Psychoanalytic aesthetics an introduction to the british school by nicky glover

So the deftest introduction to the book, as a whole, would be to stand back from the rich detail of the canvas, in order to note a few striking features of the tone of Nicky Glover’s sta

In many ways, this book doesn’t need any welcoming soul at the doorway to outline what lies within, and to delimit what the reader can expect

The book, itself, is introductory – and each of its chapters are welcoming enough to give the reader a good signpost as to what lies within

So the deftest introduction to the book, as a whole, would be to stand back from the rich detail of the canvas, in order to note a few striking features of the tone of Nicky Glover’s stance, which lies subtly embedded in the rich content

Although the author’s own theoretical favourites can be inferred, like a fair-minded mother, she gives each a considered, clear but un-simplified

platform for the reader to consider both the charms and limitations of each particular slant on the aesthetic sensibility of the growing child-mind

Throughout this book, each planet of thinking, with its particular spin,

gravity and atmospheric conditions is not just gazed at from a distant, high-powered telescope – Glover actually takes us down onto the planet’s ground, and then offers a perspective of the other planets, from that place

Thereby, each view presented in the book can itself be a ‘filter’ through which to look at the other views

It is the issue of perspective that shines through the whole book, chapter by

chapter

The theories become diaphanous through Glover’s knack for finding the crucial elements, and illuminating their fine filaments to produce the perfect

“mood lighting” for rich, but relaxed, fireside contemplation

The quiet, meditative tone of the book invokes far more than the intellectual sum of its theoretical parts

Even in these ‘postmodern’ days, the ‘territorial imperative’ just about

totally precludes the possibilities of any adherent of the Kleinian, Lacanian, Winnicottian, Bionic or Freudian ‘creed’ ever writing such a book

And if they could, it is unlikely that they could include an Ehrenzweig or a Fuller, to weigh in on equal terms with the usual stalwarts (Freud, Klein, Winnicott, and Bion) of psychoanalytic bibliographies

In chapter 6, for example, Glover deftly finds the words for more than just a compare-and-contrast schoolroom fly-by of the views of Donald Winnicott and Marion Milner

Through simplicity – not simplification, that is, a poetic method of economy and distillation, she manages to present an almost alchemic distillation that enables the reader to hold similar-but-different perspectives at once

So, rather than championing any one writer-theorist, she sets out to cast more light on the phenomena itself - of creativity, and therefore human mental Life, and builds new scaffolding, to reveal the infinite complexity of cross-angles in theory-building about the Mind itself

Yet, only upon closing the book, do we start to gather an impression of what lies underneath that vast, but meager and always incomplete theoretical scaffolding – the workings and evolutions of the minds of individuals,and the building – through time, generations and cross-fertilizations, of an

ongoing ‘work-group’ mind

This theory-building is always – must be - a shared human enterprise, in order to grasp and understand our own condition Yet, there are beacons, shiny stars from the sceptred isle, that grab at Glover’s imagination,

Here, for example, on Milner, Glover writes:

This heightened awareness could be reached only through an “inner gesture” of letting go

of the “narrow” focus (that is, everyday discursive thinking) and a deeper order would be revealed to her which sometimes had a very frightening quality - almost like a death itself

- but when she submitted herself to it, it felt more like a liberation This “deeper order” (cf Ehrenzweig's “hidden order”) was characterised by a sense of more fluid boundaries between self and the world - even to the point of subject-object union This is a theme which was to play an important part in her writings, as in Winnicott's thinking, especially with regard to understanding aesthetic experience and the way in which creative

perception is fostered by a negotiation of the “gap” between self and other, involving the active surrendering of conscious ego control.

Later, spurred by the freedom enlarged by Glover, by the aforementioned fireside, the reader might ponder a co-mingling of Milner’s “Inner gesture” with Bion’s ‘catastrophic change’ in relation to “O”

Already, a great unifying broach – though intensely present implicitly in all

of Klein’s work and somewhat explicit in Winnicott’s – which takes these ideas away from the unicycle of an intrapsychic battle between Life and Death drives - was made by Meg Harris Williams

Through the arc of her work, which has spanned the poetic structure of Bronte’s “Wuthering Heights”, through to Hamlet’s unsuccessful mating (

with both Ophelia and his own pre-conceptions), and more recently, “The Vale of Soul-making”, she has elucidated the great problems facing an

individual mind developing its own means of expressive reciprocity and aesthetic sensibility if it cannot find a receptive ‘counter-mind’, which bears and acknowledges all the ambivalence and anguish of the ambiguity that mental growth has as its subsoil

Hamlet without Horatio flounders - yet with him, the rottenness clears for the next generation Cathy and Heathcliff, without each other, shrivel and regress into sadistic self-ruination

Inspiration from the thinking-feeling couple are the child’s only answer to the despair and heartlessness of Macbethian mindlessness

Richard III can become a Richard in Analysis (Klein), capable of being moved by the depressive stillness of a beautiful psycho-analytic

interpretation from the mother that can hold both his despair and his cut-throat omnipotence

It seems likely that Harris Williams and Donald Meltzer were able to

creatively carry that counter-mind role for each other, as their model of aesthetic development in the mind of the child evolved, in a space not quite

in, nor totally removed from, the world of psycho-analytic thinking

Just as Freud shocked the establishment with news of unconscious infantile sexuality, and Klein shocked the Freudians with news of infantile

unconscious sadism, depression and reparation, Meltzer and Harris Williams shocked the Kleinians – even the Bionians - with news of a crucial aesthetic sensibility and conflict in the mental life of the infant, arching back into pre-natal curiosity, and ready to bolt out of the gate at the caesura of birth

Most of the theories that are presented in these pages will have a term for transcendent emotional experience that leaves Freud’s ‘sublimation’

appearing to be a bit under-clothed and ragged

And one of the great features of this book is that it sets up an intricate

‘kaleidoscope’ to view most of the major post-Freudian elaborations of this

‘transcendent’ capacity, the emotional leap that enables ‘quantum’ growth of the mind

Although much of this is underpinned by Klein’s astonishing and brave conception of the Depressive Position, Glover does not see Klein as having the final word Rather, Klein’s momentous work is yet another – albeit

major – twist in the kaleidoscope

Whereas Bion thought that the minded needed to have ‘binocular vision’ through the bringing together of ‘common sense’ – Glover’s kaleidoscopic vision is not just a frozen binocular stereogram – but, an ever-changing perspective, chapter by chapter – until by the conclusion, we do not just have

an erudite, well-written, for-the-record text book, with an assemblage of prominent British aesthetic theories We have, as well, a new aesthetic object in its own write (to slightly misquote John Lennon) capable of

continuing its kaleidoscopic re-combinations long after it finds its home amongst the bookshelf, at the junction of Psycho-analysis and Aesthetics, with their combined mutual pre-occupation with the child, and its vision of Beauty in the inner and outer worlds

For it is this unique emphasis on the aesthetic struggle within the infant

mind that places these British psycho-analytic thinkers in a class of their own, where the theoretical cannot develop meaningfully unless it is

anchored in the

“sagacity of the body” - the partnership of body and mind, when the head and the heart are working together …

whose crucible is the new mother, with her new child, developing and being developed by each other through interplay

It may be that an Australian, with one foot (at least) outside of the ‘territory’ may be best placed to observe and muse about this brave new field, much as

a loose-footed Austrian Jew was moved to do, over a century ago

Neil Maizels