| Our Philosophy and New Method |
| Lutecium a non-school of Lacanian/Freudian Psychoanalysis San Francisco, California |
July 4th, 2008
San Francisco
"In dedication to psychoanalytic transmission through the teachers that could hear me, through the students that
I long to hear." - Rebecca Bauknight, Ph.D.
San Francisco
"In dedication to psychoanalytic transmission through the teachers that could hear me, through the students that
I long to hear." - Rebecca Bauknight, Ph.D.
Desurburbanizing Psychoanalysis
Lutecium's Philosophy of Training
Following Foucault's concept of history I strive to create a cohesive narrative tracing a select path of events. History's
retelling always reveals the repressed history, the unconscious unarticulated passages that hold the potential and
possibility of hidden events that surface to consciousness in some point in time when a subject desires to give voice
to a story that has yet to be told. The access to an actual past is bound by the stories that will never be spoken, even
when they are.
In tracing what happened to the Americanization of Psychoanalysis I am attempting to understand why links with the
radical movements defining our art and intellectual worlds were never considered. I am wondering about the
impoverishment of American Psychoanalysis that was in part created by its refusal to incorporate the ingenuity that
defined the radically progressive moments in American art, music, philosophy, literature and poetry that resonated
around the world.
In the fifties, the circuitry of culture was making itself known as the modern art influence from Paris with its African and
Island (Gauguin, Picasso) accents changed the course of American painting (Jasper Johns, Richard Diebenkorn).
Philosophy and literature would also be heralding the subject and experience through its Faulknerian stream of
conscious writers plummeting the similar depths revealed through the European existentialist writers. Pragmatic
philosophy set forth by Dewey's version of deconstructionism began to hit similar notes generated by the postmodern
movement arising in France. There was a deep artistic and philosophical resonance in many areas of expression and
academia during and following World War II.
Lutecium's Philosophy of Training
Following Foucault's concept of history I strive to create a cohesive narrative tracing a select path of events. History's
retelling always reveals the repressed history, the unconscious unarticulated passages that hold the potential and
possibility of hidden events that surface to consciousness in some point in time when a subject desires to give voice
to a story that has yet to be told. The access to an actual past is bound by the stories that will never be spoken, even
when they are.
In tracing what happened to the Americanization of Psychoanalysis I am attempting to understand why links with the
radical movements defining our art and intellectual worlds were never considered. I am wondering about the
impoverishment of American Psychoanalysis that was in part created by its refusal to incorporate the ingenuity that
defined the radically progressive moments in American art, music, philosophy, literature and poetry that resonated
around the world.
In the fifties, the circuitry of culture was making itself known as the modern art influence from Paris with its African and
Island (Gauguin, Picasso) accents changed the course of American painting (Jasper Johns, Richard Diebenkorn).
Philosophy and literature would also be heralding the subject and experience through its Faulknerian stream of
conscious writers plummeting the similar depths revealed through the European existentialist writers. Pragmatic
philosophy set forth by Dewey's version of deconstructionism began to hit similar notes generated by the postmodern
movement arising in France. There was a deep artistic and philosophical resonance in many areas of expression and
academia during and following World War II.
Psychoanalysis as it gravitated to this continent rather than speak to its forced exile, in fact, decided to align itself alongside the path of science. A science
that was attempting to seal and continue victory through the mass production and the Atom Bomb that set us on top of the world. Psychoanalysis would
soon be rejected by the medical model for its lack of "scientific rigor". Cognitive and behavioral psychologies that could prove and control "predictive
outcome" would replace psychoanalysis. We continue to observe the growing popularity of neuropsychology within psychoanalysis as part of an attempt to
scientize and thus "legitimize" psychoanalysis, particularly as we are no longer on top of the world. Another strategy to secure psychoanalytic knowledge
within the closets of science that will eventually be thrown out when it needs more room for storage.
The Psychoanalytic work secured by those immigrant analysts fleeing Nazi Germany and facing the anti communist sentiment of the McCarthy era must
have been swaddled in anxiety and fear. By safely ensconcing Psychoanalysis within the legitimizing medical establishment, the heart of Psychoanalysis
was traded in for security. The voice of psychoanalysis becomes another text book, another nomenclature, an increasingly rejected proposal for funding or
housing within the medical community and the academy.
Isolated from the most burgeoning moments of intellectual and artworld fervor in America, we have inherited a Psychoanalysis fearful of its own potential.
We have inherited the birth of psychoanalysis along with the fear of those immigrant analysts that carried psychoanalysis safely to this shore. "Safety" and
"containment" becoming the anxious pervasive concerns that restricts the openness to risk within the psychoanalytic work. Much of psychoanalytic
inheritance carries with it an unspoken anxiety that continues to wall psychoanalysis off from more "threatening" and "dangerous" locations of expression
that open up possibilities for revival and reinvention. What has become of us?
I have always wondered what would happen if there was a way to return psychoanalysis to the fifties Art renaissance that had passed by the more fretful
psychoanalysis of the fifties. My imagination wonders about filling in the missed moments. Psychoanalysis and American Ego Psychology were intent on
adapting analysis to a cultural "reality." Demands were placed on analytic theory to follow science and industries interest in generating exact replications of
human consciousness as extension of mass reproduction of "things." Psychoanalysis attempted big N studies to compete with psychologies that were
interested in reliability and predictability to secure itself within a medical discourse that was interested in treating big N's cheaply and quickly. The new
factory of healthcare. The inherent contradiction in attempting to generalize and reduce the singular work of psychoanalysis to atomistic replicable
components would never allow psychoanalysis a fair hearing on such reductionist terms. A factory of psychoanalysis is an absurdity and we could, in fact,
use this as a cartoon to express the joke of managed care.
Psychoanalysis currency is language, words, the quality of the voice. The current attempt to breakdown unconscious and conscious processes into
neurobiological correlates faces similar problems, heuristically speaking. Why would any theory so dangerously threatened by Hitlerian "Science" return to
Science and the same medical discourse that had justified a genocide out of which the theory escaped. The assertion of psychoanalysis within the folds of
medical authority and its subsequent exiles and rejections speaks to a complicated partnering filled with unresolved concerns of segregation and
abjection; absorption and disappearance.
