I want to thank the Freud Museum for constructing this event which allows us to think some more about the differing forms of free association, especially as it bears on the topic of being creative.
In the last few weeks I have been either reading, looking at, or listening to the works of my fellow panellists, wondering what the title might mean for them, especially how and in what ways they think of free association; another way of discussing aspects of creativity. What do we have in common if anything, or, as importantly, how do we free associate differently? I had just read Blake Morrison's The Justification of Johann Gutenberg, viewed some of Hiller's works, and after listening to Holloway's "Fantasy-Pieces on the Heine 'Liederkreis' of Shumann (1971), I was reading Holloway's program notes and here is what he writes:
"In my twenties (l963-73) I composed myself into an impasse and then, with the help of Schumann, composed myself out of it. The way out, towards the end of the l960's, came via an intense absorption with his songs. For months I'd doodle at the piano around the handful of favourites, isolating and abstracting their constituents, especially intervallic, in a trance of fascination. There was no idea of what might come of this even after I began to jot down sketchesóextensions, secants, reharmonizations, rhythmic shifts and so forth."
He writes that out of this something had to come, and it did, as Scenes from Schumann. I had an inner image of Hiller combing through the object world, finding in the detritus of previous generations what Chris Turner, writing of Hiller's Psi Girls, terms "the fragmented bliss of the pre-linguistic", and, I had been impressed, to use the printing metaphor, by Morrison's extraordinary immersion in his task, which realises itself in Gutenberg. Listen to this.
"I travelled to see machines. Cogs, camshafts, levers, pulleys
trip-hammers and screwsówherever I went, whatever their use,
I sought them out. Mostly I saw mills: fulling mills, grain
mills, tanning
mills, paper mills, mustard mills and silk mills, whirling like
magic
apprentice boys. A few were driven by wind, but the rest
were built on
river-banks and ran off water. I loved the ease they brought
to men, and
how water too was changed by them, from idling gentle and glassy-still
towards their paddle-wheels to coming out (as though itself ground
and
pestled) in churfing foam. I loved the rhythm they made-again
and again
and againóand never tired of hearing it. I loved the different
tasks that
a single stretch of river could perform: the water rushing by
one monastery
in France was made to crush olives, sieve flour, trample cloth,
heat beer-
vats, puff the bellows for the forge, and carry off waste.
I have heard this
tide of industry called a nuisanceóoh, the dinning of forges!
the knawing
of cogs! the corrupting of rivers with acid and lime!
But the sight and sound
of engines never failed to gladden or excite me." (71)
Note how Morrison absorbs us first in the naming of objects which subtly enact through the alliterative repetition of the word "mill", the very excitement of the machine's repetition which he finds so fascinating, a compelling marriage of literary form and narrative object that accomplishes that thick density of the movement of multiple ideasóand representational aimsóthat Freud attended to when he wrote about the dream work: especially condensation and displacement. Morrison creates an oxymoronic moment when he uses the riverófavoured pastoral objectóto serve and honour the machine age. In one paragraph Morrison orchestrates many differing lines of thought (or image), thick with histories, all moving in a free associative palimpsest that both constructs theories about Gutenberg's world at the same time that it contributes to the matrix of authorial perception "at work" in this "object world."
When Holloway wrote of his absorption, I found myself musing on the word: it became a kind of onomatopoeic transitional object
aaaaaaaaaaaabsssssssssooooooaaahhhrrrrrrrrb
sort of soaks up the phonemic surround, especially if you speak it in American rather than in English giving it true colonial reach. One is taken in by its own action, and Holloway's word choice allowed me to see, or to think I saw, something in the way these very differing people free associated. Each gets lost in his or her object world, absorbed by it. Such immersions, however, are not endpoints but media: means to the creation of some different form: a serenade, a novel, a work of art.
Now let me read you something from Freud, his passage on free association which appears in his Encyclopaedia articles of 1923, and, is on page 7 of Free Association, should you wish to "read along with Freud."
