Tag: Sigmund Freud

A Look in the Mirror

Posted on by Andrea Scrima

MORE LOOPY LOONIES BY ANDREA SCRIMA

For the past ten years, Andrea Scrima has been working on a group of drawings entitled LOOPY LOONIES. The result is a visual vocabulary of splats, speech bubbles, animated letters, and other anthropomorphized figures that take contemporary comic and cartoon images and the violence imbedded in them as their point of departure. Against the backdrop of world political events of the past several years—war, pandemic, the ever-widening divisions in society—the drawings spell out words such as NO (an expression of dissent), EWWW (an expression of disgust), OWWW (an expression of pain), or EEEK (an expression of fear). The morally critical aspects of Scrima’s literary work take a new turn in her art and vice versa: a loss of words is countered first with visual and then with linguistic means. Out of this encounter, a series of texts ensue that explore topics such as the abuse of language, the difference between compassion and empathy, and the nature of moral contempt and disgust. 

Part I of this project can be seen and read HERE

Part II of this project can be seen and read HERE

Images from the exhibition LOOPY LOONIES at Kunsthaus Graz, Austria, can be seen HERE

 
Andrea Scrima, LOOPY LOONIES. Series of drawings 35 x 35 each, graphite on paper; edition of postcards with text excerpts. Exhibition view: Kunsthaus Graz, Austria, June 2024.

7. EEEK

Michel de Montaigne’s famous statement—“The thing I fear most is fear”—remains, nearly five hundred years later, thoroughly modern. We think of fear as an illusion, a mental trap of some kind, and believe that conquering it is essential to our personal well-being. Yet in evolutionary terms, fear is an instinctive response grounded in empirical observation and experience. Like pain, its function is self-preservation: it alerts us to the threat of very real dangers, whether immediate or imminent.

Fear can also be experienced as an indistinct existential malaise, deriving from the knowledge that misfortune inevitably happens, that we will one day die, and that prior to our death we may enter a state so weak and vulnerable that we can no longer ward off pain and misery. We think of this more generalized fear as anxiety: we can’t shake the sense that bad things—the vagueness of which render them all the more frightening—are about to befall us. The world is an inherently insecure and precarious place; according to Thomas Hobbes, “there is no such thing as perpetual Tranquillity of mind, while we live here; because life it selfe is but Motion, and can never be without Desire, nor without Fear” (Leviathan, VI). Day by day, we are confronted with circumstances that justify a response involving some degree of entirely realistic and reasonable dread and apprehension, yet anxiety is classified as a psychological disorder requiring professional therapeutic treatment. Read more »

Sunday, February 9, 2025

Can Love Last? A (mostly) encouraging story about the fate of romance over time

Posted on by Gary Borjesson

by Gary Borjesson

Note: Since it is February, and since the world can surely use more love, I offer this as a little Valentine’s gift, dedicated to romantic love. Its inspiration is Stephen Mitchell’s book, Can Love Last? This is not a book review but an invitation to reflect on romantic love, with Mitchell as our guide.

The urn with the lovers that inspired John Keats’ famous poem, Ode on a Grecian Urn, which beautifully captures the split between wanting and having.

In my early twenties I fell in love with a woman who couldn’t color inside the lines. Brilliant, sensitive, and adventurous, but unreliable, addicted, and self-destructive. Around that time I was also in love with an amazing woman who was healthier and more reliable, if also (like me) less dangerously exciting. I felt conflicted: Should I embrace a more romantic and adventurous life, or choose something safer and more sustainable? My gut told me that choosing adventure in this case would end in heartbreak and bad habits. My heart was split between wanting safety and wanting danger. My head didn’t know what to think.

Many of us face a similar bind, whether to choose safety or adventure. Whether to plan ahead or live more spontaneously and passionately. Whether to hit the open road or put down roots. In his fascinating and wise book, Can Love Last? the fate of romance over time, psychoanalyst Stephen Mitchell addresses this bind, and offers a way through. The way begins by recognizing that romantic love is actually constituted through the tension between “the ordinary and transcendent, safety and adventure, the familiar and the novel, that runs through human experience.”

So, how do we make true love? In Mitchell’s grand vision, it’s not about siding with passion or security, it’s about about bringing them into the living conversation that is romantic love. In the final chapter of Can Love Last Mitchell sums up his argument

deeper more authentic commitments in love entail not a devotion to stasis but a dedication to process in the face of uncertainty. Genuine passion, in contrast to its degraded forms, is not split off from a longing for security and predictability, but is in a continual dialectical relationship with that longing.