I am awed by the texture and beauty, the capacity for psychoanalytic writing to take me beyond logic. To a remainder of myself that I cannot bear to witness.
That heeds a recognition, an understanding of the gravity of being human. The heaviness, the weight of writing to the dilemma of being in a body that
advances towards its death. That generates defenses and resistances to an inherent destruction that I can only imagine. It is the aesthetic, the style, the
complexity and texture revealed through one person’s writing that speaks of a mysterious and vulnerable truth. A truth that verges through the dream world,
that whispers through a writer, an analyst that dare speak aloud to only one. One to one.
The certainty Science exerts in gathering knowledge on objective "reality" that transcends subjectivity confused Freud's reality principle. The attempt to turn
consciousness into an "object" that is organized by the same natural laws as organic matter indicated that consciousness could be exchanged with
objects, computers, artificial intelligence. Science began to sew its seamless line between imagination and the "reality" of consciousness through a grand
narrative that erased its own subjectivity, its fantasy, its representation of the world. The concept of an unconscious becomes too cumbersome. The thick
even monotone style of scientific writing neutralizes the singular voice. Numbers replace words. Quantity replaces quality. The audience is no longer a
listener, a reader, a patient, but a funding source that demands P<.01. The sound of an American psychoanalysis is barely perceptible. The intimacy
between the voice and the listener is broken. Psychoanalysis is thinning.
The idea that there are sharp boundaries between the interior and exterior became more pronounced and literalized through object relations as
environment became assessed as "an object" that can be defined as healthy or unhealthy, good or bad, effecting the inner world of the subject. Ironically,
the emphasis on purity and contamination of an objective environment defined as "reality" unconsciously repeats the definitions of contamination and
health so sadistically exacted in Nazi Germany under the banner of Science, under the "authority" of those who assumed the judgment of health and
disease. Reality is assumed rather than explored philosophically. Hegel never gains much momentum.
Hegelian influences make their way into an American art movement that replaces objects of study with representation of subjective impressions and
perceptions. The object of painting turns inward to capture the view of a subject gazing upon something sometimes imperceptible. American
Psychoanalysis deemphasized the role of perception, sign, representation, and the unconscious in the formation of consciousness. The American
psychoanalytic movement became restricted and hygienized during a renaissance of expression in American history.
A march against mass consumerism and totalitarianism was expressed through the sound of an original voice, singular perceptions marked the impact of
what the subject brings to bear on the formation of "reality." The intention of much of the modern art period of the fifties was to speak unhindered by any
grand totalizing idea. Abstract expressionism, figurative painting, Dadaism, were forms that expressed what spontaneously comes to mind. The only rule of
psychoanalysis. Merce Cunningham, Robert Duncan, Jasper Johns, and John Cage would place chance, breath, random notes, free association,
improvisation in expressions that celebrated unique perception, distinct dissonances, and purposeful distortion emphasizing the lack of cohesive
narratives and meaning to speak to mystery of being human. One to One.
By reaching back in time to question why psychoanalysis did not reach its potential pitch through the innovative times that surrounded it, in exile, in
America, we give words to its lost history. It's missed collaborations. We are sorry.
In remembrance of these missed moments, Lutecium seeks to create a method of training that honors the methods established in experimental
education and performance art studios (e.g. The actor's studio, the black mountain poets influenced by John Dewey, The New Music Movement brought
forth by John Cage). Lutecium is in the process of introducing a movement that might be called the aesthetizising of psychoanalysis or it might be called
The missing poetics of Psychoanalysis. We are only dreaming. But we stand behind the dream. We dream the unconscious. We speak to the
unconscious. We write to renew an interest in its force. We are articulating what has not yet been written in the hopes of relocating psychoanalysis within its
missed history. It's missed Americanization. An Americanization that had been open to the pathos of Europe and vulnerable to the paradigm shifts that
were taking place in those creative venues whose porousness frequently speaks to the unconscious. We collaborate with forms that speak to the style and
sensibility of a Psychoanalysis that might have been. That speak to its reader, its patient. One to one.
Rorty suggests that it is not simply the path that knowledge eventually takes to manifest. It is all of the paths that it doesn't take that lead it to its evolution or
to its demise. Those paths not taken can be imagined. These points of knowledge, although past, still maintain their potential to detour. They can be
retraced through articulation. By speaking to what might have been. What could be.
In psychoanalytic time there is a going back in time to redirect the symptom often residing in an impasse, a frozen moment in time that needs to be
rerouted in order that something different can be spoken. In the reconstruction of history, there are words that attempt to address what has been missed,
that pursue then attempt to fill in the Real. In searching for what was forgotten, something is yet to come forth. It is the imagination that mostly comes forth
offering us a narrative that might make sense until it recedes into another historical revival.
Rebecca
July 4th, 2008
to the sound and lightning-flashes of fireworks
Lutecium's New Method of Training
Transmission rather than teaching: A voice of one's own.
Drawing on experimental learning models set out by Dewey and the Actors studio, our seminars take on a workshop or studio format. We invite candidates
and seminar participants to express and articulate the theories they are learning. We encourage a style of theory-speak that enables our students to apply
theory to their own thought content, utilizing their innate patterns in thinking and speech to express and apply complex concepts to life and to a wide range
of topics. We believe a Lacan/Freud classical foundation offers our students a solid platform to voice a variety of ideas and schools of thought.
We emphasize a cultivation of a singular voice to capture the intense personal work of psychoanalysis. A work that has the capacity to express itself more
intensely when offered an opportunity to be fully revealed within the art forms that have for centuries cultivated the performativity of the spoken and written
word.
We invite our students to write and speak in passionate ways that can keep the curiosity of the unconscious alive, we want their unusual acquaintance of
the unconscious of the unconscious met with in personal analysis to roll freely and easily off the tongue.