"The treatment is begun by the patient being required to put
himself in the position of an attentive and dispassionate self-
observer, merely to read off all the time the surface of his
consciousness, and on the one hand to make a duty of the most
complete honesty while on the other not to hold back any idea
from
communication, even if (1) he feels that it is too disagreeable
or if
(2) he judges that it is nonsensical or (3) too unimportant or
(4)
irrelevant to what is being looked for. It is uniformly
found that
precisely those ideas which provoke these last-mentioned
reactions are of particular value in discovering the forgotten
material."
In my essay I say why I think this is passage is tellingly significant, but I want to add something I could not have thought, I believe, had I not been immersed in my fellow panellist's work. Indeed, especially as I had an aim, which was to say something intelligible on this platform in a week's time, which is when I wrote this piece, one week ago.
And I cannot make that point without reading another passage from Freud, same essay, in which he describes the analyst's task.
"Experience soon showed that the attitude which the analytic physician
could most advantageously adopt was to surrender himself to his
own
unconscious mental activity, in a state of evenly suspended attention,
to
avoid so far as possible reflection and the construction of conscious
expectations, not to try to fix anything he heard particularly
in his memory,
and by these means to catch the drift of the patient's unconscious
with
his own unconscious."
Now I think this is the most radical statement he ever made because Freud is unmistakably clear that psychoanalysis works as an unconscious process, but what I wanted to say now was that it could only work for Freud if the patient was apparently speaking the irrelevant. It was important for him to be lost in the everyday details of mental life, out of which something of interest would arise.
When I think of the way I work as a psychoanalyst I realise that being absorbed in what my patients say is very important and that the more they talk, indeed, just free talk and the less they try to say something profound or insightful, the greater the likelihood that we will both be engaged in unconscious creativity. And that means, to me, a giving over of one' self to the creativity of that form of unconscious composition found in what I call in this essay The Freudian Pair: the analysand free talking, the analyst in meditative listening. . Not every session yields an insight derived from this kind of inter subjective creativity. In fact, I think those insights that do arrive out of the matrix of association are all the more significant because of the comparative rarity of psychic revelation, but I think something of what we are talking about today we may hold in common: a period of immersionómaybe without even knowing this is going onóin our respective "materials" whether produced by a patient, another composer, or the abandoned objects of someone's life and out of this we create something.
In 1989 Susan Hiller said of reflecting that it is as tactile as it is visual and she writes: "In Monument [a work from l980] I referred to the process of thinking as 'groping among underwater plants, unable to see either my hands or the vegetation'. She adds that "this is a physical, precise sensation" as "the eyes are free to look while the hands work, and the skin and nerves register sensations, textures, temperatures" and from this metaphor she suggests that we acknowledge the perspective of the dreamer, because as a dreamer "you can be simultaneously the protagonist of the dream and the viewer watching the action on the screen of the dream. It's the sensation of being both inside and outside thought, of thought being both inside and outside one, this double vision."
Maybe this is a good way to describe the position of the analyst listening to the patients free talking, as the analyst is both inside and outside the experience at the same time, as perhaps was Holloway when he was listening to Schumann.
What I would like to know from Holloway, however,Öand of course I know this is not an easy question, but one I am sure he has thought over many timesÖis what was he thinking? Not exactly. But when he was "groping around" in Schumann what musical ideas occurred to him; or, put differently, what are musical ideas? What form of free association is the musical "chain". I ask this because sometimes when I am trying to describe what it is like to work with patients over a very long time the image of an orchestral score comes to mind. It serves as a metaphor, for me, of what goes on unconsciously in our minds and in analysis. There are multiple registers, differing ideas, spanning differing temporal connections going on all at once, using differing instruments. Maybe the score of an opera is more accurate; indeed, only it would have to be an opera in constant creation and recreation of itself, an endless composition, moving along visually, acoustically, linguistically, theatrically, "feeding" off the work's encounter with the continually changing world around it.
