A while ago, I reported on a change of direction in my PhD. It had been under my nose all this time but it is common knowledge in psychoanalysis that the most obvious tends to be the most invisible (see Lacan on Poe’sThe purloined letter). In my obsession with the scientific and the objective I somehow overlooked the fact that what I am talking about, from a practice point of view, is feminine seduction.

There is a split, a contradiction between thoughts and my actions. I want to think objective, but I act subjective. I am drawn to shoes, to pinks, to retail therapy, shopping sprees and tiaras. The problem came when I tried to present an image of unity, when I tried to argue that what I experienced as subjective was, in fact, universal. But subjective knowledge can, after all, constitute knowledge and I may be able to get my PhD in spite of this contradiction, right? Lacan’s Seminar XX (Encore: On Feminine Sexuality, the Limits of Love and Knowledge) was helpful to put monsters at rest for a while. But I am a visual person, as I keep repeating to my psychoanalyst, images, colours, forms, are what stays with me. I discovered Silvie Fleury’s work while reading Stallabrass’s Art Incorporated. I did not like her then: although I thought her visuals were enticing, I felt there was something distrustful. A little like a Mantis Religiosa, I thought that, if I got too close, she would deceive me; so I kept my distance. But isn’t that what seduction is? Deception, in the best and worst sense, is what is at heart of it. See Valmont, Juicy Salif and Baudrillard. Once I could see that and decided I did want to be deceived (just for the pleasure [principle] of it), I saw myself reflected in her work.

Sylvie Fleury, Pleasures

Above: Sylvie Fleury, Prada Shoes, Courtesy of Art&Public

I have always had a soft spot for what other people might consider bad photographs. Call them errors, mistakes, mishaps, shakes, parapraxes, slips, forgetfulness, out-of-focus, wrongly lit, stupidity, lapsi… The thing is that, for me, they hold something of the moment that straight pictures, in all of their sanitised composion, don’t. Obviously, my point is that the unconscious speaks though them. I have rescued many of these over the years. I remember when photographs used to come in paper and my dad went through the set and chucked away those that were “bad”. More than once, after being put to bed but unable to get to sleep, I would get up and safe some of those photographs from eternal repression. “I am thirsty” ‚Äì I would say, if someone asked me what I was doing. The answer was not totally false. I was trying to understand.

Email received today at 14:38:

www.sheffieldart.blogspot.com
www.objectsinwaiting.co.uk

Disturbingly, Lexa Walsh’s objects are very similar to mine. She calls them seductive too, although they embody everything I don’t want mine to be. I think they are closer to a fetish, someone else’s fetish, than to a seductive object. They silence my look somehow, I don’t want to be near them. That revulsion, however, is not the lack of gratification required of the artistic object. These objects do gratify a fantasy, a fantasy one may have about art, what art does, where art goes.

Partially, broken apart, however, they do have something that makes me think twice: the doll’s look, the similarity of the brown objects to both feces and chocolate, the sexual references in Mickey Mouse, hair without body. Hair, hair, always hair, the fetish object excellence. These elements are not seductive characteristics. They don’t lead astray. They are the reminders and the remainders of an other’s desire.

Victoria Civera does not qualify her objects as seductive. They are not fetishes either. They talk about desire, about little objectual passions we all have even if they manifest themselves through a different object choice. The object in Civera’s work often stands for something else; or, to put it in another way, it calls something else into play.

If I am to be right in my quick diagnosis of Lexa Walsh’s abject work, her fetishes would also have to call something into play. That something, however, is not Das Ding or Objet Petit a, as in Civera’s case. Althought the two examples of work may look the same, they couldn’t be further away when related to my research. This distinction between seductive, fetish objects, and their relationship to abjection and, of course, desire [through my objects, my desire, the desire of the Other], is something I am going to have to address in this year’s report.

I dreamt dad and I were driving to Gran’s house (as we used to do every Sunday). On our way, we encountered a group of terrorists, who stopped us and made us get out of the car and into a barn/house/caserio-type building. In that building, there we many other people . Our car had been left in a gravel car parked outside the barn, where there was also a yellow bus, one of those American kids go to school in. Inside the barn, the terrorists (at least one man and one woman) told us to give them what we had on us —including watches, wallets, credit cards and contact lenses, which we had to pierced so as not to escape.

I said I needed to go outside in order to take my contact lenses off. I took with me a little white eye shadow container which had a dirty mirror. the woman terrorist came out with me and my dad. I remember being able to communicate with my dad telepathically. My dad said, with his voice: “I am going for a stroll within the confines of the garden”. Outside, other people were everywhere, getting rid of their possessions. I knew my dad was going to try to escape and I decided to stay and make friends with the terrorist woman to get her attention, so my dad could try to get us some help. I talked to her about girly things. At some point, I said to her I was going to see what a group on the far end of the garden were up to (or was I going to the loo?). She let me go. One I was on the far side of the garden, I could see through a glass door that my dad had been successful in getting help. A group of armed SAS is helmets and glowing yellow vests was coming towards me. I decided to escape and look for dad as they were entering the garden.

All was mayhem; people running in different directions. In this chaos, I saw Julio, a tall boy I used to fancy in high-school come towards me and pick me up, really happy to see me. When he put me down, I saw my dad come out of the gents, freshly shaven and smelling of eau de cologne. He asked me: “why didn’t you escape with me?” and I replied that I though I’d better distract the terrorist.

