Essays
‘Do not fear the unconscious’:
Nise da Silveira and Carl Gustav Jung.
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As a result of her work with the analytical psychology of Carl Gustav Jung, Nise da Silveria published, in 1968, the short book Jung, summarizing the basic concepts of his theory, now in its 20th edition. From 1946 to 1974, at the STOR (Seção de Terapêutica Ocupacional/Section of Occupational Therapy) of the National Psychiatric Centre D. Pedro II, Engenho de Dentro, Rio de Janeiro, Nise da Silveira lead a pioneering psychiatric practice centred on the component of occupational therapy, that she would call “the emotion of dealing”, and which came to provide 17 different activities for the residents.
Silveira observed that her schizophrenic patients, when given the means for plastic expression, would convey their inner trials under progressively more mythical and archaic imagery, through primordial images. In order to understand this inexorable ‘symbolic progression’, Silveira used Jung’s formulations regarding the psyche: his comprehensive conception of psychic energy; the collective unconscious and the archetypes; the dynamics of the process of individuation, with the archetype as the counterpart of instinct, defining the basic human psychic conflict; the formation of the symbol enabling the parity of the conflicting parts within psyche and the resulting emergence of primordial images; the symbol as a dynamo, a transformer of psychic energy, fundamental for the process of individuation.
Silveira’s method of analysis of the creative production of her patients aimed at interpreting the stages of the psychic process that unfolds with the retrieval of the creative drive, and comprised two fundamental aspects: taking the creative labour as a whole and using the ‘language of mythology’ to read it. She observed the patients’ actions during their creative process at the studio in order to relate ‘the emotional situation lived’ by the patient with the images, which should be taken as series and whose interpretation demanded the ‘knowledge of mythology, history of religions, philosophy and psychology of primitive peoples’. The outstanding character of the work produced at STOR was noticed by Carl Gustav Jung, as he observed the paintings of Nise da Silveira’s patients exhibited at the 2nd International Congress of Psychiatry, in Zurich, in 1957: ‘How is the environment in which these patients paint? I suppose they work surrounded by empathy and by people who don’t fear the unconscious’.
MIP2, BH09: Tropic of Body
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The artists take hold of the processes of ‘high culture’, discursive and intellectual, mimicking them on the realm of artistic intervention, to show how civilizational evolution within the dominant paradigm goes against the bodily functions – nourishment and excretion, speech and language – physiologies respectively of the raw, organic, material instinct, and of a course beyond the intellect, an equally preponderant factor in human psychism. They show how those functions are essentially human and, therefore, cosmogonic, and are preserved on the concrete and intuitive processes of the ‘low culture’, in popular, archaic, and aboriginal contexts, and in what is left of them after the impact of the rational scientific model, in the eccentricity of the destitute and forgotten who seem to show the limbo between paradigms of knowledge.
The full void: Lygia Clark poetics of embodiment
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Seemingly rooted in childhood, the image of the full-void bound Lygia Clark's artistic practice.
During an initial stage of her research, after the ‘death of the plane’, the ‘full void’ underlied the assertions of ‘the living time’ and of ‘the living act’, and the resulting ideas of ‘totality’ and ‘precariousness’, in the Bichos (Animals) in 1960, and in Caminhando (Walking) in 1963. Later on, after the ‘suppression of the object and of the poetics of transference’ the ‘full-void’ underlied the assertions of ‘living culture’ and ‘rite without myth’, in the experiments that ran from the Nostalgia do Corpo (Longing for the Body) until the Baba Antropofágica (Anthropophagic Drool). The ‘full-void’ would finally underlie the assertion of ‘the creative state’ with the therapeutic setting of the Estruturação do Self.