It is Lutecium's belief that the vulnerability, enigma, mystery, and ambiguities that have been cultivated in our art practices can easily reawaken a sensibility
that can impact and incite longing for reflection and revelation. A longing for psychoanalysis. As we allow psychoanalysis to mingle amongst its missing
pieces--and as we train, provoke and support our students voices--perhaps psychoanalysis can regain its voice and begin to speak freely again.
The movements listed below reflect the period of the fifties. We would like to lead this list off with one of the most influential artists living today - Alonzo King,
the founder and choreographer of Lines, an international dance company that began in San Francisco. Lutecium has been greatly inspired by Mr. King's
capacity to pulsate new movements and new culture through and thus beyond the classical lines of ballet. Attention to the technique always precisely
executed..... disappears as each dancers singular soul emerges through the lines and forms of the body.
Incorporating the philosophy and approach that Alonzo King brings to the training of his dancers, Lutecium believes that our psychoanalytic voices, those
future voices in training, our candidates must rise to the same occasion though the speaking, writing, and practice of psychoanalysis.
Potential Movements in American Psychoanalysis
Lines Ballet School Philosophy
July 23, 2008, Alonzo King showcases his students
Cowell Theater, San Francisco
"The cornerstone that shapes the training philosophy is that art is within the artist. Creative intelligence is a part of mankind's intelligence as are heart,
brain and lungs. We believe that each individual has a singularly unique voice. Our aim is to strengthen and hone that interior voice in each student while
establishing a deep seated dance foundation. LBS teaches movement as a science that extracts the best attributes of all dance forms with ballet (western
classical dance) as our mainstay.
In Lines Training philosophy, each individuals interior facility is tapped, cajoled, nourished and brought forth. By focusing on individual character we are
offering a key to knowledge and awareness that will be utilized whether or not the student chooses to pursue a performing career in dance." -Alonzo King.
On Method Acting practiced at the Actor's Studio, New York
"The Stanislavski system ... represents a sharp break with traditional teaching and a return to actual theatre experience. It tries to analyze ... what actually
happens when an actor acts. Theatres and actors of great variety and diversified form have created outstanding works on the basis of the training acquired
by use of Stanislavski’s principles. The works created are never copies or imitations of one another but are original creative achievements. That is the
purpose of Stanislavski idea. It teaches not how to play this or that but how to create organically." -Lee Strasberg.
William Faulkner's acceptance speech upon receiving the Nobel Prize for literature
Stolkholm, Sweden
December 10, 1950
Directed towards future writers:
..."He must teach himself that the basest of all things is to be afraid: and, teaching himself that, forget it forever, leaving no room in his workshop for
anything but the old verities and truths of the heart, the universal truths lacking which any story is ephemeral and doomed--love and honor and pity and
pride and compassion and sacrifice. Until he does so, he labors under a curse. He writes not of love but of lust, of defeats in which nobody loses anything
of value, and victories without hope and worst of all, without pity or compassion. His griefs grieve on no universal bones, leaving no scars. He writes not of
the heart but of the glands.
Until he learns these things, he will write as though he stood among and watched the end of man. I decline to accept the end of man. It is easy enough to
say that man is immortal because he will endure: that when the last ding-dong of doom has clanged and faded from the last worthless rock hanging
tideless in the last red and dying evening, that even then there will still be one more sound: that of his puny inexhaustible voice, still talking. I refuse to
accept this. I believe that man will not merely endure: he will prevail. He is immortal, not because he alone among creatures has an inexhaustible voice,
but because he has a soul, a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance. The poet's, the writer's, duty is to write about these things. It is his
privilege to help man endure by lifting his heart, by reminding him of the courage and honor and hope and pride and compassion and pity and sacrifice
which have been the glory of his past. The poet's voice need not merely be the record of man, it can be one of the props, the pillars to help him endure and
prevail." -William Faulkner.
Black Mountain College
“The ‘Rebel Poets of the 1950s’ have been grouped into four overlapping constellations: the Beat Generation, the San Francisco Renaissance, the Black
Mountain poets, and the New York School poets. Together they formed, in Allen Ginsberg's words, ‘the united phalanx,’ whose unity owed more to a
collective feeling of embattlement than it did to unified poetics. At the time, many of these writers were called anti-intellectuals, ‘destroyers of language,’
and literary juvenile delinquents. These writers actually read voraciously--both classical and modern literature--and pursued the perennial avant-garde
imperative to reinvigorate literary culture by destroying the hackneyed and moribund. Ironically, the reigning tradition that now seemed ripe for attack was
modernism, along with the strictly formalist New Criticism that had become entrenched in the universities and in literary journals. In an attempt to widen the
range of modern poetry, the rebel poets of the 1950s emphasized many elements that were new or had been previously excised: the bardic spoken voice,
links to jazz and spontaneous composition, open verse forms and rhythms, derangement of the senses as a stimulus to creativity, confessional candor,
and content that embraced political issues, Buddhism, and the natural environment.
Perhaps as important as their loosely shared poetics was a sense of personal friendship that transcended geography. Frank O'Hara called it ‘hands-
across-the Rockies for perhaps the first time in American history.’ A tightly knit community arose out of necessity, for these poets depended on the little
magazines, small presses, and public readings that they jointly organized. They often were associated with visual artists, not only in the watering spots in
which they gathered (New York's Greenwich Village and San Francisco's North Beach), but in the books and magazines they jointly produced to celebrate
the conjoined word and image." -From Experiment in Art MIT Press, Vincent Katz.
