the sheer subjectivity of a patient's floundering in a stormy sea of fantasy, confusing himself and the analyst together, yet needing a life-belt to hold on to (who can also guide him here and there) while he struggles to the solid shore of self-discovery. This is what Marion Milner's book plunges us into, and we must sink or swim with her and the patient in trying to find the sense of it all: a salutary experience, but too dangerous for the rigidly 'objective' scientist who only feels safe with what can be predicted, tested, verified. He would have to dismiss it as 'nonsense', as Medawar does with dreams, because there is nothing he can do to make the patient better. As Masud Kahan writes (p. xxxi): 'This is not really an account of an analysis but of a research into how to let oneself be used, become the servant of a process.' I suspect that is the truth about all psychoanalytic therapy, even if not so obvious at the oedipal level. A therapist must be the kind of person this patient can grow with. Chapter 14, on 'Many Kinds of Nests: Beginning to Conceive of a Holding Environment', underlines Professor Sir Denis Hill's call to abandon the 'medical model' in favour of 'intuitive subjective empathy' with patients. I am asked to make this an opportunity to discuss the whole issue of the methodology of case-presentation, on which clarification of theory depends. The problem is that much of the case material is too confidential for publication. This patient, who agreed to the public revelation of her intimate personal life, is doing an outstanding service to mankind, and calls for our gratitude. Briefly, after an utterly undermining childhood, she arrived in hospital, aged 23 years, and after some months had ECT. Three weeks later she arrived at Milner's consulting room (1943) saying she had lost her soul and that the world was no longer outside her since ECT. It had cut her off from her past and left her with no background and no future. From childhood she had fought down her real feelings, and did not know that she did not feel 'in the spatial world', schizoid, withdrawn behind outward aloofness or gaiety. Then the death of an elderly mother-substitute shattered her detachment and she said she 'broke down into reality', which meant overt illness. In hospital her real need emerged for a mother to feel recognized by and real with, as an infatuation for her female psychiatrist. ECT re-established her schizoid elimination of all feeling of reality. From 1943 to 1950 Milner and the patient worked steadily from this unpromising starting-point. The tragic story of the disintegrated family life of her whole childhood, the exciting but traumatic sexual episodes with an elderly male neighbour, her isolation at school, her obsessional rituals to master her inner terrors and prove that she could 'stay in being' as a durable person in spite of them, were discussed, and seem to have been her prolonged introductory investigation of Milner's reliability. Then suddenly in 1950 she began to draw. Milner makes it clear that she could not have been coped with in therapy alone, without the support of friendly people to live with, several hospitals to take her in times of Milner's holidays or in very disturbed periods, and drugs (Equanil, Tofranil) to keep some control over her tensions so that she could carry on her 'mental work' within herself and adjust minimally to daily life. But the real heart of
her treatment was the slow process of working out a growing insight into the struggling mental-development processes revealed in her extraordinary fantasy life; and made possible by the security of her relationship with Milner, who rarely 'interpreted', often found this or that bit of theory relevant but not understood by the patient, often 'wondered within herself' if this or that in the patient's material might mean so and so, but waited to see how the patient's fantasy developed. Then in 1950 she began a spate of drawings, running into several thousands, urged, it turned out, by her need for an outlet for the tension of her fear that she might murder the old lady who cared for her, certainly also a negative transference. But it was a great breakthrough, enabling her to 'objectify' what was going on in her unconscious fantasy world. It is impossible to convey the complexity, richness and development of this material. Beginning with doodlings of meaningless shapes which did not obviously carry the symbolic meanings the patient read into them, the drawings gradually became more coherent, meaningful and specifically symbolic. One example must suffice. In 1950, as her drawings were multiplying, she had her first 'startle' reaction since ECT, blushed, showed a fear of excited feelings inside her, and drew a duck (the first of hundreds) with an embryo inside it, expressing an unrealized awareness of
a new 'life of feeling', a new self beginning to grow in her. Soon after, she woke in the night with sexual feelings which disappeared as she became conscious, but she drew a baby half-way out in being born. She then for the first time vomited in session, which was found to express a pregnancy fantasy, her own real self coming to birth. At that stage, it seems she became frightened of birth as 'separation'. Her drawings faded out, and in the third period of her treatment, 19517, she produced only two sheets of drawings. There seemed to be less clarification of her fantasy life, but progress in practical matters. She became independent enough to get a daily house-cleaning job, and then a living-in au pair job, made friends and became able to read literature (of the standard of Proust), and became an outstandingly good cook, passing an examination in this. What was happening to the 'duck', her embryonic self in the womb? She was troubled with problems of 'twoness' merging into 'oneness' and splitting again into 'twoness'. She was working through a chronic anxiety about her relation to Milner, not of achieving independence of her but of dissolving identification with her, which might not mean 'independence' but 'sheer loss', being born into an empty world unwanted. At that time Milner's lack of 'theoretical possessiveness' was important. She did not insist on shutting the patient up to psychoanalysis or nothing, respected her feelings of needing to experiment and find other helps, physiotherapy, hypnotism, group therapy, drugs, an esoteric 'group cult'; but the patient was relating it all to her analyst and holding on to Milner. One reason for the extreme length of her treatment was her intense need to hide her illness, and Milner felt that the group therapy at least helped her to realize that she and her illness together could be accepted. This enabled her to make more use of individual therapy. At last in 19578 she began drawing again, but this time only in sessions, which would appear to mean that she had now become able to accept Milner as a real person for direct communication. She was needing to deny an urge to become nothing (which must have aroused fears) as the necessary complementary opposite of the need to become something, and kept insisting, 'You can't have life without opposites'. Milner writes: I do not think I made any interpretation in this session. She was busy drawing a little duck inside a big one, the little duck wearing a hat. She said: 'It's got a hat on: that means it's ready to come out'.
That was in March 1958. Milner regarded her drawings over the next 10 months as 'trying to prepare a concept of a baseline for "being in the world".' On 8 January 1959 she wrote: I am in the world for the first time for sixteen years I can remember them now as years of blackness. Being unaware of oneself and consequently of other people makes it impossible to observe and question one's actions, so one behaves with no consideration for anybody. Now in a split second I have to take responsibility [for what I am]. I have selected this one strand of material that was clear and understandable, at least in retrospect. The massive detailed development from initial formless scribbles to what ultimately produced several works of real artistic value, one must immerse oneself in and let comprehension grow. Milner functioned, not as a scientist analysing, experimenting or manipulating an object, but as an artist, sensitively and so therapeutically experiencing, valuing, a human subject, both that person's reactions to and effects on herself, and her own on that person, allowing and supporting a growth process in the patient, till at last she became a real and separate person relating. Of one session she writes: I say very little since there does seem to be a process at work which I do not dare risk interrupting, a process in which my role is to stand by and intervene only if something seems to be blocking. I feel sure that something is about to be born, or resurrected, so give no interpretations, only asking for occasional associations (pp. 2834). An approach to an interpretation often took the form of what Medawar would call 'a lucky guess, an intuitive hypothesis', possible results of which could be deduced and watched for, in the intense interplay of fancy and fact in both patient and analyst, a process which, as Medawar also says, often results in 'lucky finds' of what was not being looked for. After 20 years of treatment, the patient at last arrived at a stage where she was able to find her mate, or rather 'he having found her and she having let herself be found (she said he was the first person who did not automatically become no good by the mere fact of liking her), it was not until she had had the experience, for some time, of his arms holding her' that she felt safe enough to have real transference experiences, on Milner, and then on her husband. Several times 'she managed to manipulate a situation in which she did hit her
husband and discover he was strong enough to hold her and prevent her harming him'. Loss of the fear of her destructiveness opened the way to life. The great value of this kind of 'reporting' of the psychotherapeutic process is that Milner gives us as much of the sheer material as is possible, and leaves us to learn from it ourselves, as she had to do. She does not solidify the clinical material into clear-cut theoretical formulations, but lets us draw our own conclusions, if we are capable of it. Here and there she shows how some aspect of current theory was a useful guide-line to her, but as often another theoretical interpretation produced no result and if persisted in would have fouled up the whole growth process: which shows that a bad theory can do more harm than a good theory can do good, unless used by an intuitive analyst who 'cares' more for the patient than for her theory. The overall impression is of the extreme complexity of the mixture of elements in the patient's psychic life and in the growth processes of infant and child. (1) From the total undifferentiated mass of coenaesthetic sensation, there emerge experiences of the head, heart, lungs, stomach, mouth and tongue, abdominal, anal and sexual feelings, all subtly represented in the patient's drawings. At one period the patient particularly expressed a great variety of problems through drawings of clearly anal significance, all having meaning for her struggle to find her natural healthy self. Thus her 'body-image' was one of utter confusion, a mixture of all sorts of contradictory and incompatible psychic states, represented by an ever-varying selection of body parts and aspects, internal and
external, including not only her own body but her mother's with whom she felt identified, and her analyst's. (2) External body-experiences of sensory perception, sight, sound, touch, taste, smell, of her own body parts and of external objects, all bound up with her changing states of mind as a floundering but growing self. (3) Psychic, subjective, purely mental experiences, both emotional and intellectual, and 'object-relational', containing both memories of past events and hopes for the future. All of this through years of infancy and childhood had gone into her 'confused failure of self-development', and now had to be relived to open the way for healthy growth. Item by item, this massively confused subjective experience had to be worked over and sorted out in the patient's fantasy, as obscurely symbolized in her hundreds of drawings, many of which were never even discussed but had played their part in her tortured redevelopment, often blindly at a conscious level but with sudden flashes of insight revealing the deep unconscious purposiveness of the whole process of finding a real self relating to a real therapist, and finally to real people in the larger world. The patient could never have achieved the final result without Milner, yet it is difficult to say it was done 'by analysis', for much of the meaning of it all only because apparent to Milner in writing it up after success had been achieved. But do any of us know what is going on deep in us as we grow? What is certain is that the slow maturing of Milner's own insights was all the time stimulating the evolution of the patient's own working out and working through by a minimum of 'interpretation' and a maximum of 'intuitive support', being consistently and understandingly there. Thus Milner writes: What I seem to have said in the session was that she had difficulty in believing in a way of coming together with me that is psychical and not erotically physical, and which could lead to something new being created, her new self and mine. She responded to this by saying she felt slightly relieved, with now a tiny bit of hope, and a flash of me being 'there' (p. 289). Often Milner felt she could see in a drawing more than the patient could make use of for a long time to come, yet the patient was capable of fantasying and drawing far ahead of her capacity to understand and make use of it consciously. There is danger in attempting to summarize what one can only call the joint use of symbols by the patient and Milner. It over-simplifies what has grown confusedly over years to stages of simplification and clarification, to a healthy natural body-image and a maturing self. I will risk one example. At one stage the patient concentrated markedly on the symbol of a circle with and without a dot in it. Here are a few of its varying meanings at different stages: (1) A place to be safe inside, a defensive cocoon, a womb; (2) a prison one lies passive in; (3) a prison one is frightened inside (she had claustrophobic symptoms) and fighting to get out of; (4) a stomach one has been eaten up into, like a spider devouring prey; (5) a place in which one is part of someone else, identified with mother who may be good and bad, and one is longing both to stay in and get out; (6) a place to grow inside and be born out of; (7) yet again the circle may be oneself drawn with 'internal objects' inside,
and (8) oneself empty, having cast out (vomited, defaecated, urinated, projected) all internal objects; (9) the other person (the analyst) one wants to 'get into' communication with; (10) two overlapping circles, beginning to represent relationship, with yet further varieties of possibility. This is simply an attempt to convey something of the massive yet ever-changing complexity of living fantasy with which the patient and Milner had to deal, and does not exhaust the meanings she expressed by the circle with and without a dot. Thus later on it came to mean herself with central core, and then again, without a dot, a realization that the core of the self is indescribable. Concerning the circle and dot as mother's breast, Milner writes: 'I did not say anything of this, knowing too well the dangers of