Mitchell’s way of putting it would have appealed to my 22-year-old self, who would soon be going off to grad school in philosophy. Back then, however, I didn’t have the maturity or self-awareness to put this wisdom into practice—even if I could have appreciated the theory. Nevertheless, for those who want to make love that lasts, Mitchell’s book offers insight and inspiration. Many practical suggestions can also be gleaned. Read more »

Monday, August 7, 2023

Undead Freud

Posted on by Christopher Horner

by Chris Horner

if often he was wrong and, at times, absurd,
to us he is no more a person
now but a whole climate of opinion
under whom we conduct our different lives

—W. H. Auden ‘In memory of Sigmund Freud’

Undead

Freud and psychoanalysis seem to be in a state resembling Schrodinger’s famous cat: alive and dead at the same time. Dead and discredited and yet alive and influential. Perhaps the better analogy here is not to the ambiguous feline but to another figure: that of the undead. For while Freud the man expired in 1939 and has been killed again and again before and after that date, still he returns, like something repressed that just won’t lie down and vanish.

In an interesting essay in the New Republic in 1995, Jonathan Lear commented on the extraordinary fervour with which Freud and psychoanalysis seemed to be killed, again and again [1]. It prompts the thought: why? Lear proposes three cultural currents that motivate Freud bashing: the development of drugs, alongside increasing knowledge and interest in how the brain works, the way cheap pharmacology seems preferable to expensive psychoanalysis, and finally a backlash against some of the grander claims about Freud and his techniques that were much touted in the earlier part of the last century. Certainly Freud got things wrong and sometimes went about his analysis in a way that seems quite mistaken. But is that it? Read more »

Monday, June 22, 2020

When Freud met the Antichrist in Orvieto

Posted on by Leanne Ogasawara

by Leanne Ogasawara

Built at the beginning of the 15th century on the place of sacristy of the Orvieto Cathedral.

1.

I had been in Orvieto about a week, when a young American woman came up to me in the painted chapel and said, “Excuse me, do you speak English?”

Not waiting for my answer she continued, “Do you have any idea what these paintings mean?”

Looking at her astonished face, I gestured toward the eastern wall and whispered, “Well, over there is the Antichrist.”

Her friend joined us. They turned toward the wall where I was pointing and squinted.

“But he looks like Jesus Christ,” she said.

Fresco 1500

I handed her friend my fancy bird-watching binoculars and said,“Yes, but look at his face. See how Satan is controlling his movements? Like a puppet master.”

“What is this place?” Her friend with my binoculars asked.

“It is the Last Judgement, painted by Luca Signorelli in 1500.”

“It looks like a war.” She said.

“It is a war,” I responded. Read more »

“I am a Pornographer”: Conversation with Saskia Vogel on her debut novel “Permission”

Posted on by Andrea Scrima

Andrea Scrima: Saskia, you’ve written a book that invites us into the BDSM community to explore the complicated emotional landscape lying at the heart of its negotiations over consent and—as the title you chose for your book underscores—permission. When the book begins, Echo, the young narrator, is submerged in a fog of emotional blunting following her father’s accidental death; she trusts bodies and the language they engage in more than emotional intimacy. We’re in southern California: the milieu is wealth and privilege, Hollywood beckons, and the narrative is full of gleaming surfaces. Can aspects of Permission be read as a social commentary?

Photo: Nikolaus Kim

Saskia Vogel: Thank you for that introduction, Andrea! The book certainly came from questions I had about the society I encountered when I moved back to LA after spending most of high school in Sweden and university in London. LA, where I was born and raised, was suddenly new to me. I could legally drink, which meant access to new spaces, and I finally had a driver’s license. I was also carrying years of distance and encounters with new cultures with me. Nothing about LA life was a given anymore. I thought it would feel like free space. However, when I arrived in LA as an adult, in my early twenties, I became aware of a strong current that asked me to conform to certain norms as a woman, for instance in how I presented myself. Dating culture was oddly formal, like we were supposed to demonstrate our skill in performing a script rather than make a connection. Looking back, I might suggest that the kind of abuse of power that was happening in the upper echelons of Hollywood, and I’m thinking of Weinstein here, trickled down into parts of society, creating a dishonest economy of sex and power. Very soon I found a group of friends who were deeply involved in the kink community. Half of myself, shall we say, was in that community, and the other was trying to navigate life outside of that community. There was quite a stark contrast between the BDSM community I knew—informed by mutual respect and consent, articulated boundaries, and an awareness of power dynamics—and my life outside it, which I experienced as far more patriarchal and conventional than my imagination of life in LA had been. Those two worlds left me with questions about the roles available to women in society, about who benefits from the existing power structures, and if there was a way out. I dropped my main character Echo right into the middle of these questions. Read more »