The Pragmatic Movement in Philosophy - Dewey
"There are two important implications of this line of thought that distinguish it from the metaphysical tradition. First, although inquiry is aimed at resolving
the precarious and confusing aspects of experience to provide a stable basis for action, this does not imply the unreality of the unstable and contingent, nor
justify its relegation to the status of mere appearance. Thus, for example, the usefulness and reliability of utilizing certain stable features of things
encountered in our experience as a basis for classification does not justify according ultimate reality to essences or Platonic forms any more than, as
rationalist metaphysicians in the modern era have thought, the similar usefulness of mathematical reasoning in understanding natural processes justifies
the conclusion that the world can be exhaustively defined mathematically." -Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
Richard Rorty Remembered
“A thinker who wanted America to fulfill its charter and devote itself to maximum human flourishing, Rorty believed that human beings must stop looking for
some nonhuman or extra-human reality, such as God, nature, spirit, matter, or even human nature; for some thing-in-itself that, though entirely independent
of human knowing, would nonetheless provide us with universal laws for governing our actions and our thinking. Rorty believed firmly, and said as much
repeatedly, in the predictive capacity of science and its supreme value to human use. He believed that Hitler and Stalin were evil. But he did not believe that,
say, the germ theory of disease or revulsion in the face of persecution and fanaticism, no matter how passionately we believe they advance the cause of
knowledge or dignity, can yield universal principles or tell us something about the intrinsic nature of reality. We are ineluctably human. No ecstatic
encounters with the Other have been scheduled. We are stuck arguing with one another, in order to achieve, not truth, but consensus." -Stephen Metcalf,
Slate Magazine.
Karl Popper on historicism
Popper's arguments against holism, and in particular his arguments against the propriety of large-scale planning of social structures, are interconnected
with his demonstration of the logical shortcomings of the presuppositions of historicism. Such planning (which actually took place, of course, in the USSR,
in China, and in Cambodia, for example, under totalitarian regimes which accepted forms of historicism and holism), Popper points out, is necessarily
structured in the light of the predictions which have been made about future history on the basis of the so-called ‘laws’ which historicists such as Marx and
Mao claimed to have discovered in relation to human history. Accordingly, recognition that there are no such laws, and that unconditional predictions about
future history are based, at best, upon nothing more substantial than the observation of contingent trends, shows that, from a purely theoretical as well as a
practical point of view, large-scale social planning is indeed a recipe for disaster. In summary, unconditional large-scale planning for the future is
theoretically as well as practically misguided, because, again, part of what we are planning for is our future knowledge, and our future knowledge is not
something which we can in principle now possess — we cannot adequately plan for unexpected advances in our future knowledge, or for the effects which
such advances will have upon society as a whole. The acceptance of historical indeterminism, then, as the only philosophy of history which is
commensurate with a proper understanding of the nature of scientific knowledge, fatally undermines both historicism and holism. -Encyclopedia of
Philosophy.
New Music Movement
"I have nothing to say / and I am saying it / and that is poetry / as I needed it" -John Cage.
"It was at Harvard not quite forty years ago that I went into an anechoic [totally silent] chamber not expecting in that silent room to hear two sounds: one
high, my nervous system in operation, one low, my blood in circulation. The reason I did not expect to hear those two sounds was that they were set into
vibration without any intention on my part. That experience gave my life direction, the exploration of nonintention. No one else was doing that. I would do it
for us. I did not know immediately what I was doing, nor, after all these years, have I found out much. I compose music. Yes, but how? I gave up making
choices. In their place I put the asking of questions. The answers come from the mechanism, not the wisdom of the I Ching, the most ancient of all books:
tossing three coins six times yielding numbers between 1 and 64." -John Cage, 1990.
"After five years as a soloist in the company of Martha Graham, he began choreographing independently, first in solo concerts, then in 1953 he formed his
own company, whose fiftieth anniversary was celebrated in 2003. In his many works for the company, he has been noted for his collaborations with
contemporary visual artists and musicians, especially with John Cage, his life partner from the 1940s until Cage’s death in 1992. In the course of their
work together, they proposed a number of radical innovations. The most famous and controversial of these concerned the relationship of dance and music,
both of which are time arts. Therefore, they came to the conclusion that the two should exist independently, occurring in the same time and space but
without supporting or being connected to one another in the usual way.
Both Cunningham and Cage made extensive use of chance procedures, which meant that not only musical forms but narrative and other conventional
elements of dance composition, such as cause and effect, climax and anticlimax, were also abandoned. Cunningham is not interested in telling stories or
exploring psychological relationships: the subject matter of his dances is the dance itself." -Merce Cunningham Dance Company expose.
Neo Dadaism
" When something is new to us, we treat it as an experience. We feel that our senses are awake and clear. We are alive.”
-Jasper Johns.
”Early works were composed using simple schema such as flags, maps, targets, letters and numbers. Johns' treatment of the surface is often lush and
painterly; he is famous for incorporating such media as Encaustic (wax-based paint), and plaster relief in his paintings. Johns played with and presented
opposites, contradictions, paradoxes, and ironies, much like Marcel Duchamp (who was associated with the Dada movement). Johns also produces
intaglio prints, sculptures and lithographs with similar motifs.
Johns' breakthrough move, which was to inform much later work by others, was to appropriate popular iconography for painting, thus allowing a set of
familiar associations to answer the need for subject.
Though the Abstract Expressionists disdained subject matter, in the end it could be said that they simply changed subjects. Johns neutralized the subject,
so that something like pure paint--painted surface--could declare itself. For twenty years after Johns painted ‘Flag,’ the surface--in Andy Warhol's
silkscreens or Robert Irwin's illuminated ambiances--could suffice." -Wikipedia.
Black renaissance movement
“The Harlem Renaissance in literature was never a cohesive movement. It was, rather, a product of overlapping social and intellectual circles, parallel
developments, intersecting groups, and competing visions – yet all loosely bound together by a desire for racial self-assertion and self-definition in the
face of white supremacy. The interplay between intense conflict and a sense of being part of a collective project identified by race energized the movement
and helps account for our enduring fascination with it.