talking to her about her mother's actual breast or myself as symbolically feeding her'. Perhaps the deepest significance of the circle and the dot emerges when Milner writes: I noted particularly her phrase 'The self which thinks and grows regardless of conscious choice'. It seems as if, although now able to accept a bigger self than her conscious ego, she was not yet able to fit into her self model the idea that she could relate herself to it, by conscious choice; in fact that there must be a cooperation between her conscious and unconscious functioning (p. 376). Chapter 27, 'A Crystallization of Theory: Breathing and Primary SelfEnjoyment', has theoretical implications of the first importance, which may perhaps be summarized thus: when we experience ourselves through an enjoyable 'sense of relaxed and serene bodily well-being' (which Milner found she could arrive at by deliberate attention to the slow deep rhythm of breathing, with the intention of achieving a relaxed mood suitable for the creative work of painting), 'the outer world became far more vividly there in its otherness and sheer "thusness" the sense of relaxed and serene bodily well-being' resulted in 'fresh seeing of the world' (pp. 37980). Thus the more real our experience of self, the more real will be our experience of our outer world and our relation to it. Once stated, this seems self-evident. If I feel unreal, how can anything else seem real? Milner again writes: Something else I noticed, introspectively, about the transformations of the way in which the ego experiences itself, when one is lying down, both in the process of relaxing muscular tensions and in becoming aware of one's own breathing; for it could result, if given a little time, in a sensation of total melting, so that one's whole self-awareness changed to being a dark warm velvety puddle, intensely related to, in fact almost interpenetrating with, the supporting ground. And it was from this that there came, if the relaxation had been deep enough, the astounding feeling of both oneself and the world as new created (p. 381). Here we are on a level far deeper than impulse-conflict, and the frustration or satisfaction of needs: the basic level of individual self-experience as real in relating to a real world, the final goal of all analytical introspection of our psychic experience, the probable basis of all experiences of love, artistic creativity and religious sensibility. This book requires not just reading, but long pondering. Freud wrote: 'Psychoanalysis can cure neurotic suffering but not normal human unhappiness', but the deeper we go, the less clear is the dividing line. There is normal human unhappiness really due to environmental misfortune, but much that looks like normal human unhappiness is due to inward frustration by failure of satisfactory self-fulfilment, even though it falls short of 'illness'. This book is a magnifying glass held over much that looks like 'normal' human unhappiness. The aim of psychoanalysis is emerging as, not 'the cure of illness' (which may or may not be involved in a far larger problem), but the slow process of understanding and liberating a choked and distorted personality for free-flowing development towards self-discovery, self-realization, creative self-expression in relating with enjoyment to other people, with whom the whole richness of the environing world is shared. This is not 'curing an illness' but 'growing a person'. Many people know quite well what they want, and feel angry and cheated at being fobbed off with less. A friend of mine, visiting his friend soon after she had ECT, said: 'Is there anything I can do for you?' She said: 'Yes. Bring me a new "me".' Milner did just that for Susan in 20 years. Clearly, this ultimate aim of psychotherapy can only be achieved in a few cases. It is possible for psychoanalytic, psychological and psychiatric means to achieve partial success in some symptom relief, short of this goal. But whatever is achieved, this is the only real ultimate aim that throws a full searchlight on human living. Milner's book should give pause to the 'scientific optimists', if they will read it, who tell the public that in 20 years GPs will cure all mental illness with pills. Though in practice we have to do some lesser thing that is possible, Milner's
result alone makes ultimate sense of all psychotherapeutic endeavour, and casts true light on the significance of living itself; what Winnicott meant when he said: 'You can cure your patient of his neurosis and still not know why he goes on living. We have not yet raised the question "What is life about".' In digesting the contents of Milner's book, I believe we shall have the experience of finding an answer to that question gradually formulating itself as an intuitive understanding that will be difficult to put into words but will have become an enrichment of our experience. The intellect is a poor tool for dealing with the most important things. As Winnicott took the ultimate medical responsibility for this treatment, I quote him: 'Over a period of decades, I have watched Milner and the patient with amazement as they let time pass by while a process tending towards wholeness or health was taking its own time to become realized'. Further clarification of psychoanalytic theory should grow out of pondering on just this kind of material. It used to be held that for psychoanalysis, the patient must have an 'intact ego', which is clearly a fiction. But it does imply that the true aim of research and therapy is to understand the failure of basic ego-formation, Balint's 'basic fault and benign regression in search of recognition' and Winnicott's 'basic egorelatedness and his view that the good motherchild relation is our model for psychotherapy, in the end. The function of 'analysis' is to clear the ground and make the ultimate problem accessible, that of enabling a stunted and malformed mentality to grow into a spontaneous individual personal self. H. GUNTRIP
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(1970). The Hands of the Living God. Int. J. Psycho-Anal., 51:531-540
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Document Roland, A. (1972). Imagery and Symbolic Expression in Dreams and Art. Int. J. Psycho-Anal., 53:531-539.
(1972). International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, 53:531-539
Imagery and Symbolic Expression in Dreams and Art

Alan Roland
In any serious discussion of the psychoanalytic theory of imagery and symbolic expression in dreams and art, it is first necessary to point out that the psychoanalytic literature is pervaded by the characterization that metaphorical thinking1 in particular, and the primary process in general, are more primitive, inferior and regressive as compared with abstract, conceptual secondary-process thinking. This characterization rests in part on the basic assumption that, both historically and individually, the development of language and thinking is from the metaphorical to the conceptual. The psychoanalytic literature, beginning with Freud (1900), then with important contributions by Rank & Sachs (1913) and Jones (1916), on through contemporary psychoanalysis including the English school, is replete with this basic assumption. Related to the primary process and metaphorical thinking is the important problem of symbol-formation and symbolization. In the early literature, symbolformation and symbolization (Jones, 1916) was further considered to be inferior due to intellectual or affective inhibition, mainly the latter. Symbolization was conceptualized as part of the primary process, thus being in the service of the pleasure principle, and as developing only to give expression to inhibited feelings or drives that would otherwise have no other means of representation. This viewpoint was then extended to metaphorical thinking in general. With the development of ego psychology and the adaptive point of view in psychoanalysis, some way was sought to include the obvious positive features of metaphorical thinking and poetic metaphor, such as in art. Writers like Kris (1952) and Milner (1952) still rested on the assumption that metaphorical thinking is basically regressive and primitive, but when under the control of the ego, it can then serve important adaptive functions. Also related to the adaptive dimension is Klein's (1930) important contribution that symbolization is a necessary ego function of the child for adaptation to other objects from his primary ones, and that accurate symbolization in the internalization of early objects underlies realistic secondary-process thinking. This conceptualization was further extended by another member of the English school, Rycroft (1968), to include the idea that symbolization which leads to adaptive relatedness to new objects is part of the secondary rather than the primary process. Nevertheless, the concept of metaphorical thinking or symbolic expression as regressive has still been kept. However, from the standpoint of current linguistics and psychological knowledge, the basic assumption in psychoanalytic theory that the development of language historically and individually is from the metaphorical to the conceptual is now open to very serious question. From the vantage point of modern linguistics (Brown, 1958), there is no hard evidence or data showing any historic linguistic development from the metaphorical to the conceptual. What apparently is present to varying degrees is the observation that the language of an urbanized,
Presented at the Midwinter meeting of the American Psychoanalytic Association in December 1970. Earlier versions were given at a Symposium of the National Psychological Association for Psychoanalysis in March 1969 and a meeting of the Institute for Psychoanalytic Training in January 1970. Copyright Alan Roland 1 Here it is important to differentiate metaphorical thinking in its popular usage from poetic metaphor. The former is characterized by a general substitution or representation of one
mode of thought by another, usually through some type of figure of speech or analogy. The latter is characterized by a joining together of different levels of experience, often concrete and abstract, to establish new relationships. In this paper we shall use metaphorical thinking interchangeably with symbolic expression. We mean by these terms a more inclusive representation of all aspects of the psyche than the classical psychoanalytic use of symbols, which are substitute representations of the id only. Symbolic expression is inclusive of the psychoanalytic symbol, but is not limited to it. 2 See Erikson (1969) for an excellent explication of one non-Western culture's way of thinking.
industrial-technological society does rely more on conceptual-abstract thinking than metaphorical expression as in a less industrialized society. But this obviously is more a reflection of certain very modern cultural developments in a limited segment of the world, mainly that of Europe and North America, than an inevitable historical development and evolution. Thus the viewpoint of metaphorical thinking as primitive and archaic may be seen in part as an expression of the 19th-century rationalistic philosophies that were so much an outgrowth of the scientific-industrial revolutionearlier based on the Renaissance and Enlightenment, and which so influenced psychoanalytic theorizing. Weber (1920), in a brilliant introduction to The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, traces the development of the rational mode of thought that so characterizes and pervades Western culture. From the vantage point of our current understanding from anthropology and area studies of other highly developed non-Western cultures and languages, we can now appreciate that the old attitude of superiority of the scientific Weltanschauung of modern Western culture reflects a limited point of view.2 On an individual level, it is apparent from the work of Werner (1948) and Piaget (1962) that a child can and does express himself in metaphor. However, a child's use of metaphor is done without any conscious sense of the implications of the metaphor, usually needing an adult to explain the metaphor. This is because children's metaphors often result from incomplete concept-formation, where concept boundaries and categories are still lacking. In other words, from insufficient development of secondary-process thinking. In contrast, the adult's use of the metaphor, whether in artistic, literary, or creative scientific work, is done more consciously and with a fuller view of the implications involved. The adult then uses the metaphor to join disparate elements together in encompassing new and unfamiliar relationships. Thus we believe it is more accurate to state that the adult ability to think in metaphor is a much richer, fuller development of a basic integrative capacity of the ego that is earlier manifested in an incipient form in childhood than the standard psychoanalytic hypothesis that posits all metaphorical thinking as regressive, even when in the service of the ego.3 We are now faced with the situation that if metaphorical thinking in particular, and the primary process in general, are not well-defined by terms such as regressive, archaic, primitive and inferior, how can this type of thinking be best conceptualized, especially in relation to secondary-process thinking? An important recent contribution to this problem is the well-conceptualized approach of Noy (1969). His point of view takes off from the current emphasis on ego mastery and synthesis, particularly with regard to the self, as developed in the work of Erikson (1968) and George Klein. Noy's main position is that the primary process, in relation to the secondary process, is best defined by function rather than by regression, topology, primitivization, inferiority, or such. The function of primary process is then defined as integrating new experiences into a self-system, as well as giving expression to the self in such areas as dreams and art; while the secondary process function is in dealing with outer reality, depending on constant feedback. In keeping with the psychoanalytic literature, Noy places all
metaphorical thinking as part of the primary process, but posits that the primary process in its imagery develops considerably from childhood to adulthood, as does the secondary process . Relating the two processes to dreams and art , the mode of thinking is overwhelmingly primary process in the former, as dreams are given over wholly to expressions of the self. While art is a combination of primary and secondary processes, with emphasis on the primary, as art it is the expression mainly of the self but integrated with gestalt needs for form. Noy's position is in many respects a well-conceptualized and quite compelling one. Nevertheless, from recent observations on dreams (Roland, 1971) and on art, we believe that a somewhat different formulation from Noy's is necessary. However, before giving evidence from dreams and art for a reformulation, it is important to note how some of the more recent thinking in the related area of symbol-formation and symbolization supports Noy's basic conceptualization of the primary process as related to internalization. This we would like to do in
I am indebted to Nancy Dorian, Professor of Linguistics at Bryn Mawr College, and Albert Rothenberg, Professor of Psychiatry at Yale University, for clarification of these points.