It is not possible for any psychoanalyst to know much less to describe what is taking place when the patient is free talking and when one is just listening. But the practise itself enhances each person's access to something mysterious, deep, and connecting, even if one is rather left outside the "know." I once called what we know but cannot think, or have not thought, the "unthought known" by way of discussing what was known by the unconscious that had yet to be transformed into conscious thought. Freud had difficulty distinguishing unconscious contents from unconscious organisation; indeed, the Freudian Pair will reveal hidden lines of thoughtóunconscious contentsóbut as importantly, the play of unconscious thinking between the participants liberates more than the occasional disguised content: it provides access of one person's unconscious to another person's unconscious and in this respect it both enhances and liberates the potential of unconscious capability itself.
Free association in psychoanalysis provides us with a new way of thinking unconsciously, a form discovered by Freud and both appreciated and elaborated by Jung. But as we know, there are many other places and other forms of free association, in which we think by moving through the object world, perhaps in a differing medium, guided by a differing form of unconscious thinking. When Robin Holloway is listening to Schumann he is, I venture, engaged in a form of associative thinking that follows certain inner laws of musical structure, along with cultural and historical influences; but, the connecting links he makes I believe are determined by his own unconscious creativity which makes these links for him; or rather, he wakes up to them and as he composes it rather just arrives on time, all there, even if he has not known what he would find. When I think of Blake Morrison, whose Guttenberg would do les annalalists proud as he has reconstructed 15th century Mainz, he has, I believe, found a different way to think. It would be hard to define it, but it would have something to do with losing himself in another place, time, culture, and language, absorbing himself in detailsÖthousands and thousands of them...all the while doing so while inhabiting a character. In one of his essays "Too True" Morrison quotes Susan Sontag: "Some people are their lives, others merely inhabit them" and he says if one is in "the latter camp, as many writers are, there's a distance that enables you to dissect yourself without it hurting." (18). But by inhabiting Gutenberg's life, Morrison finds a different form for free associative logic, if we will, a way of thinking by immersing the self in a character who lives something one knows but has never thought and could never have thought without this specific act of immersion that constitutes this particular form for thinking.
To some extent, the novel allows us a far wider range of character-association than any other form, not simply because the writer creates characters and hangs out with them for a while, but by inhabiting fictive selves he or she releases unknown parts of the self that would otherwise be unthinkable. And however one structures a novel, it could not proceed unless the writer had given himself up to character-association, to an adventure in which that inner multiplicity latent to any self, found a form for its expression along the axis of character, of identification not simply with others, but any self's capacity to imaginatively create other characters from the unconscious. If as I believe, we are limited by our own characterówhich I think of as our own idiom of formówe nonetheless seem more than able to imaginatively inhabit other charactersÖ indeed to our delight. Writing fiction, then, is not simply liberating, it is an invention in unconsciously derived life which very often takes the form of free association by inhabitation. And the relation between characters who then are in some sort of free association with one another, expresses through these differing personality formsÖor samplesÖaspects of what has impressed one in one's own life; i.e., we have been impressed or in-formed by many characters in our life and they are "in" us in some way and although the novel is not simply a "return of the impressed" it's genius works the creativity of human characters affecting one another.
Some years ago Marion Milner asked me if I had any hobbies. I think this was really an interpretation as I think she sensed that I might be suffering an impoverishment in my own creativity and in a way she was right. I was fortunate in some ways to grow up by the sea and my hobby, if one can call it that, was surfing: in particular body surfing. But one needs the sea nearby to take part in that hobby and in some ways I have been something of a beached surfer for fourty years which is the unfortunate side of having found in the sea the place of one's hobbies.
Two years ago my wife gave me a set of acrylic paints which proved one of the most dangerous moments in my life. I had painted as a child, as all children do, and I had even won an art contest, by mistake. I was 10 and I painted an "Indian Village" with lots of tee pees, but the judges mistakenly thought it was a "Groundhog Village"ómy tee pees looked I gather like mounds of earth-- and so I won and lost at the same time, and gave up any further attempt at figurative work in the arts so to speak. But when my family got me to painting, I was lost in abstract expressionismÖas that is all I can doÖin a way that I have never been lost in "anything" before and I would paint from dawn till dusk on weekends, then early mornings, then between patients, and gradually I began to lose interest in just about anything else, which is when I sensed the danger of this absorbing work. This was announced, strikingly enough, when I went into a session to see a patient with my smock on, and, I could not possibly describe the look on her face, but it is probably the look anyone would have if he or she was to be confronted with a living category error.