Scholarship on the movement has itself been conflicted, contradictory, and passionate, for the issues with which the ‘renaissance’ authors struggled have
remained. The field of Harlem Renaissance studies is all competing interpretations, from its inception to the present. What role should or did Marxism play
in black political and intellectual culture? How important is the fact that many of the important writers were gay or bisexual? What are the political
obligations of the black artist, and do they carry formal, thematic, or technical implications for the practice of art? How should or does or did African
American culture articulate with American culture more generally? What should be made of the extensive involvement of black with white authors and
patrons of the time, given the imbalances of power between them and the whites’ inherited prejudices or blindnesses? How might one reconcile the
‘mixed’ nature of African American (or Anglo-African, or Afro-Caribbean) cultural expression with the claims of racial solidarity and autonomy? What does it
mean to be ‘Negro’? What is race? Harlem Renaissance writers, like many people today, disagreed with each other over the answers to these questions.
A ‘companion’ to the Harlem Renaissance must allow dissonance, overlap, and multiplicity to inform its very structure." -From Cambridge Companion to
the Harlem Renaissance, George Hutchinson.
Arts and Crafts Movement
"To the proponents of Arts & Crafts, the Industrial Revolution separated humans from their own creativity and individualism; the worker was a cog in the
wheel of progress, living in an environment of shoddy machine-made goods, based more on ostentation than function. These proponents sought to
reestablish the ties between beautiful work and the worker, returning to an honesty in design not to be found in mass-produced items. The American
movement drew inspiration from the materials, choosing to highlight the grain of the wood or the form of the pot. They incorporated walls of rich wood
tones, relegating wallpaper to borders. Paints were in rich earth tones. Furniture and architectural details were designed to take advantage of machines
allowing the individual craftsmen to assemble the furniture and finish the wood. The use of machines lowered the cost, making the furniture, pottery and
metalwork affordable and therefore available to ‘the people.’" -From the Movement, Celeste Cummings.
that was attempting to seal and continue victory through the mass production and the Atom Bomb that set us on top of the world. Psychoanalysis would
soon be rejected by the medical model for its lack of "scientific rigor". Cognitive and behavioral psychologies that could prove and control "predictive
outcome" would replace psychoanalysis. We continue to observe the growing popularity of neuropsychology within psychoanalysis as part of an attempt to
scientize and thus "legitimize" psychoanalysis, particularly as we are no longer on top of the world. Another strategy to secure psychoanalytic knowledge
within the closets of science that will eventually be thrown out when it needs more room for storage.
The Psychoanalytic work secured by those immigrant analysts fleeing Nazi Germany and facing the anti communist sentiment of the McCarthy era must
have been swaddled in anxiety and fear. By safely ensconcing Psychoanalysis within the legitimizing medical establishment, the heart of Psychoanalysis
was traded in for security. The voice of psychoanalysis becomes another text book, another nomenclature, an increasingly rejected proposal for funding or
housing within the medical community and the academy.
Isolated from the most burgeoning moments of intellectual and artworld fervor in America, we have inherited a Psychoanalysis fearful of its own potential.
We have inherited the birth of psychoanalysis along with the fear of those immigrant analysts that carried psychoanalysis safely to this shore. "Safety" and
"containment" becoming the anxious pervasive concerns that restricts the openness to risk within the psychoanalytic work. Much of psychoanalytic
inheritance carries with it an unspoken anxiety that continues to wall psychoanalysis off from more "threatening" and "dangerous" locations of expression
that open up possibilities for revival and reinvention. What has become of us?
I have always wondered what would happen if there was a way to return psychoanalysis to the fifties Art renaissance that had passed by the more fretful
psychoanalysis of the fifties. My imagination wonders about filling in the missed moments. Psychoanalysis and American Ego Psychology were intent on
adapting analysis to a cultural "reality." Demands were placed on analytic theory to follow science and industries interest in generating exact replications of
human consciousness as extension of mass reproduction of "things." Psychoanalysis attempted big N studies to compete with psychologies that were
interested in reliability and predictability to secure itself within a medical discourse that was interested in treating big N's cheaply and quickly. The new
factory of healthcare. The inherent contradiction in attempting to generalize and reduce the singular work of psychoanalysis to atomistic replicable
components would never allow psychoanalysis a fair hearing on such reductionist terms. A factory of psychoanalysis is an absurdity and we could, in fact,
use this as a cartoon to express the joke of managed care.
Psychoanalysis currency is language, words, the quality of the voice. The current attempt to breakdown unconscious and conscious processes into
neurobiological correlates faces similar problems, heuristically speaking. Why would any theory so dangerously threatened by Hitlerian "Science" return to
Science and the same medical discourse that had justified a genocide out of which the theory escaped. The assertion of psychoanalysis within the folds of
medical authority and its subsequent exiles and rejections speaks to a complicated partnering filled with unresolved concerns of segregation and
abjection; absorption and disappearance.
I am awed by the texture and beauty, the capacity for psychoanalytic writing to take me beyond logic. To a remainder of myself that I cannot bear to witness.
That heeds a recognition, an understanding of the gravity of being human. The heaviness, the weight of writing to the dilemma of being in a body that
advances towards its death. That generates defenses and resistances to an inherent destruction that I can only imagine. It is the aesthetic, the style, the
complexity and texture revealed through one person’s writing that speaks of a mysterious and vulnerable truth. A truth that verges through the dream world,
that whispers through a writer, an analyst that dare speak aloud to only one. One to one.
The certainty Science exerts in gathering knowledge on objective "reality" that transcends subjectivity confused Freud's reality principle. The attempt to turn
consciousness into an "object" that is organized by the same natural laws as organic matter indicated that consciousness could be exchanged with
objects, computers, artificial intelligence. Science began to sew its seamless line between imagination and the "reality" of consciousness through a grand
narrative that erased its own subjectivity, its fantasy, its representation of the world. The concept of an unconscious becomes too cumbersome. The thick
even monotone style of scientific writing neutralizes the singular voice. Numbers replace words. Quantity replaces quality. The audience is no longer a
listener, a reader, a patient, but a funding source that demands P<.01. The sound of an American psychoanalysis is barely perceptible. The intimacy
between the voice and the listener is broken. Psychoanalysis is thinning.