I have always found that writing a diary or journal, including this one, is a difficult task. If, added to the description and reflection on life and a PhD, one finds the complexities of undergoing psychoanalytic treatment, the prospect is almost insurmountable. No one is sane enough for psychoanalysis; there is always an ever so slight repression, a nagging denial, a level of resistance, something unknown and unconscious. The analysand, no matter how distant from the process she wants to be, always ends up in the midsts of transference. Without that, there’s no psychoanalytic treatment, of course. Psychoanalysis makes the research consider various things, amongst which are one’s subjective relationship to the research (the objective-subjective conundrum, or the personal-political, as I have called it before) and the issue of time and its management.

Looking not to feel too isolated in my task, I quickly google “clinical+diary” for inspiration. Top hit is S?°ndor Ferenczi’s book, writen from the opposing site in the relationship, as analyst. I had come across this book before, in an article by Julia Borossa, part of my beloved In the Place of an Object collection of essays. Borossa talked about the vulnerability, the intensity of the analytic relationship but only now that my sessions were evolving from training to treatment the importance of this issue of recounting clicked.

The contradiction between need and fear, what I mostly feel in the sessions, is very difficult to write about. Description of the topics discussed and the analysis of symptoms undertaken as part of the sessions is easy. But that, in a sense, is not getting involved, not dealing with the issue, repressing. How can one work through the facts, the feelings in the writing? How can one work through the facts, the feelings in art? [Sublimation comes to mind]. Time management is crucial here. I have said before that psychoanalysis does not happen without commitment, both in terms of money and of time. It is the same with writing and art. However painful, difficult, unimportant, boring, long, tedious, frustrating it may be, one has to keep at it, day after day, week after week or whatever the time agreement is. This is the only way breakthroughs in the style, the accounts, the works could ever happen. Resistance is pierced, something emerges. Write, Write, Write; Do, Do, Do. Let that be a promise from me, who hasn’t finished a substantial piece of work in a long time.

I don’t know why but I have an irresistible urge to call J‚Äî S‚Äî “my oracle”, instead of “my psychoanalyst”. If that doesn’t mean I am putting him in the position of subject-supposed-to-know, nothing does.

Art and psychoanalysis are practices of the impossible on the path of initiation to the mystery, the beyond discourse. Their search is for a pure language, ideally coinciding with the Thing itself; not a familiar reflection of ourselves but a going towards the most foreign and intimate lnd. And reaching it [...] is impossible.

Benvenuto, B (2000) The Impossible. In Kivland, S & du Ry, M. In the Place of an Object. Journal of the Centre for Freudian Analysis and Research, Volume 12, Special Issue 2000. p. 59

I am beginning to have doubts about psychoanalysis as a therapy. As a practice, it is still relevant to the aims of my research but the questions is, how long do I need to commit myself to treatment if I only want to find out how about the context in which treatment occurs.

I simply did not want to talk in today’s session. What does one do in that situation? Spend ¬£40 to lay on a couch and be silent? The fact that I talked non-stop, in a superficial and detached manner points the finger at the heart of my problem: my relationship to the Big Other and the relegation of my own desire. That, of course, is a self-diagnosis by someone that knows very little about psychoanalysis and even less about herself; or so it seems. The second uncomfortable moment came when I tried to make sense of the 11 sessions J‚Äî S‚Äî and I have been through by hinting at the fact that what I may be experiencing could be called hysteric symptoms. Surprisingly, I got an assertive answer, almost followed by a disclaimer. I confessed I had been reading Dora and perhaps, as an impressionable person, I had internalised some of the symptoms in my want for answers. J‚Äî S‚Äî said (kindly and calmly) that Dora was written very early on, very many studies and theories have followed this initial analysis.

What got me, like 10,000 volts electricity, wasthe fact that I am going to have to pick up these pieces in next week’s session. I seem to be opening more wounds than curing them. My symptoms remain the same and I feel I am going round and round in circles. I understand that psychoanalytic treatment requires time and commitment but what dawn on me yesterday was the fact that I may not be able to give precisely that at this stage (let alone the money side).

When my demande d’analyse shifted from the PhD towards my symptoms, I think I held hope for cure. The hope has now faded, leaving an untidy, arduous, rocky road of work to do to get o an unknown destination. Its funny that, knowing what I did about the clinical aspects of psychoanalysis, I thought my case was different… I’ll give treatment a chance, I’ll stop reading Dora, but stopping treatment also appears as one of the possible courses of action.

I am standing in a space by a window with volets [shutters]. The word came to me only in French. In front of the is a horizontal space, like a low and wide windowsill. I am polishing a pair of small scissors. I recognise the scissors as they are those my mother has in her living room, by the sofa where she sits. The screw holding them together is very loose and their tip is bent. She uses them to cut facial hair. I am still polishing them when my newly married friends O. and C. come outside the window and chat to me. I can’t remember what they say but they don’t stay long. After they’ve gone, I continue polishing the scissors in my hand. When I finish, I place them down on the windowsill-like surface an take another unpolished pair of the same scissors. In the dream, I am surprised of the fact that I have so many of them…