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first summarizing the role of symbolization in human development, integrating the work of several writers in the field. On the basis of the work of such psychologists and psychoanalysts as Werner (1948), Kubie (1953), Angyal (1965) and Menaker & Menaker (1965), and to a certain extent the English school, symbolization and symbolic expression can be conceptualized as a basic capacity and function of the ego, crucial to human development. This conceptualization is also similar to the important philosophical work of Susanne Langer (1942), who stated, 'This basic need, which certainly is obvious only in man, is the need for symbolization'. We can further formulate from the contributions of these writers that symbolization in its broad sense is related to the basic need of the human being to internalize his environment for development and adaptation; symbolization then serves as a bridge between the inner and outer world. This need to internalize the environment is not only in terms of libidinal development (as Klein emphasizes) and the establishment of object constancy (Hartmann, 1964), but also for the development of various ego functions (as certain writers have emphasized, such as Weiss, 1960); (Piaget, 1962); (Spitz, 1965); (Menaker & Menaker, 1965).4 If symbolization is closely related in human development to internalized images in the ego (or self) and superego, then imagery in dreams, and to a large extent in art, is obviously composed of various internalized images. These may range from body-images (Schilder, 1953) to self-images (Weil, 1958), to identifications and introjects, to identity thema (Lichtenstein, 1961), ego ideals, and various interactions between self and object (Grinker, 1957) with its concomitant self- and object-representations (Jacobson, 1964). Since from earliest life, drive and emotion are experienced in relation to parents and family, and then to their internalizations, intense emotion, conscious or unconscious, is usually related to these internalized images in dreams and in art. Here our conceptualization differs from that of Schafer (1968), who views internalized images as basically devoid of energy and affect. That dreams are to a large extent composed of various internalized images has been known from the beginning of dream analysis by Freud, and has been more recently emphasized by Kanzer (1955). However, it is our distinct impression that the symbolic expression of various internalized images in art has been insufficiently appreciated, except by some of the English school. From our
own paintings and etchings, it has quite often been possible to recognize an aesthetic depiction of various identifications and introjects, as well as body and self-images, some from very early childhood. Sometimes such recognition may take months or years after the work of art has been completed. A simple example of this is an etching of an old maple in which an early childhood body-image involving a burn was depicted and synthesized with a present-day self-image. At this point, we would like to report our findings from our other paper on dreams (1971) for a reformulation of Noy's position, and to illustrate these findings with a dream below. These comprise observations on dream imagery as related to symbolic expression (metaphorical thinking) and primary process on one hand, and to paradox and poetic metaphor on the other. We will first state our observations: We find that the primary process mechanisms of displacement, condensation and symbolization (in the classical sense) serve a dual function. To the extent that the various mechanisms of the primary process are related to wish-fulfilment, they serve the purpose as stated in the classical psychoanalytic
This raises the whole issue of how to conceptualize the close interrelationship of ego function and internalization, which still remains a strong controversy in the psychoanalytic field. Historically, Freud (1923) treated the ego both in terms of function and internalization (identifications). Hartmann (1964), in a paper in the 1930s, called for a separation of function and internalization, relegating function to the ego and internalization to the self. Most, though by no means all, contemporary psychoanalytic ego psychologists follow Hartmann's division. Our own preference is to keep Freud's formulation of viewing the ego in the paradoxical or bimodal manner of both function and internalization. The rationale for our conceptual preference is that evidence is present (Klein, 1930); (Weiss, 1960); (Spitz, 1965), (Menaker & Menaker, 1965) that internalization and function are inextricably interwoven from earliest infancy, i.e. that the most basic ego functions, such as reality-testing, depend on proper internalization. Further, it is now clear that imitation, egotization and identification play important roles in the development of most ego functions in childhood. By keeping this dual formulation of the ego, theoretical attention is kept more focused on the crucial interrelationship of function and internalization. Hartmann did not seem to be sufficiently aware in his writings of this close interrelationship. As a result, though his conceptualization is obviously a workable one, it is probably no accident that most of the ego psychologists following his theorizing have paid insufficient attention to the effect of internalization on function in both normal and psychopathological development.
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literature of enabling the unconscious wish to evade the superego for expression. Here the primary process is in the service of disguised expression because of the superego, anxiety, and defensive operations. However, when these mechanisms are related to the various psychic structures, to the internalizations of the ego, and to dynamics and childhood memories, they serve to give them a rich symbolic expression, depicting just where the psyche is at with regard to various conflicts. Thus the primary process here is in the service of symbolic expression and good symbolic fit, rather than disguise and distortion (Roland, 1971, p. 433). It enables the dream to give symbolic expression simultaneously to more diverse aspects of the psyche than any other communication, with the possible exception of art . Thus far, our observations are completely in accord with Noy's formulation of the function of primary process , as giving expression to the self. However, we have also made two additional observations with regard to poetic metaphor (as differentiated from metaphorical thinking) and paradox in dreams. First, dream imagery has the components to make up poetic metaphors, but never seems to complete the poetic metaphor. Let us illustrate this by a very brief example:
In one part of a dream, a man was rehearsing a thrust stage. He was urged by the directors to sing in a certain way, but decided that his own way would be considerably better. He then asserted himself and sang in his own way. It turned out to be better. Upon close examination of this dream fragment, we found the components of a poetic metaphor: the concrete image and symbol of the thrust stage and the more abstract image of self-assertion in singing his own way. The poetic metaphor would be: 'on the thrust stage of his manhood'. But the metaphor is obviously not completed in the dream. With regard to imagery and paradox in dreams, we have found that after we are successfully able to analyse a dream in relation to its relevant context, i.e. upon closer scrutiny of the total dream in its multifaceted symbolic expression, the latent content falls into two basic structural elements (in terms of structural linguistics)5 of seeming opposites or contradictions. In other words, after the associations are obtained, and after our knowledge of primary process mechanisms is utilized, our interpretations always seem to integrate opposites into statements effectively explaining the relevant context. Thus dreams have the makings of effective paradoxes, where contradictory lines of thought are synthesized into a fuller truth (Roland, 1971, pp. 4323). But here we must emphasize, as with poetic metaphor, that dreams do not complete the paradox. This integration into a fuller truth must be done by the creative act of interpretation. It is important to clarify and differentiate our concept of structural opposites existing in the latent content only, from the more well-known observations of opposites or contradictions as coexisting in the manifest content; or of certain aspects of the latent content being the opposite of part of the manifest content through the primary process mechanism of displacement. We must further differentiate and relate our observations of structural opposites in the latent content from the obvious presence and depiction of conflict and ambivalence in dreams. Our observations indicate that structural opposites in the latent content often but by no means always coincide with conflict and only sometimes coincide with ambivalence (Roland, 1971, p. 433). These observations lead us to conclude that there is a hierarchical organization of expression in dreams: from the disguised expression of wishes to a multifaceted symbolic expression of diverse aspects and processes of the psyche, to incomplete poetic metaphors, to structural opposites in the latent content as incipient paradoxes. It is thus apparent that primary process mechanisms do not occur haphazardly in dreams, but are used in the service of hierarchical modes of direct as well as indirect expression. Our conclusions are in keeping with Ehrenzweig's (1967) theory of a hidden organization in primary process in art . However, we must further conclude that while primary process mechanisms and symbolic expression (metaphorical thinking) go hand in hand in the dream in giving a rich expression to the psyche, poetic metaphor and paradox must be completed by the more conscious efforts of analyst and analysand in the integrative process of interpretation.6
In structural linguistics, oppositions or balancing factors are found to be intrinsic to the very structure of all languages. 6 This is not to preclude those rare dreams of creative discovery, which Freud noted and assigned to the prior work of the preconscious, later incorporated into the dream.
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(Here we may add that our experience reveals that there is real value in psychoanalytic therapy in the interpretive integration of structural opposites, but very little if any value in forming poetic metaphors from the dream.) An examination of a dream in detail is now in order to illustrate these
hierarchical modes of expression: the relationship of primary process mechanisms to wish-fulfilment and multifaceted symbolic expression, incomplete poetic metaphor and structural opposites in the latent content as incipient paradoxes. The dream we shall present is the same as in our previous paper (Roland, 1971). However, while some of its analysis is obviously the same, our emphasis in this paper will be more on modes of expression than interpretive use of the dream in clinical work, as in the other paper. The dream was that of a 21-year-old girl, Jane, who had been in psychoanalytic therapy for one and a half years after coming to New York City from Boston. The transference was still one of a strong overidealization of the therapist, who was thus looked upon as a friendly ally. Not until over a year after the dream was reported did the intense negative transferences develop in a transference neurosis. The relevant context of the dream was her bringing her boy friend, Charles, home to her parents and brother for the first time, with a considerable reaction of little understood anxiety that the visit home would somehow completely sabotage her current good relationship with Charles. The dream was reported after a stage in therapy of working on her pervasive reaction of apathy when visiting home. It had become apparent and was interpreted to her that she was caught in a conflict between strong dependency needs on her parents on one hand, and their striking inability to allow any striving on her part towards autonomy and individualization without their cutting off their relationship with her. These interpretations enabled her to become somewhat more self-assertive and less apathetic in striving towards her own identity. The dream is as follows: I am driving in a section of North Boston. It's full of violence and I'm afraid. I'm following my brother in his car (a sports car), but not too closely. I don't want him to know I'm following him. (On later inquiry, she associated that she was afraid to follow him too closely in childhood as he didn't want her tagging after him.) I'm hoping he'll lead the way out. Then, I remember I'm to meet Charles at the train station and I'm afraid I'll be late and miss the train and him. Upon further questioning her for a fuller description of the dream scene, she gradually recognized that the surroundings were very similar to the neighbourhood she grew up in as a young child, another section of Boston. She then spontaneously associated that North Boston is in reality a negro neighbourhood in contrast to the area she had lived in. She further described the people on the streets as being silently and sullenly violent, with much pent-up rage. We shall first use the dream to explicate the relationship of primary process to wish-fulfilment on one hand, and symbolic expression on the other. It is apparent that in one use, primary process displacement operates through the image of the silently and sullenly violent negroes to give disguised expression and fulfilment to Jane's feelings of rage. However, from the standpoint of symbolic expression, this displacement also represents accurately the defensive operations of the ego, showing that by ego-distancing (Sheppard & Saul, 1958) she is mainly out of touch with or has repressed her inner feelings of rage. Moreover, the fact that her rage is represented by many others rather than by one indicates its intensity: and her reaction of fear to the negroes also shows her anxiety over the repressed rage becoming expressed. We further find that through condensation, the image of the silently and sullenly violent negroes with much pent-up rage not only aids in the disguised expression of the rage, but also gives excellent representation or symbolic expression of the nature of her reaction to rigidly enforced compliance by her parents, of her masochistic self-image of being the subservient underdog at home, and of her repressed feelings threatening current good object relationships. Another example of this dual use of primary process is when she follows the brother's car, which is leading the way out. Here, through the symbol of the car (in the classic psychoanalytic sense), there is disguised expression of phallic strivings and penis envy. But also given symbolic expression is the brother as ego ideal, an ideal of actual rebellion in the family that might represent a way out from enforced compliance with its resultant destructive rage. Further
represented through her associations is her fear of following too closely in his footsteps, i.e. the fear of being the rebellious
girl and of giving expression to her phallic urges. With regard to incomplete metaphors, several are present in the dream. The images of the silently and sullenly violent people as negroes in her childhood neighbourhood obviously represent through displacement and ego-distancing her own repressed ego state from childhood. Blackness, rage, and a childhood ego state are components of a metaphor that is really not completed in the dream. Resolved, the poetic metaphor would read, 'the blackness of my childhood rage'. In the image of following her brother's car, which she hopes will lead the way out, elements of another incomplete metaphor are present. As we noted above, the brother was associated with the rebellious one in the family in contrast to her own subservience. Thus rebellion, following him, and hoping he'll lead the way out become elements for an incomplete poetic metaphor. Here the completed metaphor would be 'rebelling in my brother's footsteps as a way out'. The final metaphor in the dream incorporates missing the train associated with the breaking up of her love relationship with Charles. Here, the metaphor would be constituted as 'missing the boat (train) in my love relationship'. With regard to the structural opposites in the latent content, let us first summarize the dream as a multifaceted symbolic expression from our work on it above. In the first part, great anxiety was depicted over intense feelings of repressed rage (the silent and sullenly violent negroes with pent-up rage) from childhood (the old neighbourhood). Also depicted through the negroes is a passive, subservient childhood adaptation with a self-image of the victim. In the next part of the dream, there is a fearful wish of following the brother's example at home of open rebellion as a way out of her subservience and repressed rage, through the expression of phallic urges (following his car). Penis envy of the brother is also present. Finally, there is the fear of missed communication and a breaking up of the relationship with Charles (missing Charles' train; Kanzer, 1955). The structural opposites in the latent content are the repressed rage of childhood, and its fearful expression, from a subservient, masochistic adaptation at home on one hand; and on the other, the fear of the breaking up of a love relationship with Charles. Putting it in a more literary mode of expression, rage and love are juxtaposed, and form the elements of a possible paradox that must clarify the anxiety expressed in the relevant context. Before delineating how the structural opposites were integrated in clarifying the relevant context, it is important to note that intrapsychic conflict as depicted in the dream does not really coincide with the structural opposites. For conflict in this dream revolves around a masochistic, subservient adaptation from childhood with considerable repressed rage, as against more open self-assertive and rebellious behaviour. The conflict is dynamically prolonged because of internalized images of the parents cutting off their love relationship with her if there was any self-assertion on her part. Further conflict concerns the possible breaking through of the rage to actual manifestation. The interpretive work pointed out to Jane that she was afraid that her visit home with Charles would re-establish the old forms of masochistic relationship with her parents in the context of some newly won selfassertion. This in turn would re-evoke intense responses of rage from childhood, with considerable anxiety that the rage might spill over into her relationship with Charles, thus wrecking it. Further, that the one way out she could now visualize in the dream was to follow in her brother's footsteps by being more openly rebellious at home. We have now noted the hierarchical modes of expression in dreams and have illustrated them with a dream example. At this point, we may question how our
findings in dreams relate to art . First, in both dreams and art, primary process mechanisms and symbolic expression or metaphorical thinking are clearly in evidence (Ehrenzweig, 1967); (Noy, 1968). Second, works of art are composed in various ways of poetic metaphors, and usually reach a final paradoxical integration (Brooks, 1960), whereas, as we have seen in dreams, poetic metaphors are incomplete and structural opposites in the latent content are not yet integrated into paradox. Thus the creative process in art is present in dreams in only an incipient stage, and needs the later creative work of analysand and analyst with associations and interpretations to do the necessary integrations. In another comparison we find that paradox and metaphor in both dreams and art only gain meaning in relation to context. In dreams the structural opposites of the latent content can only be effectively integrated in interpretation in relation to the relevant context in a patient's life situation or therapy (as I have discussed in detail; Roland, 1971). In art, metaphor and
Many of these aspects of the relationship between art and dreams emerged in conversation with Albert Rothenberg, who is currently on an N.I.M.H. Career Research Grant studying the creative process in writers.