Anyway, among many things, what amazed me about painting was where this was all coming from. I painted for just over three months before I stopped as I painted about 200Ö"works"Öfor lack of a better word, but it was as if some need in me was being fulfilled in a form that I had no conscious understanding of whatsoever, and yet it was more pleasurable than anything I had undertaken before.
We may know very little consciously about one or another of the art forms, but these forms seem to know something about us, and the evocative structuring of any of these forms, seems not just destined but designed to play upon unconscious formal knowledge sitting there in each of us.
When I think of free association in psychoanalysis and what Freud invented I believe that he provided something for the human species that it had been looking for for at least a couple of thousand years. That is the only way I can understand why people take so naturally to something they have "in effect" never seen or practised before; indeed, used something which otherwise should be quite off putting. I mean, think about it. One person lies down on a couch, another sits out of sight and is silent, and yet the one lying on the couch starts speaking and speaking and rather sort of takes off. Never been in a situation like this, lets say 30 something, wouldn't want to describe this scene to anyone so embarrassing is the icon-psychoanalysis, yet they take to it. In that way, I think psychoanalysis has provided a new form for thinking and relatingófor transforming inner experience into a two person relationóthat has not existed before, but which is evolutionary.
The individual is there for help.
The species is there for free association.
Musical forms, art forms, fictive forms will change and on occasion a new form for these types of thinking will evolve and change the range of thought possibility and of unconscious creativity. Each of these differing forms arrives representationally in consciousness, but each individual at differing points is "guided" or "determined" by those unconscious processes of thought peculiar to the form.
Are there differing forms of free association?
Is the composer, novelist, sculptor, film maker, fine artist following some inner unconscious logic, so much so, that in time it is possible to look back and discover a previously hidden pattern of thought? If so, then free associative thinking operates in both visual, sonic, linguistic, and gestural categories. Does the unconscious, then, have available a range of associative possibilities? If so, does it, know this? If we occupy differing forms of creativity, do we, then, choose to think about something through a particular form of thought?
There is always a risk, however, in attempting to homogenise the heterogeneous and few words are as overworked as is the word "creativity", so, we run a risk that this panel is a false congregation. It may be that collecting ourselves under the sign of free association occludes the radical difference of distinct forms of work: composing, novelising, painting-installing-collecting and so forth.
In "Portrait of the artist as a photomat" Susan Hiller writes "my interest in artefacts is precisely this, to make visible, as it were, the unconscious language of our society through revealing something"(62) and she is, in a way, part of what Gordon Lawrence terms "social dreaming", or, we might say, she is dreaming the dreams of her society: a double transformation, one that "receives" the social unconscious, that hears and sees it, and that can then give it some place. Hiller's many essays and books concentrate on how the artist is often a kind of intermediary between dream and consciousness. So we might ask, in some of her contexts, is she saying that as she associates she is freely receiving what is being spoken, or what has been left to hear, and so is this then a kind of auditory free associative process, in which one has an "eye" for a form of free associationósocial dreaming or cultural dreamingóthat is waiting to be perceived.
In one of my favourite English films, Ken McMullen's Ghost Dance, a single moment in this fascinating, haunting, and so out-of-place work, strikes me as what Freud calls a nodal point, a point of intersection between disparate lines of thought. It occurs in an empty docklands warehouse, water 5 inches deep on the floor, ceiling dripping. The performance artist Stuart Brisleyóin the distanceómoves to the centre of the room, descends into the water and then in painstaking slow motion, crawls through the water towards us, as the film saturates us in an extraordinary "soundtrack" of music alienated by its own isolation. Mc Mullen as in his later work manages to combine not simply differing lines of thought in one extended moment, but several differing forms of thought each carrying distinctly different sets of association as visual, gestural, and sonic themes intermix to create unforgettable fleeting moments that often seem to me to identify unconscious creativity: almost to show it its shadow before it is gone from view.