The idea that there are sharp boundaries between the interior and exterior became more pronounced and literalized through object relations as
environment became assessed as "an object" that can be defined as healthy or unhealthy, good or bad, effecting the inner world of the subject. Ironically,
the emphasis on purity and contamination of an objective environment defined as "reality" unconsciously repeats the definitions of contamination and
health so sadistically exacted in Nazi Germany under the banner of Science, under the "authority" of those who assumed the judgment of health and
disease. Reality is assumed rather than explored philosophically. Hegel never gains much momentum.
Hegelian influences make their way into an American art movement that replaces objects of study with representation of subjective impressions and
perceptions. The object of painting turns inward to capture the view of a subject gazing upon something sometimes imperceptible. American
Psychoanalysis deemphasized the role of perception, sign, representation, and the unconscious in the formation of consciousness. The American
psychoanalytic movement became restricted and hygienized during a renaissance of expression in American history.
A march against mass consumerism and totalitarianism was expressed through the sound of an original voice, singular perceptions marked the impact of
what the subject brings to bear on the formation of "reality." The intention of much of the modern art period of the fifties was to speak unhindered by any
grand totalizing idea. Abstract expressionism, figurative painting, Dadaism, were forms that expressed what spontaneously comes to mind. The only rule of
psychoanalysis. Merce Cunningham, Robert Duncan, Jasper Johns, and John Cage would place chance, breath, random notes, free association,
improvisation in expressions that celebrated unique perception, distinct dissonances, and purposeful distortion emphasizing the lack of cohesive
narratives and meaning to speak to mystery of being human. One to One.
By reaching back in time to question why psychoanalysis did not reach its potential pitch through the innovative times that surrounded it, in exile, in
America, we give words to its lost history. It's missed collaborations. We are sorry.
In remembrance of these missed moments, Lutecium seeks to create a method of training that honors the methods established in experimental
education and performance art studios (e.g. The actor's studio, the black mountain poets influenced by John Dewey, The New Music Movement brought
forth by John Cage). Lutecium is in the process of introducing a movement that might be called the aesthetizising of psychoanalysis or it might be called
The missing poetics of Psychoanalysis. We are only dreaming. But we stand behind the dream. We dream the unconscious. We speak to the
unconscious. We write to renew an interest in its force. We are articulating what has not yet been written in the hopes of relocating psychoanalysis within its
missed history. It's missed Americanization. An Americanization that had been open to the pathos of Europe and vulnerable to the paradigm shifts that
were taking place in those creative venues whose porousness frequently speaks to the unconscious. We collaborate with forms that speak to the style and
sensibility of a Psychoanalysis that might have been. That speak to its reader, its patient. One to one.
Rorty suggests that it is not simply the path that knowledge eventually takes to manifest. It is all of the paths that it doesn't take that lead it to its evolution or
to its demise. Those paths not taken can be imagined. These points of knowledge, although past, still maintain their potential to detour. They can be
retraced through articulation. By speaking to what might have been. What could be.
In psychoanalytic time there is a going back in time to redirect the symptom often residing in an impasse, a frozen moment in time that needs to be
rerouted in order that something different can be spoken. In the reconstruction of history, there are words that attempt to address what has been missed,
that pursue then attempt to fill in the Real. In searching for what was forgotten, something is yet to come forth. It is the imagination that mostly comes forth
offering us a narrative that might make sense until it recedes into another historical revival.
Rebecca
July 4th, 2008
to the sound and lightning-flashes of fireworks
Lutecium's New Method of Training
Transmission rather than teaching: A voice of one's own.
Drawing on experimental learning models set out by Dewey and the Actors studio, our seminars take on a workshop or studio format. We invite candidates
and seminar participants to express and articulate the theories they are learning. We encourage a style of theory-speak that enables our students to apply
theory to their own thought content, utilizing their innate patterns in thinking and speech to express and apply complex concepts to life and to a wide range
of topics. We believe a Lacan/Freud classical foundation offers our students a solid platform to voice a variety of ideas and schools of thought.
We emphasize a cultivation of a singular voice to capture the intense personal work of psychoanalysis. A work that has the capacity to express itself more
intensely when offered an opportunity to be fully revealed within the art forms that have for centuries cultivated the performativity of the spoken and written
word.
We invite our students to write and speak in passionate ways that can keep the curiosity of the unconscious alive, we want their unusual acquaintance of
the unconscious of the unconscious met with in personal analysis to roll freely and easily off the tongue.
It is Lutecium's belief that the vulnerability, enigma, mystery, and ambiguities that have been cultivated in our art practices can easily reawaken a sensibility
that can impact and incite longing for reflection and revelation. A longing for psychoanalysis. As we allow psychoanalysis to mingle amongst its missing
pieces--and as we train, provoke and support our students voices--perhaps psychoanalysis can regain its voice and begin to speak freely again.
The movements listed below reflect the period of the fifties. We would like to lead this list off with one of the most influential artists living today - Alonzo King,
the founder and choreographer of Lines, an international dance company that began in San Francisco. Lutecium has been greatly inspired by Mr. King's
capacity to pulsate new movements and new culture through and thus beyond the classical lines of ballet. Attention to the technique always precisely
executed..... disappears as each dancers singular soul emerges through the lines and forms of the body.
Incorporating the philosophy and approach that Alonzo King brings to the training of his dancers, Lutecium believes that our psychoanalytic voices, those
future voices in training, our candidates must rise to the same occasion though the speaking, writing, and practice of psychoanalysis.
Potential Movements in American Psychoanalysis
Lines Ballet School Philosophy
July 23, 2008, Alonzo King showcases his students
Cowell Theater, San Francisco
"The cornerstone that shapes the training philosophy is that art is within the artist. Creative intelligence is a part of mankind's intelligence as are heart,
brain and lungs. We believe that each individual has a singularly unique voice. Our aim is to strengthen and hone that interior voice in each student while
establishing a deep seated dance foundation. LBS teaches movement as a science that extracts the best attributes of all dance forms with ballet (western
classical dance) as our mainstay.