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paradox gain meaning in relation to the context of the work in which they appear.7 Since poetic metaphor and paradox are integral parts of art , and are manifested in incipient stages in dreams, our next problem is conceptualizing their relationship to primary and secondary process thinking. We have several different possibilities for conceptualizing this relationship. The first possibility is extending the definition of primary process to include poetic metaphor and paradox, as well as metaphorical thinking. This has been Noy's (1968), (1969) choice, and in his theory everything that is integrative and expressive of the self is considered part of the primary process. However, our finding that poetic metaphor and paradox are manifested in only an incipient stage in dreams, and need later conscious creative integrative work, seems to make this approach invalid. A second possibility is that of Arieti's (1967) positing a tertiary process which integrates both primary and secondary processes in art and other forms of creativity. A third approach is in locating the particular creative integrations manifested in poetic metaphor and paradox in a more refined or developed part of the secondary process. We believe this third conceptualization is a more economic one than Arieti's creation of a totally new tertiary process. Our conceptualization is supported by Rothenberg's (1969) finding that highly creative writers tend to be constantly thinking in and integrating seemingly contradictory lines of thought and feelings into new syntheses. Moreover, we believe that a different conceptualization from Arieti, as well as from Kris (1952), is needed of the relationship of primary to secondary process thinking in the arts. It is developed below. Our approach is also related to the theory of ego functioning as developed by Menaker & Menaker (1965): that the ego is not simply involved in mastery and synthesis, but strives for new levels of integration in psychosocial evolution. Thus poetic metaphor, paradox, analytic interpretive integrations, and creative scientific insights as well, are all in the service of an ego striving towards new integrations, and seeking new relationships. At this point, we are still left with the problem of the relationship of the primary process to the secondary process in art . From our conceptualization of poetic metaphor and paradox as highly developed aspects of the secondary process , we would see art as governed in a hierarchical manner by this highly developed part of the secondary process, with symbolic
expression (metaphorical thinking) and the mechanisms of the primary process in descending order being subservient to this part of the secondary process.8 This we may contrast to creative scientific work where we suspect this highly developed integrative part of the secondary process works with and governs more logical conceptual parts of the secondary process , with relatively little if any manifestation of the primary process . We further view these hierarchical modes of functioning in art as relatively unitary cognitive modes of functioning. This is in contrast to Kris who postulated alternating states between secondary and primary process functioning in art . Our own experience in art , confirmed by other artists, indicates that except for later revision of the work, there is a relatively stable, unitary cognitive mode and ego state of functioning, which we would submit combines aspects of the secondary and primary process in a hierarchical manner. At this point, we may inquire briefly into the relationship of primary and secondary process thinking in dreams and art with preconscious mentation, particularly as explicated by Kubie (1958). It is apparent that preconscious mentation is present in both dreams and art in the form of metaphorical expression, and in art in the forms of paradox and poetic metaphor. However, while Kubie concentrates on the presence of preconscious processes in different areas of psychic functioning, our emphasis in this paper can be viewed as differentiating the nature of preconscious mentation in dreams and art, with implications for other areas of psychic functioning as well. This is done through explicating the varying relationships of primary to different aspects of secondary process thinking in unitary cognitive modes of a hierarchical nature.
Noy (1968) and Ehrenzweig (1967) also see art in a hierarchical combination of secondary and primary processes, but with the secondary process mainly constituting principles of aesthetic form. This is in contrast to the thesis of this paper, that poetic metaphor and paradox as the crux of creative work in art are part of the secondary process. This is in addition to considerations of principles of aesthetic form, which we also view as being part of the secondary process, but as being subordinate to the central organization, or integration of opposites, in the work of art.
8
Our conclusions point to an area for further research. They imply and suggest that we further develop concepts of different cognitive modes. These modes would be according to the particular combinations of primary and secondary process thinking in the variety of functions (such as art and scientific work) in which we direct our mind. This would also have to take into account different aspects of the secondary process itself (differentiating logical-conceptual from poetic-paradoxical or integrative-intuitive) in these various combinations. This position is in general accord with Langer's work (1953) on different kinds of symbolization serving both art and science. This viewpoint is also supported by our self-observations in a variety of different pursuits that we operate in significantly different cognitive modes and ego states in writing a scientific paper, doing psychoanalytic therapy with patients, painting and etching, and working on plays and librettos. In this we find that significantly different cognitive modes are not only present between art and scientific work and psychoanalytic therapy, but also between different art forms as well (such as painting and playwriting). We must conclude by admitting that here we are now only beginning to grapple with the basic problems in this whole area.
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BROOKS, C. 1960 The language of paradox. In A. Tate (ed.) The Language of Poetry New York: Russell & Russell. BROWN, R. 1958 Words and Things Glencoe, Ill.: Free Press. EHRENZWEIG, A. 1967 The Hidden Order of Art Berkeley: Univ. of California Press. ERIKSON, E. H. 1968 Identity, Youth and Crisis New York: Norton. ERIKSON, E. H. 1969 Gandhi's Truth New York: Norton. FREUD, S. 1900 The interpretation of dreams S.E. 4-5 [] FREUD, S. 1923 The ego and the id S.E. 19 [] GRINKER, R. 1957 On identification Int. J. Psychoanal. 38:379-390 [] HARTMANN, H. 1964 Essays on Ego Psychology New York: Int. Univ. Press. JACOBSON, E. 1964 The Self and the Object World New York: Int. Univ. Press. JONES, E. 1916 The theory of symbolism In Papers on Psycho-Analysis 2nd ed. London: Baillire, Tindall & Cox, 1918 KANZER, M. 1955 The communicative function of the dream Int. J. Psychoanal. 36:260-266 [] KLEIN, G. (undated) Psychoanalytic theory: an exploration of essentials (Unpublished manuscript.) KLEIN, M. 1930 The importance of symbol-formation in the development of the ego In Contributions to Psychoanalysis London: Hogarth Press, 1948 KRIS, E. 1952 Psychoanalytic Explorations in Art New York: Int. Univ. Press. KUBIE, L. S. 1953 The distortion of the symbolic process in neurosis and psychosis J. Am. Psychoanal. Assoc. 1:59-86 [] KUBIE, L. S. 1958 Neurotic Distortion of the Creative Process Noonday Press. LANGER, S. 1942 Philosophy in a New Key New York: Penguin Books. LANGER, S. 1953 Feeling and Form New York: Scribner. LICHTENSTEIN, H. 1961 Identity and sexuality J. Am. Psychoanal. Assoc. 9:179-260 [] MENAKER, E. & MENAKER, W. 1965 Ego in Evolution New York: Grove Press. MILNER, M. 1952 The role of illusion in symbol formation In M. Klein et al. (eds.), New Directions in Psychoanalysis New York: Basic Books, 1957 NOY, P. 1968 A theory of art and aesthetic experience Psychoanal. Rev. 55 623-645 [] NOY, P. 1969 A revision of the psychoanalytic theory of the primary process Int. J. Psychoanal. 50:155-178 [] PIAGET, J. 1962 Play, Dreams and Imitation in Childhood New York: Grove Press. RANK, O. & SACHS, H. 1913 The Significance of Psychoanalysis for the Mental Sciences (Monogr. 23.) New York: Nervous and Mental Diseases Publ. Co., 1915 ROLAND, A. 1971 The context and unique function of dreams in psychoanalytic therapy Int. J. Psychoanal. 52:431-439 [] ROTHENBERG, A. 1969 The iceman changeth: toward an empirical approach to creativity J. Am. Psychoanal. Assoc. 17:549-607 [] RYCROFT, C. 1968 Imagination and Reality New York: Int. Univ. Press. SCHAFER, R. 1968 Aspects of Internalization New York: Int. Univ. Press. SCHILDER, P. 1953 Medical Psychology New York: Int. Univ. Press.
SHEPPARD, E. & SAUL, L. 1958 An approach to a systematic study of ego function Psychoanal. Q. 27:237-245 [] SPITZ, R. A. 1965 The First Year of Life New York: Int. Univ. Press. WEBER, M. 1920 Introduction In The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism New York: Scribner. WEIL, E. 1958 The origins and vicissitudes of the self-image Psychoanal. Rev. 45 WEISS, E. 1960 The Structure and Dynamics of the Human Mind New York: Int. Univ. Press. WERNER, H. 1948 Comparative Psychology of Mental Development New York: Int. Univ. Press.

Roland, A. (1972). Imagery and Symbolic Expression in Dreams and Art. Int. J. Psycho-Anal., 53:531-
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JONES, E. 1916 The theory of symbolism In Papers on Psycho-Analysis 2nd ed. London: Baillire, Tindall & Cox, 1918
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Document Stokes, A. (1974). Primary Process, Thinking and Art. Contemp. Psychoanal., 10:327-341.
(1974). Contemporary Psychoanalysis, 10:327-341
Primary Process , Thinking and Art

Adrian Stokes
PARTLY BECAUSE OF DEVELOPMENTS in what is called ego psychology, partly, surprisingly enough, because of the standing accorded to art , some psychoanalysts have in recent years expressed dissatisfaction about the status of the primary process . Formulated on an economic basis with three main mechanisms, condensation, displacement, symbolization, this concept dates from the Project and Interpretation of Dreams(Freud, 1900) but was not elaborated in the light of Freud's many later psycho-analytic concepts, in particular the structural. And so it is now sometimes felt that the primary process was left behind. The complaint, however, does not challenge the main lines for the organisation of unconscious material, dreams in particular, that Freud laid down for the primary process: but the question is asked: what, if anything, happens to the primary process after the full development of secondary process , apart from representations in dreams, pathological states, jokes, verbal errors and art , contexts for which primary process has been invoked continuously. A summary of answers recently made, including, of course, his own, is to be found in Pinchas Noy's extremely able paper, called "A Revision of the Theory of the Primary Process" (Noy, 1950) from which I now quote: It is obvious that, as the secondary processes are those that are equipped to deal with reality, only the primary ones may serve to maintain the self's sameness and continuity and to integrate new experience with the self. In previous discussion of the function of the primary processes in the preverbal stage, this
Copyright 1974 by Academic Press, Inc. All rights of reproduction in any form reserved. Contemporary Psychoanalysis, Vol. 10, No. 3 (1974) 1 Read to the Imago Group, London, November, 1969, and presented here with the
gracious permission of Mrs. Stokes. It is included in Stokes, A. (1973), A Game that Must Be Lost. Cheadle, Cheshire: Carcanet Press, Ltd.