Mc Mullen is one of the great risk takers of English film and fine art, and brings to mind a wonderful passage from Michael Parson's essay "Creativity, psychoanalytic and artistic" which is to be found in his book The Dove that Returns, the Dove that VanishesI
"If creativity is the discovery of what we had not known we were looking
for, or the making of something, up until now, un-imagined, it calls
for
a special type of vulnerability. To be open to the shock of creative
discovery
means putting ourselves at risk and being ready to give up, with no
certainty
about the future, ways of seeing which up until now have served us
well."
(150)
For Parsons that kind of risk and vulnerability is essential to what takes place in a psychoanalysis, and, to my way of thinking, this is no more so than when the analysand takes the risk of free talking and when the psychoanalyst takes the other risk of just listening without trying to accomplish immediately. (How tragic it is, therefore, that so many psychoanalysts now caught up in what is called interpretation of the here and now transference arrogate to themselves the task of translating what is "going on" and in this ironic assumption utterly destroy the axis of unconscious creativity founded by Freud, and heretofore, the very genius of psychoanalysis as a new life form).
We know somethingóbut not that muchóabout unconscious creativity and the differing forms of free association, and I look forward to hearing what people have to thinkóon the panel and in the audienceóand who knows, but maybe afterwards, on the way home, something we weren't aware of working out together will rather occur to us or inside us: you know, those moments when we throw our head back and gently smack the forehead with the palm of the hand. Happens sometime, but afterward.
Anyway, I leave you with two images, two differing people, in different forms, engaged in differing forms of free association. The first is the poet Sharon Olds, putting into wordsóand associationsóthe sound of her daughter singing, from "The Sound"
"The morning our daughter has come home, I hear
a sound, over my headólike angels,
or the pinging in my ears, sometimes,
in bed, or the noise of a planet's ring,
the whir of dry grit around it.
It comes and goes, a cosmic zinging,
finally I realise it's a woman singing,
actually, a woman humming
in the room above meóits our girl, unpackingó
the floor boards creak, I hear it and then don't,
as if a wind carries it unevenly,
clear, high, casual, watery humming.
It sounds like a summer band at a distance,
or music made with the back of the mind,
purposeless, melodious chaff of a
woman puttering, her soprano saying
Here is no harm, we improvise
on the edge of milk and sleep. And its
so intimate, without witness,
as if I were hearing the workings of her muscles
as she lifts and unfolds, each garment doubles,
quadruples like the zygote. I have never, before, heard a
grown woman singing aloneó
my mother mostly yoo-hooed to a male
God, gorgeously screamed for helpó
now, below our daughter's crooning,
I lean, here, like a newborn freshly
arrived in a home, or an embryo
in the belly of a woman whom homecoming has made
musical, the body's harmony
audible, as if matter itself were merciful.
The second image reverses this process as now Robin Holloway tells us how he put sight into sound. Travelling through South America in l981 he "conceived 'on the spot' like an artist sketching" his Third Concerto for Orchestra. He heard "instant sound pictures" that "began almost at once to tend towards an overall plan", but his notebook was stolen and although he recovered some of these sketches in the next few days, it would be ten years before he could "pick up the thread and resume work". I leave you with his comments about his work: lost and regained and finished:
"And now that it is completed, I see that the delay
could well have been advantageous. What I was trying
for 'on the spot' was probably unrealisable (even with
the gigantic orchestral forcesóa southern hemisphere
Ameriquesóthat I had in mind). And it would probably
Have been too descriptiveótoo close, too dependent
On the sensory inspiration. During the long years of
Recovering the theft, grinding away at material whose
Ungraspableness defeated the efforts again and again,
The visual, metaphorical and even moral connotations
Have distanced, condensed and grown abstract. They are
Certainly still presentóindeed the surprise of this first performance
Is how immediately sensuous so much of the music remains.
But such
Connotations are now fused into purely musical workings, which
Are entirely their own subject, remorseless and implacable."
And he goes on.
A poet hears music and puts what she hears into words. A composer views inspiring sights in South America, hears sound images and transforms them into his Concerto. Both work the object in free-associative ways; the work of the unconscious involved in each transformative process is so different; yet, is this so?
I look forward to our discussion.
Christopher Bollas