In Lines Training philosophy, each individuals interior facility is tapped, cajoled, nourished and brought forth. By focusing on individual character we are
offering a key to knowledge and awareness that will be utilized whether or not the student chooses to pursue a performing career in dance." -Alonzo King.
On Method Acting practiced at the Actor's Studio, New York
"The Stanislavski system ... represents a sharp break with traditional teaching and a return to actual theatre experience. It tries to analyze ... what actually
happens when an actor acts. Theatres and actors of great variety and diversified form have created outstanding works on the basis of the training acquired
by use of Stanislavski’s principles. The works created are never copies or imitations of one another but are original creative achievements. That is the
purpose of Stanislavski idea. It teaches not how to play this or that but how to create organically." -Lee Strasberg.
William Faulkner's acceptance speech upon receiving the Nobel Prize for literature
Stolkholm, Sweden
December 10, 1950
Directed towards future writers:
..."He must teach himself that the basest of all things is to be afraid: and, teaching himself that, forget it forever, leaving no room in his workshop for
anything but the old verities and truths of the heart, the universal truths lacking which any story is ephemeral and doomed--love and honor and pity and
pride and compassion and sacrifice. Until he does so, he labors under a curse. He writes not of love but of lust, of defeats in which nobody loses anything
of value, and victories without hope and worst of all, without pity or compassion. His griefs grieve on no universal bones, leaving no scars. He writes not of
the heart but of the glands.
Until he learns these things, he will write as though he stood among and watched the end of man. I decline to accept the end of man. It is easy enough to
say that man is immortal because he will endure: that when the last ding-dong of doom has clanged and faded from the last worthless rock hanging
tideless in the last red and dying evening, that even then there will still be one more sound: that of his puny inexhaustible voice, still talking. I refuse to
accept this. I believe that man will not merely endure: he will prevail. He is immortal, not because he alone among creatures has an inexhaustible voice,
but because he has a soul, a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance. The poet's, the writer's, duty is to write about these things. It is his
privilege to help man endure by lifting his heart, by reminding him of the courage and honor and hope and pride and compassion and pity and sacrifice
which have been the glory of his past. The poet's voice need not merely be the record of man, it can be one of the props, the pillars to help him endure and
prevail." -William Faulkner.
Black Mountain College
“The ‘Rebel Poets of the 1950s’ have been grouped into four overlapping constellations: the Beat Generation, the San Francisco Renaissance, the Black
Mountain poets, and the New York School poets. Together they formed, in Allen Ginsberg's words, ‘the united phalanx,’ whose unity owed more to a
collective feeling of embattlement than it did to unified poetics. At the time, many of these writers were called anti-intellectuals, ‘destroyers of language,’
and literary juvenile delinquents. These writers actually read voraciously--both classical and modern literature--and pursued the perennial avant-garde
imperative to reinvigorate literary culture by destroying the hackneyed and moribund. Ironically, the reigning tradition that now seemed ripe for attack was
modernism, along with the strictly formalist New Criticism that had become entrenched in the universities and in literary journals. In an attempt to widen the
range of modern poetry, the rebel poets of the 1950s emphasized many elements that were new or had been previously excised: the bardic spoken voice,
links to jazz and spontaneous composition, open verse forms and rhythms, derangement of the senses as a stimulus to creativity, confessional candor,
and content that embraced political issues, Buddhism, and the natural environment.
Perhaps as important as their loosely shared poetics was a sense of personal friendship that transcended geography. Frank O'Hara called it ‘hands-
across-the Rockies for perhaps the first time in American history.’ A tightly knit community arose out of necessity, for these poets depended on the little
magazines, small presses, and public readings that they jointly organized. They often were associated with visual artists, not only in the watering spots in
which they gathered (New York's Greenwich Village and San Francisco's North Beach), but in the books and magazines they jointly produced to celebrate
the conjoined word and image." -From Experiment in Art MIT Press, Vincent Katz.
The Pragmatic Movement in Philosophy - Dewey
"There are two important implications of this line of thought that distinguish it from the metaphysical tradition. First, although inquiry is aimed at resolving
the precarious and confusing aspects of experience to provide a stable basis for action, this does not imply the unreality of the unstable and contingent, nor
justify its relegation to the status of mere appearance. Thus, for example, the usefulness and reliability of utilizing certain stable features of things
encountered in our experience as a basis for classification does not justify according ultimate reality to essences or Platonic forms any more than, as
rationalist metaphysicians in the modern era have thought, the similar usefulness of mathematical reasoning in understanding natural processes justifies
the conclusion that the world can be exhaustively defined mathematically." -Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
Richard Rorty Remembered
“A thinker who wanted America to fulfill its charter and devote itself to maximum human flourishing, Rorty believed that human beings must stop looking for
some nonhuman or extra-human reality, such as God, nature, spirit, matter, or even human nature; for some thing-in-itself that, though entirely independent
of human knowing, would nonetheless provide us with universal laws for governing our actions and our thinking. Rorty believed firmly, and said as much
repeatedly, in the predictive capacity of science and its supreme value to human use. He believed that Hitler and Stalin were evil. But he did not believe that,
say, the germ theory of disease or revulsion in the face of persecution and fanaticism, no matter how passionately we believe they advance the cause of
knowledge or dignity, can yield universal principles or tell us something about the intrinsic nature of reality. We are ineluctably human. No ecstatic
encounters with the Other have been scheduled. We are stuck arguing with one another, in order to achieve, not truth, but consensus." -Stephen Metcalf,
Slate Magazine.