function was defined as assimilating new experiences into the framework of the gradually developing 'self nuclei'. This function always remains the main task of the primary processes to assimilate and integrate new experiences into the gradually growing self, and, after the self's maturation, to maintain its sameness and continuity, as the inner constant core of the ego. This self-centred function is accomplished by the same processes that in the first stage of life served the same goalcondensation, displacement, symbolization, and many other processes that we are continuously learning about from child observation, analysis of dreams, art, etc. All the known psychoanalytical evidence seems to support this view. Any observation of children and adults reveals these two phases of activityfirst an encounter with reality and an attempt to deal 'realistically' and 'logically' with it, and then prolonged activity to work through and master this new experience, accomplished by fantasies, dreams, play, art, etc. The same two phases are also seen in the opposite direction, from self to reality: a new motivation reveals itself first in dreams, fantasies, and art, and is later expressed, only after considerable working through, in reality-orientated behaviour. All these 'mastering' activities, which, as is assumed here, serve self-assimilation, operate predominantly by primary processes, and we will always discover the same elements of condensation, displacement, and symbolization in activities such as dream, fantasy and art. Much of what characterizes and differentiates the two systems may be regarded as a result of the different conditions and aims of operation. The secondary processes, which have to function in reality, have to adapt to this reality and 'speak' its language, i.e. be organised according to the rules governing common logic and human communication. The primary processes, having no function in reality, are free to 'speak' any language, but, as they have to assimilate new experiences with the self, they cannot limit themselves to word presentations; they must present all the elements belonging to an experiencefeeling, ideas, memories, etc. It would be necessary to read this whole long paper for fairness to Noy. My aim is to suggest that the scene he sets for ceaseless operations in the primary process is the one which Kleinian's especially call "the inner life". For them it revolves round the positions and relations of inner objects, includes envisagement of their strong corporeal character, a crowded scene: whereas "self-nuclei" and similar expressions, indeed, all the subtle lodging and dodging of Erikson about identity, leaves on me, at least, vague, unrealized, and, I would say, an unreal impression. We are in need of a firm composition on the inner stage if primary process is to be meaningful as the assimilation of experience to the inner life, a not unreasonable extension of the role of primary process as described by Freud, in view of his later structural view of the psyche. To say so involves mention of an ambiguity regarding the
character of the primary process presented in The Interpretation of Dreams(Freud, 1900) and other usages of this term that seem to identify primary process with the mechanisms of displacement and condensation. As the instrument of the unconscious, the primary process seeks satisfaction for a wish in accordance with the pleasure principle, without deferment or inhibition. "It (primary process) is unable to do anything but wish" (S.E. V, p. 600). In The Interpretation of Dreams Freud describes the mechanisms of displacement and condensation in the context, particularly of dream distortion, as instruments of
the dream-work. Nor do I think we shall have any difficulty in recognizing the psychical force which manifests itself in the facts of dream-displacement. The consequence of the displacement is that the dream-content no longer resembles the core of the dream-thoughts and that the dream gives no more than a distortion of the dream-wish which exists in the unconscious. But we are already familiar with dream-distortion. We traced it back to the censorship which is exercised by one psychical agency in the mind over another (S.E. IV, p. 308). It seems that the very mobility and lability of "the cathectic intensities" in the Ucs, typified by processes of displacement and condensation, has provided a potential for their co-operation with the inhibiting agency that results in constructions, in symptoms, for instance, as well as in dreams. No less than displacement, condensation, and symbolism entail substitution whereby the spread of ferment from object to object ensues, the most general character of mental life. We are at liberty, it seems to me, to underline it especially in view of the concept of the unconscious part of the ego that appears with The Ego and the Id(1923), though Freud says nothing about primary process in that context. "It" (the ego), he writes, "withdraws libido from the id and transforms the objectcathexes of the id into ego-structure". He had already made it clear "that the ego is formed to a great extent out of identifications which take the place of abandoned cathexes by the id" (S.E. XIX, p. 48). Hence, the super-ego. Melanie Klein described the spread of feeling, the enrichment of new objects encountered by means of symbolism, that forms the necessary approaches to the grasp of actuality (Klein, 1930). Freud himself did not regard the Ucs as something finished with, a vestigial organ, a residuum from the process of development. It is wrong to suppose that communication between the two systems is confined to the act of repression. On the contrary, the Ucs is alive
and capable of development, and maintains a number of other relations with the Pcs, amongst them that of co-operation. In brief, it must be said that the Ucs is continued into what are known as derivatives, that it is accessible to the impressions of life, that it constantly influences the Pcs, and is even, for its part, subjected to influences from the Pcs (S.E. XIV, p. 190). I think one can take this passage to represent Freud's general view, though not every detail of it has uniform support from his other writings. His invariable emphasis in regard to the unconscious and in regard to primary process is upon the lability of libido, upon the unfettered power that displaces, substitutes, condenses, and later symbolizes; the same power that, today more than ever, we discern continuously exercised in projective and introjective identification. At this point, then, we may concur with Dr. Noy's picture of a maturing inner life, with the later history of that which he insists be called the primary process. He should have cited Dr. Charles Rycroft's paper of 1962 with the amusing title, Beyond the Reality Principle where he writes: The primary processes are the forms of mental activity which correspond to the labidinal component of adaptation. Dissociated application of the secondary processes to affective relationships is unrealistic and non-adaptive. The use of words is, of course, a most important aspect of secondary activity. Freud wrote: The system Ucs contains the thing-cathexes of the objects, the first and true object cathexes; the system Pcs comes about by this thing-presentation being hypercathected through being linked with the word-presentations corresponding to it. It is this hypercathexes, we may suppose, that brings about a higher psychical organization and makes it possible for the primary process to be succeeded by the secondary process which is dominant in the Pcs (S.E. XIV, p. 201202).
Words are the stuff of thought-processes "which are themselves without quality and unconscious" (S.E. V, p. 617). All the same, we commonly speak of words as symbols: here also a substitution, it is evident, a displacement, a code. The distinguishing adaptation by means of secondary process is vital to us; yet we may see that this process is secondary in the other sense too, in the sense of being subsidiary in regard to some major matters of the framework common to both processes. I shall later refer to another primitive aspect of the use of words. To the term, symbolism, Freud allowed a very narrow sense, partly as a result of the effort to distinguish clearly the many
modes of substitutive significance that have been aggregated above. But even in explaining and confirming this narrow sense, Ernest Jones in his famous paper of 1916 wrote: As soon as one begins to get into the subject deeply its interest and importance rapidly widen, more and more problems open out, and at last, especially if the word 'symbolism' is taken in its widest sense, the subject is seen to comprise the whole development of civilization. For what is this other than a never-ending series of evolutionary substitutions, a ceaseless replacement of one idea, interest, capacity, or tendency by another? (Jones, 1920). This consideration leads to an even wider aspect that can have not more than mention here. The continuous power of substitution (the proclivity that in some psycho-analytic reactions is partly confined within the compulsions of prerealityprinciple thinking) has claims, in view of imagery and symbol-formation, including language, to be the distinguishing art the human brain developed, it is sometimes inferred, from the conceptual activities involved in long-range perception. Now these endless and multiple links win small resonance when, a mere stockin-trade, primary process , secondary process , are paraded in psychoanalytic discussion of the more abortive kind, particularly, I would say, in references to that useful "regression", art . The talk tends to be solely of the hidden, the contradictory; when more sophisticated, of the undifferentiated, the unsystematic that is yet bound up with an overlay of presentability stemming from reinforced secondary elaboration. Some thinkersoften non-analystswho have juggled with the concepts, primary and secondary processes, as if they were differently coloured counters, have tended to present us with a very simplified picture of conscious thought processes. It sometimes seems that on the one hand there are dreams, jokes, slips of the tongue, art; in a word, regression: and on the other, there is completely logical or realistic attachment to reality: whereas we know that all the timepsycho-analysts know it better than any one else whatever the activity or thought, associative conjunctions and displacements into the inner life never cease their function, even in consciousness. The practice of psychoanalysis would be impossible were it otherwise. It, therefore, appears rather pompous and humourless that one of the factors responsible for the desire to rid the primary process , as we experience it in later life, of an invariable connotation of regression, has been a reverence for art . It
is surely gratuitous to invoke art should the experiences of a scientist contemplating his children, his garden, a landscape, have been enough. His thoughts before the landscape are by no means circumscribed with considerations of strata or density of the population. The shapes at which he looks, whatever the object of his immediate attention, are bound to encounter the inner landscape. I have not in mind here the perception of a phallic symbol, say, in a tree, but the impingement of the total configuration as a symbol, an aspect of
symbolization vis--vis the outside world at large to which psycho-analysts are not inclined to pay prolonged attention even when attending to matters of art; whereas it has long seemed to me that this is the first, most general, sublimated content that should be held in mind in matters of art: not, it is true, from the point of view of the analysis of the artist since it is held in common, but for the understanding of arta subject on which so many analysts have exercised themselvesand, indeed, through art , for the contemplation of the contemplative element in most experiences. In my view, to treat of art in terms of primary process activity in the more crude sense, tied on to conscious secondary elaboration, obtains few results for the understanding of art : and the drawnout analogies with dreams are frequently unfortunate. By and large, unlike dreams, art is a cultural activity of communication: to discuss the cultured role in terms of secondary imposition only is misleading. For one thing, what is so entirely secondary about cultural aims, ideals, character; that is to say, how can they themselves be separated neatly from art as an embodiment of the inner life? The projection of private phantasy into that broader context, of course, entails mitigation or adjustment of phantasy in some respects; it also multiplies the phantasies, finds for them many analogies, elaborates the ways of condensation. Art is not a thumb that sticks out from our immense reasonableness. On the contrary, it is witness to our unceasing concern, whatever the reasonableness of which we are capable, with inner life; and so is culture. I had thought of calling this paper "Identity in Difference", a phrase that forty years ago I used frequently in descriptions of aesthetic functioning, in order to emphasize the demarcation of pictorial forms that entailed nevertheless echoes of adjacent forms so that a brotherly relationship existed; or I was referring to a unity or balance or composition wherein this close relationship
sprang from the over-determination of some key segment, some shape, or from the healing progressions that belong to a fine use of chromatic differentiations with their intensity adjusted to an equality in terms of their areas. It occurs to me that the phrase "identity in difference" might be used also to describe succinctly the result of an act of projective identification, a mechanism on which, in a proper and restricted use, much of our power of recognition and first learning depended, some general forms of our participation with the world. Projective identification exemplifies both condensation and displacement. On the subject of aesthetic value, added to pronounced self-sufficiency, I often wrote of an inviting, no less characteristic of aesthetic form, to merge with the presentation, a semi-union I described as a predominantly partobject relationship. I have not felt the need to take this back when I have stated a similar equation between the inner and outer world to be characteristic of all contemplative states. But I would today emphasize the participation of the projective-identification drive whereby the inner life and the outer object, possibly on the model of the mouthbreast partobject relationship, become pleasurably, if only because closely, associated in what has sometimes been called, for its sentimental off-shoots, "the pathetic fallacy." The fact is that we never cease to inhabit the outside world as such with our feelings. And so the simplest definition of art is that it is activity designed, by means of materials and sounds, to take advantage of, and thereby provide, an informative context for our projective inclinations, first of all, of course, those of the artist. I shall need at this point to hazard a speculation on the nature of rationality which I take to be a fine distillation from the inner world under pressure from the external world: whereas it is commonly assumed that reality, truth, or, if you like, the laws of nature, and the logical means by which they are revealed, possess
their validity independently of the mind's other drives, even though it is obvious that rationality entails constant rejection of the irrational in the way that sanity is the resolution, as well as the rejection, of what is then conceived to be the confusion of insanity, a transition we sometimes call the emergence from the predominantly paranoidschizoid into the depressive position. It is neither here nor there that our use of the instrument of reason, as every one will agree, is constantly employed in the service of
irrationality, or that in many societies, and in the case of many individuals, rationality is not far developed. The question is whether reason itself, as a process, is shorn away from the rest of the mind. Are we right to regard truth as a sophisticated notion, root as well as branch? The rare and precious search for truth for its own sake is surely an activity that cannot be isolated from an unenvious recognition of the goodness and independence of the good object, even though this recognition at the same time be denied in the inner world from which it is projected. The commoner assumption seems to be that necessity impinging on the mind, outer rather than inner necessity, somehow inspires rational thinking to the advancement of our condition in a hostile world. The reality principle takes over. The question is, though, what is there to take over? Our first learning was not of the rational kind. We are not inclined in the psycho-analytic context to believe that any process becomes entirely divorced from the method and content of its origin. May it not be possible to detect rudiments of a causal mode of envisagement in the experiences wherein I project something that consequently comes back into me: an eye for an eye? I suggest that the roots of causality are nurtured in projection and introjection: maybe extreme emotions such as the very excessive persecutory anxiety that Bion has called "nameless dread" (1967), and Meltzer "terror" (Meltzer, 1967), have contributed to a concept of the inevitable and necessitous, to the very iron of logic. But if the relationship be regarded as close between rationality and processes, particularly the processes predominant in early times, of the mind as a whole, it will foremost lie in the use of concepts that are the indispensable counters for the activities of reason. Most concepts are rarely clear beyond a narrow context, as if they had been imagos that now can be named but not envisaged unless particularized or embodied; by art , for instance. In a delirious, romantic talk about primary process where it serves as a magical deus ex machina for explaining aesthetic superdynamism, perhaps the great mistake is the implication that basic inner life lacks the element of concept and structurethat the secondary process provides all the structure. I hope to make out a relevance in turning to Money-Kyrle's recent paper (1968) which I have found extremely impressive, "Cognitive Development". I cannot summarize his close argument, and I must take the risk that I mislead by the abstraction of
a few sentences. The acquiring of knowledge, he says, "Consists, not in being aware of sensory-emotional experience but in recognizing what it is." He considers first recognition to be recognition of something as a member of a class in accordance with innate preconception. "A memory image of the first member to be recognized"he singles out the breast and the mouth"acts as a kind of name for the class". Already in this paper Money-Kyrle has called attention to the ageold problem of universals. He persists with the notion of innate preconception because it offers the only explanation of the phenomena he envisages. I wonder
whether we here see the embryo for the later aptitude to generalize and so, in the formation of concepts, for abstraction. Money-Kyrle writes: A class represented by a memory image is a concept. From these two concepts [the mouth and the breast] it would seem that all or almost all, of the vast number of concepts we employ are ultimately derived by processes of division and combination (splitting and integration). Moreover, I have the strong impression that the next steps in the construction of a set of basic concepts does not depend solely on external experience, but is itself innately predetermined. The original innate preconception of the good and bad breast or nipple seems itself to undergo a spontaneous differentiation and to bud-off, as it were, other innate preconceptions in particular, those of a good and bad penis. If so, the mouth concept is correspondingly differentiated into mouth and vagina. Or it may be that a mouth preconception differentiates into preconceptions of mouth and vagina, and precipitates a corresponding differentiation in the nipple concept. The exact procedure must be extraordinarily complexbut the experience of seeing a patient, who has failed to achieve such differentiations in infancy, begin to make them in dreams occurring in analysispenis differentiating from nipple, vagina from mouth and anus, and so onhas convinced me that what I am trying to describe does, in some form, normally take place in the first few months of postnatal life. Particularly notice here a power of differentiation held to be prior to displacement and condensation: a differentiation that, of course, comes into play long before the reality principle compels it: the reality principle, that is, taken to refer, as it was meant to do, to the external pressures upon instinct, not as well to an internal propensity subject to opposing mental tendencies. Now, visual perception in particular soon involves a sorting out, a grasping, of relevant differentiation; for instance, figure from ground initiated in the first months. We might view the early need to differentiate, in however small an area, as a necessary brake on the otherwise universal lability of substitutions and as an antecedent of a component for the later power of rational judgement. MoneyKyrle
remarks the internal necessity of early differentiations to mental health, for lack of which much emotional misconception and confusion persist. He has more to say about vital differentiations when later he speaks of the organism adapting itself to what he calls the "spacetime system." The correct orientation can be lost in at least three ways: the baby can get into it by total projective identification either out of envy or as an escape from a persecuting outer world: he can get oriented to the wrong base, in the sense that it is not one he really needs: or he can become confused in his orientation because his base is confused with a part of his own body. Though, torn from context, they may be found obscure, I quote these sentences since they emphasize the need for a power of differentiation in the earliest times, that is to say, for splitting. On the other hand, I suggest that one aspect of projective identification makes for synthesis, in what Bion has called the normal employment, "a primitive form of communication that provides a foundation on which ultimately, verbal communication depends" (1967). You will perhaps have realized that my own exiguous speculations issuea fount that is very far from proving them validfrom the fashioning of "identity in difference" that I attribute to art, whereby art reveals the nerves, as it were, and the history of the mind. But, however richand they are preminentthe aesthetic uses of metaphor or symbol, there resides in all art as the most immediate of its qualities, the stress upon a concrete mode of representation together with the ideographic and the verbal, three stages in representation to which Money-Kyrle refers. Art communicates in the first place through sensuous representations by means of what Freud called "thing-representations" which he attributed to the unconscious alone. Surely here exists both the most general and most poignant context for the irruption of the qualities attributed to the primary process in
the matter of art . Even words, those secondary constructions essential for rational thinking, for communication, are used to some extent in art as if they were substances, as if they were things, as systems, that is to say, of sound complete in themselves while still exercising the verbal role of counters of communication about substances, about objects. I shall refer to this again.
But it is not only the long-held views about art, not only Money-Kyrle's paper, that have spurred the present writing. Another recent paper has also been a determinant, Professor Richard Wollheim's lecture, "The Mind and the Mind's Image of Itself" (Wollheim, 1969), remarkable not only in subtle yet lucid philosophical argument but for daring originality in the use of psychoanalytic considerations to clinch it, an argument to show that our reports of mental states "presuppose a conception of the mind itself". Now, he further concludes that it is a conception "tinged with spatiality". He writes: I should reckon it both proper and illuminating to say that our ordinary conception of the mind, while not that of a place, is one which, when distorted, spelt out, is the story of our life read in reverse: as such, it marks the path of a regression. What he refers to here "is the subsumption of a stimulus under a bodily conception" which he relates to the dawn of thinking, having referred to Freud's account and also to Bion's. But he admits that the approximation of thoughts to corporeal substances, what he calls "the more extreme conception of the mind underlies, in many ways, the ordinary conception", although "ultimately, intellectual activity is inhibited rather than encouraged if the corporeal character of a thought remains emphatic". In its own terms Bion's account closely parallels Freud's when it depicts the schizophrenic "as so overwhelmingly assimilating a thought to a bit of the body, a bad and persecuting bit, that the only course feasible to him is to evacuate the thought". Wollheim remarks the extreme spatiality in the conception of mind that is involved in projective identification and the spatiality, in his view much modified or attenuated in normal growth and development, inherent in the imagos of internal objects, including, of course, the superego. This paper strengthens me in my view of the strong corporeality-cumspatiality that I have for a long time associated with art as a reflection of mental states and their communication. Though I have been writing of visual art I have suggested that the same quality permeates the other arts: that in poetry no less than in the dance, rhythm has corporeal reference; that the origin of most words goes back to substances and their interplay; that even the emotive impact of sound, the relationship of sound, may be described only in spatial, tactile, and kinaesthetic metaphors. To
what extent, I have asked, are they metaphors? Freud described in The Interpretation of Dreams the common "modification of dream-thoughts into pictorial form." We read in italics: " Considerations of representability is the peculiar psychical material of which dreams make use " (S.E. V, p. 344). This should be referred, it seems obvious, to what he subsequently said in The Unconscious about "thing-representation" to which I have referred. It is surely of interest that on the last page of the Standard Edition (apart from the reproduction of a short letter to Time and Tide) the following note by Freud figures, one of several notes on a single sheet of paper. August 22nd: Space may be the projection of the extension of the psychical apparatus. No
other derivation is probable. Instead of Kant's a priori determinants of our psychical apparatus. Psyche is extended; knows nothing about it. (Freud, 1941). In Negation (1925) Freud has written: Judging is a continuation along lines of experiencing, of the original process by which the ego took things into itself or expelled them from itself, according to the pleasure principle. The polarity of judgment appears to correspond to the opposition of the two groups of instincts which we have supposed to exist. Affirmationas a substitute for unitingbelongs to Eros; negationthe succession to expulsionbelongs to the instinct of destruction. I do not wish to imply that I think the identification of the corporeal with thought is not madness. I regard rationality as an abstraction from the antecedents. Hence the first value of art, the pleasure, the relief, the relief in the exercise of more propensities of mind. This pleasure and relief, of course, is confined to those who can afford to make the admission. Naturally this number includes many whose compulsiveness and irrationality is pathological. Perhaps it seems strange that we should value so highly the reflection in art of various mental facets since the pleasure can hardly be called an antiquarian interest in mental states. No. These other aspects still have great value in terms of communication and the apprehension of reality, in the company, that is, of the thin Prince-Reason. And there is no other sphere, it seems, where they can mingle as successfully, without some insult to rationality. The entailed catharsis touches not only particular repressionsthe aspect long stressed by psycho-analysisit is also intellectual, that is to say, releases the mind's awareness of total
mental function. The artist brings to bear his phantasies, his compulsions, his ideals, and his culture; a mirror of the wider mind is constructed by the aesthetic mode of their communication, however subjective the communication may be. And the mind is surely a large part of reality. Some philosophers have taken it to be the whole. Now for the last of the recent papers that seem to me to have a bearing. I am aware that in each case I may be expressing no more than my admiration of them; to their authors the connections I envisage may be inadmissible. This last paper is Donald Meltzer's "The Relation of Words, Language and Image, " from which I shall extract one point. He distinguishes "between the use of language as a mode of operation of projective identificationthat is, for the communication of states of mindwhile words are used for the transmission of information from mind to mind." He writes: Language, then, we are suggesting, is primarily a function of unconscious phantasy which employs projective identification as its mode of communication. The substance of its communications is states-of-mind. Its means of communication is fundamentally primitive, namely song and dance. What I am suggesting is that we consider "vocalization" as the symbolic form and "verbalization" as its corresponding notational system. I would stress the physical or concrete mode of expression by means of vocalization as the basis of language throughout this account, thereby bringing language in line with the mode of the arts that are the offshoots of language for the communication of states of mind. It is difficult, even in constructing a scientific presentation, to put art altogether out of court, and it does not seem desirable. Words can be so dead; bad, clumsy writing can be painful and distant from us; whereas the simplest statements can seize the mind, haunt the mind, if the sound and rhythm of the words are felicitous, I believe in this context that "felicitous" means assimilation to the general character of states of mind, as if we had introjected a projection that comes back to us enriched. The communication is full, becomes a participation in the mental commonality wherein corporeal imagery still plays so large a part.
Moreover, the less we treat of words in our writing as the voiceless digits of a code, the closer our thought about meaning tends to be, due to this care for their effect.
Psychoanalysis discovered that every activity contains symbolic functions. We do not consider the mathematical problem to be devoid of various symbolic significations for the practitioner. Emotional need inspires the exercise of rationality though it plays no part in the process: the thinking itself is then autonomous. But the doubt remains whether rationality itself is finally distinguishable in an absolute sense from other conceptualizing proclivities. What cost does thinking, in the strictest, most developed sense, have to pay for mind: I mean in the nature of the process, rather than in regard to emotions that have spurred, or that still direct, the thinking? Whatever the answerand perhaps the fact should be considered in making answerthe mental achievements with most air of completeness are those of art, those strained all the time through a larger area of mind. One reason, it seems, is that not only does painting, in particular, offer artist and spectator a higher exercise in the discriminatory power of vision but that art, in this and other ways, revivifies, enlarges upon, the link between all mental activities and our active apprehension of outside things together with their introjection. Thus, as I have said, most language is of necessity metaphor, employs, at any rate in origin, images of objects. To be reminded by the construction in artto be reminded of concreteness accompanying abstraction never ceases (in spite of schizophrenic excess) to be generally appropriate, indeed, corrective, whatever an enquiry may be. Thing-representation is primary, at no stage entirely eliminated. Consequently, the use of the word "primary" has lost here the contingent sense of "primary process", though it includes that reference. I add a few sentences on the reality principle, a comfortable concept, that is to say, we seem without difficulty to know what it means; and we certainly do know when, for instance, we speak of a child's distorted inner images of the parents, gaining in correspondence with their overt character and circumstance, as the result of analysis; or again, in regard to mitigation of all forms of omnipotence and of the confusion, particularly over identity, that the exercise of omnipotent mechanisms have brought about. All the same, we cannot equate the predominance of reason with the recognition of reality. We attribute to animals a very acute recognition of a restricted actuality, of the real dangers, for instance, that beset them. (Incidentally, our persecutory and sadistic phantasies
do not always exceed in their fury the state of preyed upon and of preying that is a general condition of the animal world: the unceasing interaction and interpenetration of substances and forms of life are not without associative links to some infantile mechanisms.) Whereas reason condemns the products of omnipotence as phantasies, one is bound to wonder whether, in one part of the mind, the condemnation has not taken the weapon of impartial discrimination as a substitute, in view of its rigorous power; and further, to wonder whether there is not a link between the proclivity to omnipotence and the evolution of rational thought, both of which we attribute to human beings alone. Now, however strong the impact and demands of external necessity, they can bring little awareness of the actual, except to the mind that has a grip, though tenuous, on sanity, since sanity is an adjustment to the external world and to the external figures that is based on a modicum of respect for truth. I use the word
"truth" rather than "actuality" or "reason" because the sane propensity is first an admission of psychic reality, that is to say, depends upon some acceptance, however small, of the limitation of defences. Thus, the study of psychosis has shown that the sense of reality is bound up with even a minimum degree of ungrudging and enduring admission, among other admissions, of the good as good. It might, therefore, be argued that it would sometimes be an advantage in the psycho-analytic context to speak of a truth, rather than a reality, principle; that the usage would help smoothen presentations of the psyche in terms of those primary and secondary processes that, in the view of this paper, are much in need of tailoring at the joins. We would do better, in my opinion, to discriminate upon a one-piece process: and such, I believe, is largely the tendency of much present-day psychoanalytic thought, an undertaking that leaves untouched the distinction between conscious and unconscious.