Karl Popper on historicism
Popper's arguments against holism, and in particular his arguments against the propriety of large-scale planning of social structures, are interconnected
with his demonstration of the logical shortcomings of the presuppositions of historicism. Such planning (which actually took place, of course, in the USSR,
in China, and in Cambodia, for example, under totalitarian regimes which accepted forms of historicism and holism), Popper points out, is necessarily
structured in the light of the predictions which have been made about future history on the basis of the so-called ‘laws’ which historicists such as Marx and
Mao claimed to have discovered in relation to human history. Accordingly, recognition that there are no such laws, and that unconditional predictions about
future history are based, at best, upon nothing more substantial than the observation of contingent trends, shows that, from a purely theoretical as well as a
practical point of view, large-scale social planning is indeed a recipe for disaster. In summary, unconditional large-scale planning for the future is
theoretically as well as practically misguided, because, again, part of what we are planning for is our future knowledge, and our future knowledge is not
something which we can in principle now possess — we cannot adequately plan for unexpected advances in our future knowledge, or for the effects which
such advances will have upon society as a whole. The acceptance of historical indeterminism, then, as the only philosophy of history which is
commensurate with a proper understanding of the nature of scientific knowledge, fatally undermines both historicism and holism. -Encyclopedia of
Philosophy.
New Music Movement
"I have nothing to say / and I am saying it / and that is poetry / as I needed it" -John Cage.
"It was at Harvard not quite forty years ago that I went into an anechoic [totally silent] chamber not expecting in that silent room to hear two sounds: one
high, my nervous system in operation, one low, my blood in circulation. The reason I did not expect to hear those two sounds was that they were set into
vibration without any intention on my part. That experience gave my life direction, the exploration of nonintention. No one else was doing that. I would do it
for us. I did not know immediately what I was doing, nor, after all these years, have I found out much. I compose music. Yes, but how? I gave up making
choices. In their place I put the asking of questions. The answers come from the mechanism, not the wisdom of the I Ching, the most ancient of all books:
tossing three coins six times yielding numbers between 1 and 64." -John Cage, 1990.
"After five years as a soloist in the company of Martha Graham, he began choreographing independently, first in solo concerts, then in 1953 he formed his
own company, whose fiftieth anniversary was celebrated in 2003. In his many works for the company, he has been noted for his collaborations with
contemporary visual artists and musicians, especially with John Cage, his life partner from the 1940s until Cage’s death in 1992. In the course of their
work together, they proposed a number of radical innovations. The most famous and controversial of these concerned the relationship of dance and music,
both of which are time arts. Therefore, they came to the conclusion that the two should exist independently, occurring in the same time and space but
without supporting or being connected to one another in the usual way.
Both Cunningham and Cage made extensive use of chance procedures, which meant that not only musical forms but narrative and other conventional
elements of dance composition, such as cause and effect, climax and anticlimax, were also abandoned. Cunningham is not interested in telling stories or
exploring psychological relationships: the subject matter of his dances is the dance itself." -Merce Cunningham Dance Company expose.
Neo Dadaism
" When something is new to us, we treat it as an experience. We feel that our senses are awake and clear. We are alive.”
-Jasper Johns.
”Early works were composed using simple schema such as flags, maps, targets, letters and numbers. Johns' treatment of the surface is often lush and
painterly; he is famous for incorporating such media as Encaustic (wax-based paint), and plaster relief in his paintings. Johns played with and presented
opposites, contradictions, paradoxes, and ironies, much like Marcel Duchamp (who was associated with the Dada movement). Johns also produces
intaglio prints, sculptures and lithographs with similar motifs.
Johns' breakthrough move, which was to inform much later work by others, was to appropriate popular iconography for painting, thus allowing a set of
familiar associations to answer the need for subject.
Though the Abstract Expressionists disdained subject matter, in the end it could be said that they simply changed subjects. Johns neutralized the subject,
so that something like pure paint--painted surface--could declare itself. For twenty years after Johns painted ‘Flag,’ the surface--in Andy Warhol's
silkscreens or Robert Irwin's illuminated ambiances--could suffice." -Wikipedia.
Black renaissance movement
“The Harlem Renaissance in literature was never a cohesive movement. It was, rather, a product of overlapping social and intellectual circles, parallel
developments, intersecting groups, and competing visions – yet all loosely bound together by a desire for racial self-assertion and self-definition in the
face of white supremacy. The interplay between intense conflict and a sense of being part of a collective project identified by race energized the movement
and helps account for our enduring fascination with it.
Scholarship on the movement has itself been conflicted, contradictory, and passionate, for the issues with which the ‘renaissance’ authors struggled have
remained. The field of Harlem Renaissance studies is all competing interpretations, from its inception to the present. What role should or did Marxism play
in black political and intellectual culture? How important is the fact that many of the important writers were gay or bisexual? What are the political
obligations of the black artist, and do they carry formal, thematic, or technical implications for the practice of art? How should or does or did African
American culture articulate with American culture more generally? What should be made of the extensive involvement of black with white authors and
patrons of the time, given the imbalances of power between them and the whites’ inherited prejudices or blindnesses? How might one reconcile the
‘mixed’ nature of African American (or Anglo-African, or Afro-Caribbean) cultural expression with the claims of racial solidarity and autonomy? What does it
mean to be ‘Negro’? What is race? Harlem Renaissance writers, like many people today, disagreed with each other over the answers to these questions.
A ‘companion’ to the Harlem Renaissance must allow dissonance, overlap, and multiplicity to inform its very structure." -From Cambridge Companion to
the Harlem Renaissance, George Hutchinson.
Arts and Crafts Movement
"To the proponents of Arts & Crafts, the Industrial Revolution separated humans from their own creativity and individualism; the worker was a cog in the
wheel of progress, living in an environment of shoddy machine-made goods, based more on ostentation than function. These proponents sought to
reestablish the ties between beautiful work and the worker, returning to an honesty in design not to be found in mass-produced items. The American
movement drew inspiration from the materials, choosing to highlight the grain of the wood or the form of the pot. They incorporated walls of rich wood
tones, relegating wallpaper to borders. Paints were in rich earth tones. Furniture and architectural details were designed to take advantage of machines
allowing the individual craftsmen to assemble the furniture and finish the wood. The use of machines lowered the cost, making the furniture, pottery and
metalwork affordable and therefore available to ‘the people.’" -From the Movement, Celeste Cummings.