REFERENCES
Bion, W. R. 1967 Second Thoughts London: Heinemann Freud, S. 1900 The interpretation of dreams Standard Edition 4 & 5 London: Hogarth Press, 1953 [] Freud, S. 1915 The unconscious Standard Edition 14 London: Hogarth Press, 1957 []
Freud, S. 1923 The ego and the id Standard Edition 19 London: Hogarth Press, 1961 [] Freud, S. 1941 Findings, ideas, problems Standard Edition 23 London: Hogarth Press. [] Jones, E. 1916 The theory of symbolism In: Papers on Psycho-Analysis London: Hogarth Press, 1920 Klein, M. 1930 The importance of symbol-formation in the development of the ego Contributions to Psycho-Analysis 1921-1945 London: Hogarth Press, 1950 Meltzer, D. 1967 The Psycho-Analytical Process London: Heinemann Meltzer, D. The Relations of Words, Language and Image Unpublished Money-Kyrle, R. E. 1968 Cognitive development Int. J. Psychoanal. 49 IV [] Noy, P. 1969 A revision of the psycho-analytic theory of primary process Int. J. Psychoanal. 50 II [] Rycroft, C. 1962 Beyond the reality principle Int. J. Psychoanal. 43 VI [] Rycroft, C. 1968 Imagination and reality Collected Papers London: International Universities Press Wollheim, R. 1964 The mind and the mind's image of itself Int. J. Psychoanal. 50 II []

Stokes, A. (1974). Primary Process, Thinking and Art1. Contemp. Psychoanal., 10:327-341
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Document Trosman, H. (1990). Transformations of Unconscious Fantasy in Art. J. Amer. Psychoanal. Assn., 38:47-59.
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(1990). Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association, 38:47-59
Transformations of Unconscious Fantasy in Art

Harry Trosman, M.D.
ABSTRACT
Unconscious fantasy is conceptualized as a representation for drive-related, conflict-laden, wish-fulfilling views of human experience. These are usually related to sexuality, and refer to birth, intrauterine existence, primal scene, castration, and seduction. Unconscious fantasy may be transformed into works of art through a variety of artistic means. The employment of formal means for the representation of fantasy may be the product of an endopsychic perception. Thus, structural attributes of the psyche may also find representation. An example is used from the creative process in the construction of a novel by Henry James, The Spoils of Poynton. In the process of fulfilling artistic purposes in the construction of his plot, the author made use of derivatives of unconscious fantasy which surface in the process of creation. The work of art is the integration of unconscious derivatives which become transformed into artistic structure. IN ANY CONSIDERATION OF THE NATURE of unconscious fantasy, it is useful to differentiate fantasies that are of universal or primal nature from those that are idiosyncratic, specific to a particular individual, and characterized by peculiarities, singularities, and originality. Among the universal fantasies one may speak of primal or generic structures which are "responsible for the organization of fantasy life regardless of the personal experience of different subjects" (Laplanche and Pontalis, 1973, p. 331). We need not get into the ancient argument about whether the universality of these fantasies is to be accounted for on the basis of a phylogenetically transmitted inheritance. It is enough today to indicate that psychoanalysts have developed
Professor of Psychiatry, University of Chicago; Training and Supervising Analyst, Chicago Institute for Psychoanalysis. Presented at the Panel on "Unconscious Fantasy," Fall Meeting of the American Psychoanalytic Association, New York, December 20, 1987. Accepted for publication March 31, 1988.
a kind of shorthand, or gloss, to account for a broad range of fantasy structures. They are about intrauterine existence, primal scene, castration, seduction, and other vital matters which are common, emotionally laden, basically wishful, and likely to account for universal appeal when evoked in an acceptable derivative form in a work of art. Freud first brought this to our attention in describing the oedipal fantasy in Sophocles' Oedipus Rex. Freud (1900) writes, If Oedipus Rex moves a modern audience no less than it did the contemporary Greek one, the explanation can only be that its effect is to be looked for in the particular nature of the
material There must be something which makes a voice within us ready to recognize the compelling force of destiny in the Oedipus His destiny moves us only because it might have been oursbecause the oracle laid the same curse upon us before our birth as upon him [p. 262]. Freud is justifying the universal appeal of a work of art on the basis of universal fantasy. But every universal fantasy is different in its constituents. The individualistic nature of unconscious fantasy, the specific peculiarity of such fantasy, is strikingly presented by a patient treated by Lewin (1935). A claustrophobic patient found himself able to breathe only intermittently when in an enclosed space. The analysis revealed the specifics of an infantile fantasy of intrauterine life. As a child, he had picked up the idea that there was fluid within the maternal womb; thus he was puzzled by how the fetus would be able to breathe under water. He had observed the flushing mechanism of a toilet, noting that when the water level in the tank fell, the chamber was left with air at the top. He noted that the bobbing ball of the flush mechanism resembled the head of a fetus. Using the mechanics of the toilet as his model, he formed the fantasy that the water level in the womb receded each time the mother urinated, and it was during these periods that the fetus could get enough air
to survive. The fantasy permitted relief from the anxiety accompanying his wish for intrauterine retreat. In addition, he was able in fantasy to provide a life-saving device for his imminent unborn sibling. Arlow (1969) points out that unconscious fantasies such as this one are heuristically valuable in exploring infantile sexual theories. I might add that they are almost works of art . They are the result of imaginative leaps, and reveal an artistic capacity in forming links between apparently disparate material through primary-process connections and collective alternates (Greenacre, 1957). In addition to various types of unconscious fantasy, it has been suggested that the fantasies of creative people vary in their vividness, often attaining a hallucinatory and delusional quality, akin to the sensory intensification of imagery in early life (Weissman, 1969). Freud (1911a) acknowledged a similar view when he stated that artists have the gift to create a new reflection of reality in place of the conventional external reality they find unacceptable. A prevalent psychoanalytic view of the relation between unconscious fantasy and artistic means regards unconscious fantasy as the deeper component of an artwork, and the artistic means a mechanism whereby the satisfaction of the unconscious content is made acceptable to the ego. According to Freud (1907): The writer softens the character of his egoistic day-dreams by altering and disguising it, and he bribes us by the purely formalthat is, aestheticyield of pleasure which he offers us in the presentation of his phantasies. We give the name of incentive bonus, or a fore-pleasure, to a yield of pleasure such as this, which is offered to us so as to make possible the release of still greater pleasure arising from deeper psychical sources. In my opinion, all the aesthetic pleasure which a creative writer affords us has the character of a fore-pleasure of this kind, and our actual enjoyment
of an imaginative work proceeds from a liberation of tensions in our minds [p. 153]. Here Freud implies that esthetic pleasure per se is superficial, anticipatory, lacking in intensity, and a means to an end, namely, eventual instinctual release. Many students of esthetics, literary critics, art historians, and others who are
responsive to the arts have tended to find Freud's formulation too limiting. There are many forms of art that offer great satisfaction even where there is little indication of deeper psychical sources in Freud's sense. Since Freud wrote those words, we have experienced art forms directed toward the satisfaction of instinctual pleasures of one form or another without much inhibition. We, in the post-expressionist era, have seen the emergence of art movements in which erotic and aggressive drives are overt in the work, and there is little disguise in the representation of these drives or in the fantasied satisfaction of an audience. In fact, the whole role of fantasy satisfaction may have shifted so that the shoe is on the other foot. The satisfaction of the derivatives of unconscious fantasy serves as an incentive bonus and a forepleasure leading toward esthetic satisfaction. As a result of instinctual satisfaction, one can begin to appreciate the "deeper" nature of the artistic work as significant form. Indeed, with the emergence of structural and developmental viewpoints in psychoanalysis, it became possible to enlarge the conception of unconscious fantasy to account for representations of the structures themselves or the developmental process as it proceeds. Rose (1980) has been in the forefront of psychoanalytic efforts to recognize how sensitive modern artists have been to these components. When we consider the Bruges Madonna and Child of Michelangelo, we may claim that he was able to capture crucial sequences of early ego development. We think of symbiosis and rapprochement when we note the position of the legs and the hands of the small child while he is about to stride forward and leave his mother as he
simultaneously clutches her fingers and her knee to maintain a secure hold on her. The historical progression of psychoanalytic clinical work has led to greater exploration of fantasy content in artworks which take into account fantasies derived from the forms of early mother-child relationship. When we turn aside from unconscious fantasies that are a reflection of dynamic contentthat is, conflictual issues involving drive and defense, compromise formations between fantasy wishes in conflict with one another, or unacceptable wishes that mobilize defensive operationswe can then turn to a view of unconscious fantasies as endopsychic perceptions of the state of the psyche. Freud refers to endopsychic perceptions on several occasions (1900, p. 506); (1901, p. 258); (1907, p. 51); (1909, pp. 164, 252); (1911b, p. 79); (1911c, p. 187); (1913, p. 91), pointing out that it is possible to project into a view of the external world a recognition of psychological relations within the unconscious. Structural and prestructural conditions of the mind can be transposed into other contexts. Nowhere is this stated more clearly than in Freud's (1911b) conclusion to the Schreber case that Schreber's "rays of God," which are made up of a condensation of the sun's rays, of nerve fibers, and of spermatozoa, are in reality a concrete representation and projection outward of libidinal cathexes. Schreber believed that the world must come to an end because his ego was attracting all the rays to itself. This fantasy can be understood in terms of distribution of libidinal energy. It is a representation via endopsychic perception of narcissistic regression and the emptying of object cathexes. Schreber's delusional fantasy is based on an act of unconscious cognition. The delusional belief is a transformation of an endopsychic process, just as a work of art is a transformation of an unconscious fantasy. Unconscious fantasies based on endopsychic perceptions may refer to states of fragmentation or organization, way stations along paths leading from extremes of incoherence to order, disharmony to equilibrium. These formal categories, also applicable to art, may bear a relation to a variety of early psychic
states which we have come to recognize in terms of attachment and separation, progressive development and regression, merger and differentiation. In addition, we can trace certain phases in development which permit the shift from primaryprocess to secondary-process modes of ideation. Analogues to the mechanisms of the dreamwork, particularly condensation and displacement, are also present in poetic form, tropes, and literary figures of speech, such as metaphor, alliteration, metonymy, and synecdoche. In The Waste Land, T. S. Eliot describes in a series of images the state of a depleted psyche in an empty, bereft world. The poetic structure itself, with its fragmented form, also conveys the tendency of language to slip back into meaninglessness and alienation. When Eliot wrote, toward the end of The Waste Land, of "these fragments [that] I have shored against my ruins," he described a period of attempted partial reintegration following narcissistic fragmentation. Thus, we may broaden the notion of unconscious fantasy to include endopsychic perceptions of the state of the psyche. Early discussions of unconscious fantasy concerned themselves with the degree of symbolization, verbalization, and organized imagery one could attribute to such fantasy. In the past, analysts were reluctant to attribute organization to an unconscious which was considered to be unformed and primitive (Beres, 1962). At present, we are prepared to accept that the unconscious we are likely to know must already be structured and formed. Shapiro (1983) and others concerned with language and linguistics have recently pointed out the close tie between symbolization and ego development. In considering the evidence for the transformations of unconscious fantasies, we may examine not only the finished work of art itself, but also the response to day residues involved in the creation of it. The initial phase, the author's first idea and the manner in which it is processed, is beautifully described for us by Henry James (1897, pp. v-xvi) in the Preface to The Spoils of Poynton:
It was years ago, I remember , one Christmas Eve when I was dining with friends: a lady beside me made in the course of talk one of those allusions that I have always found myself recognizing on the spot as "germs." The germ, wherever gathered, has ever been for me the germ of a "story," and most of the stories straining to shape under my hand have sprung from a single small seed, a seed as minute and windblown as that casual hint for The Spoils of Poynton dropped unwitting by my neighbour, a mere floating particle in the stream of talk Such is the interesting truth about the stray suggestion at touch of which the novelist's imagination winces as at the prick of some sharp point: its virtue is all in its needle-like quality, the power to penetrate as finely as possible. This fineness it is that communicates the virus of suggestion, anything more than the minimum of which spoils the operation. If one is given a hint at all designedly one is sure to be given too much; one's subject is in the merest grain, the speck of truth, of beauty, of reality, scarce visible to the common eye [It is] the sublime economy of art, which rescues, which saves, and hoards and "banks," investing and reinvesting these fruits of toil in wondrous useful "works." [No more than a day residue, says James] If life, presenting us the germ, and left merely to herself in such a business, gives the case away, almost always, before we can stop her, what are the signs for our guidance, what the primary laws for a saving selection, how do we know when and where to intervene, where do we place the beginnings of the wrong or the right deviation? Such would be the elements of an enquiry upon which, I hasten to say, it is quite forbidden me here to embark. James returns to that Christmas Eve dinner. When my amiable friend spoke of such an odd matter as that a good lady in the north,
always well looked on, was at daggers drawn with her only son, ever hitherto exemplary,
over the ownership of the valuable furniture of a fine old house just accruing to the young man by his father's death, I instantly became aware, with my "sense for the subject," of the prick of inoculation; the whole of the virus, as I have called it, being infused by that single touch. There had been but ten words, yet I had recognized in them, as in a flash, all the possibilities of the little drama of my "Spoils," which glimmered then and there into life; so that when in the next breath I began to hear of action taken, on the beautiful ground, by our engaged adversaries, from that instant, with the light of highest distinction, I saw clumsy Life again at her stupid work. [In other words, James desired to hear no more]. For the action taken I had absolutely, and could have, no scrap of use. He thinks about the little she told him: "'It's the perfect little workable thing, but she'll strangle it in the cradle, even while she pretends, all so cheeringly, to rock it.'" The artist, he continued, "has to borrow his motive, which is certainly half the battle; and this motive is his ground, his site and his foundation He thus remains all the while in intimate commerce with his motive, and can say to himselfwhat really more than anything else inflames and sustains himthat he alone has the secret of the particular case, he alone can measure the truth of the direction to be taken by his developed data." It was not until years later, after he had "laid away my prime impression for a rest not disturbed till long afterwards" that "the subject had emerged from cool reclusion all suffused with a flush of meaning The thing had 'come,' the flower of conception had bloomedall in the happy dusk of indifference and neglect; yet, strongly and frankly as it might now appeal." He goes on to describe how, during the period of gestation, his main character, Fleda Vetch, absent in the initial germ, entered the plot: "For something like Fleda Vetch had surely been latent in one's first apprehension of the theme;
this image, while I still wondered, had, with all the assurance in the world, sprung up in its place." James goes on to describe how Fleda becomes the intermediary between the conflicted son and mother. She is an intelligent consciousness, somebody with the capacity for appreciation, somebody who could both see and feel. James explains her presence on structural grounds. She was necessary for the plot. We have here an instance of the great novelist, stirred by a day residue, propelled by unconscious fantasy toward the elaboration of a story, and compelled to structure it in a certain way. The story is about the conflict between a young man and his mother over the property left by the dead father. The mother, in order to maintain her hold on the son's property, arranges for him to fall in love with a young woman, Fleda Vetch, whom the mother can trust to appreciate the beauty of the "things" left by the father. However, the young woman has moral scruples; she cannot marry her lover without giving him the free choice to decide between her and another woman whom the mother opposes. When the young man returns to and promptly marries the other woman, Fleda loses both her lover and her property. The story ends with a fire that destroys the beautiful home, and the heroine is left with nothing. The biographical material on James (Edel, 1953-1972) is sufficiently rich at this time to enable us to understand that the Jamesian heroine consumed by moral scruples is often a representation for an aspect of James himself. James formed a strong feminine identification, and an important aspect of his unconscious, infantile fantasy life was governed by a drive to establish an
attachment to a distant father. The Spoils of Poynton makes a striking reference to the "amputation" of the mother's possessions. "The amputation had been performed. Her leg had come offshe now had begun to stump along with the lovely wooden substitute; she would stump for life, and what her young friend [Fleda] was to come and admire was the beauty of her movement and the noise which she made about the house" (pp. 69-70). As Edel points out, the reference to the
amputation reminds us that the father of Henry James had suffered a leg amputation. Throughout the story we have an opportunity to note how the artist molds his germ of an idea in accord with an unconscious fantasy which determines the nature of the plot. The desire for the father's "things," in conflict with the defensive stance of moral uprightness, is paid for by the fire, which destroys everything. In the case of James, the initial impetus toward creation can be seen as an impregnation fantasyconflictual and partially repudiated, a germ, a viral infectionwhich gestates until it is fully formed. The long period of gestation, however, permits the emergence of other unconscious fantasies, of further forms of feminine identification, of unconscious wishes to possess the father's penis, of conflicts with his mother, of shifts in identification, of wishes for and fears of castration. Clearly, artistic creation is a process that follows, on the one hand, the laws of artistic formation; on the other hand, it is fueled by derivatives of deeper layers of the psyche. James claimed that Fleda was necessary to the plot in order to replace the inanimate "things" of father, the intermediary in the conflict. Pari passu, Fleda permits James to portray an aspect of his own longings, through identification with her. Through Fleda, James could construct a discriminating figure who arbitrated the conflict between mother and son. Fleda's capacity for appreciation permitted a perceptual awareness of the motives and aims of the others. The mediating role offered an opportunity for depicting satisfaction through action while defending against the disunity created by conflictual impulses and prohibitive values. Fleda became a representation for the synthesizing and conciliating ego, an organizer bringing together the disparate antagonists. The novelist could depict in the struggles of the heroine the functional ego seeking resolution and integration. In the case of James, we have one manifestation of artistic creation which by no means exhausts the possible varieties. We have enough familiarity with artistic creativity now to realize
that the creative act itself fulfills many functions. It not only gives expression to the deepest unconscious wishes; it also offers the creator opportunities for the reparation of loss, conquest and competition, and cryptomnesic incorporation through the experience of being influenced and influencing. If the artist is governed by unconscious fantasy, surely the audience is similarly possessed. Freud pointed out that the audience at Oedipus Rex is given an opportunity to recreate perceptual identities which resonate with those of the creator. The audience experiences unconscious fantasy that is similar to that of the creator. The craft of the creator disguises his own unconscious fantasy and leads the reader by means of various literary devices to experience shifting states of tension which increase and decrease in a playful and imaginative world. Here we are confronted with another meaning of the notion of fantasy. The fantasied creation resides in the realm of fantasy. The artistic product, like the dream, need
not lead to action; the esthetic domain is a preserve where forms of satisfaction can be merely represented and visualized without threat of consequence. Nor need the audience be bound by the fantasy of the artist himself. The respondent to a work of art has an opportunity to combine the latent fantasy of the artist with resonating fantasies of his own. In this sense, esthetic response is not merely a passive activity; it is an opportunity to meet the artist halfway and to resonate with the artwork just as Henry James did with the day residue presented by the woman at the Christmas Eve party. As in the activity of creation, transformations of unconscious fantasy take place in the esthetic response to a completed work of art as well. A member of the audience at Hamlet is propelled in many directions on a topographic, structural, and developmental scale. In Hamlet, Shakespeare refers to the "ear" 24 times, more frequently than in any other play (Ewbank, 1977). And in each such reference, we are confronted by varying shades and levels of conscious and unconscious meaning. The
primal scene, oedipal fantasies, and sadistic sexuality are suggested when we learn that Claudius killed the king by pouring poison in his ear. When Hamlet harangues Gertrude, his words "like daggers enter her ears." Yet the ear is also an organ for communication. In the very first scene, when Barnardo tries to convince Horatio of the existence of the ghost, he says to Horatio that he will assail his ears. The ghost feels his estrangement from humanity so acutely that he cannot tell the secret of his prisonhouse to "ears of flesh and blood." The whole state of Denmark, he states, is "an ear which is rankly abused." Thus, members of an audience are exposed to varying depths of meaning, some levels of which are consonant with primitive fantasy, others with higher symbolic forms of meaning. Part of the artistic impact depends on the ability of the artist to move us from one level to another. We require this immediacy and distancing for esthetic reasons. Works which are too close to the expression of primitive fantasy fail because we are often repelled by them. Yet if they do not resonate with some aspect of primitive fantasy, we find them too cold and too detached (Kris, 1952). In conclusion, we may consider a work of art as a derivative of and transformation of unconscious fantasy, whether the result of a conflict-laden, wish-defense dynamic or a representation of the structure itself which underlies and supports such dynamisms. The creation of the work of art links the unconscious fantasy and its manifest surface. Just as we cannot deny the reality of the surface, so we cannot deny the intensities of early experience which serve as building blocks for the imagination (Skura, 1981). Just as primitive fantasy is transformed by reality, the artist accommodates to formal purposes. The James example suggests that even in the process of such accommodation, underlying unconscious fantasy is still evident. The revelation of fantasy is not to be seen as a statement about the quality of a literary work. Nor is quality to be measured by distance from the root. One might indeed state that the success or failure of a literary work, in any case, rests on the degree of
successful integration of fantasy into an artistic structure. In a word, to go naked is not the best disguise. The successful transformation of primitive fantasy is the path by which we establish alternate versions of reality.
REFERENCES
ARLOW, J. A. 1969 Unconscious fantasy and disturbances of conscious experience Psychoanal. Q.
38:1-27 [] BERES, D. 1962 The unconscious fantasy Psychoanal. Q. 31:309-328 [] EDEL, L. 1953-1972 Henry James Vols. 1-5 Philadelphia: Lippincott. EWBANK, I. 1977 Hamlet and the power of words In Aspects of Hamlet ed. K. Muir & J. S. Wells. Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1979 FREUD, S. 1900 The Interpretation of dreams S.E. 4 & 5 [] FREUD, S. 1901 Psychopathology of everyday life S.E. 6 [] FREUD, S. 1907 Delusions and dreams in Jensen's Gradiva S.E. 9 [] FREUD, S. 1908 Creative writers and day-dreaming S.E. 9 [] FREUD, S. 1909 Notes upon a case of obsessional neurosis S.E. 10 [] FREUD, S. 1911a Formulations on the two principles of mental functioning S.E. 12 [] FREUD, S. 1911b Psycho-analytic notes on an autobiographical account of a case of paranoia (dementia paranoides) S.E. 12 [] FREUD, S. 1911c Dreams in folklore S.E. 12 [] FREUD, S. 1913 Totem and taboo S.E. 13 [] GREENACRE, P. 1957 The childhood of the artist. Libidinal phase development and giftedness Psychoanal. Study Child 12:47-72 [] JAMES, H. 1897 The Spoils of Poynton New York: Scribner's, 1908 KRIS, E. 1952 Psychoanalytic Explorations in Art New York: Int. Univ. Press. LAPLANCHE, J. & PONTALIS, J.-B. 1973 The Language of Psychoanalysis New York: Norton. [] LEWIN, B. D. 1935 Claustrophobia Psychoanal. Q. 4:227-233 [] ROSE, G. J. 1980 The Power of Form New York: Int. Univ. Press. SHAPIRO, T. 1983 The unconscious still occupies us Psychoanal. Study Child 38:547-567 [] SKURA, M. A. 1981 The Literary Use of the Psychoanalytic Process New Haven: Yale Univ. Press. Weissman, P. 1969 Creative fantasies and beyond the reality principle Psychoanal. Q. 38:110-123 []

Trosman, H. (1990). Transformations of Unconscious Fantasy in Art. J. Amer. Psychoanal. Assn., 38:47-59

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Transformations of Unconscious Fantasy in Art

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