Consciousness, Literature and the Arts

Archive

Volume 6 Number 1, April 2005

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Franzen, Georg, Symbolisches Verstehen, Frankfurt a.M., Peter Lang, 2004. 146 pages, ISBN 3-631-32111-2, Paperback only 31.80 €/22.30£/37.95US$.

Reviewed by

Fabio Akcelrud Durão

Federal University of Rio de Janeiro

            Georg Franzen’s Symbolisches Verstehen; Beiträge zur angewandten Kunstpsychologie [Symbolic Understanding; contributions to applied art psychology] is an ambitious short book. The text is divided into two parts. In the first, theoretical one, Franzen exposes the foundations of a new discipline, art psychology, while in the second he deals with concrete symbolic artifacts, Camille Claudel’s sculpture “L’implorante,” Dürer’s famous “Melancholia I”, Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s “The Blessed Damozel”, and finally Kurt Schwitters’ “Merzbau”. It would not be totally accurate to say that these various works are read or interpreted, for indeed the purpose of the book is precisely to intertwine symbolic deciphering with psychological treatment, aesthetic appreciation with spiritual healing. This actually delineates the contours of a new theoretical and practical field, less a psychology of art – the investigation of how the psyche functions in the composition and/or reception of works – than an art psychology, the scrutiny and application of artistic effects within the horizon of the cure. As such, Symbolisches Verstehen promises something excitingly new, a hybrid entity, grounded partly on psychology, partly on art studies (Kunstwissenschaft).

            Theoretically, applied art psychology draws not only from psychology and psychoanalysis, as one might expect, but also from aesthetics and iconology, which are further improved by deep hermeneutics [Tiefenhermeneutik]. In Franzen’s words: “Symbolic understanding becomes possible as a whole when the three levels mentioned, deep psychology, aesthetics and iconology are interlaced and interconnected in such a way that manifest and latent contents of meaning of an artwork may be circumscribed. It is thus necessary at the same time to recur to a theory of symbols.” (p. 36) Underlying and giving form to this junction of academic disciplines is a strong ontological claim: “The number of answers that man can give to the question of life is limited; he must choose among them. ‘Likewise, the symbols that these answers represent are limited. They are universal because there is just one man.’ [Fromm]” (p.89).[1] It is this universalist stance that grounds the possibility of the treatment by means of art, for “especially when the communicational skills of a patient is limited, the receptive use of art offers a notable rise in insight and knowledge.” (p. 58) The project of Symbolisches Verstehen is ambitious because it refuses to relinquish the objectivity of interpretation, which would dissolve the work’s structure within the flow of subjective association, but tries to unite in the same unfolding the artifact’s truth and the patient’s cure.

            There are many problems involved in this project, however. First and foremost, the therapeutic use of art fails to specify why art and not other symbolic productions is the privileged sphere of analysis. To claim that art is endowed of a “seismographic function” (p.12), or that it “points to basic experiences of human existence” (p.14) is not enough, because statements like these do not define what art is, how it differs from any other structure of meaning, why it is preferable from, say, TV. Another shortcoming of Symbolisches Verstehen is related to its form of exposition. The argument does not run smoothly; definitions and concepts do not unfold as thought progresses, but are rather thrown in quick succession. As a result, paragraphs are unusually small, and the proliferation of quotations without mediation reminds one of a bad parody of Walter Benjamin’s Arcades Project. The list of references is impressive and the author’s knowledge of his bibliographic sources staggering; nevertheless, putting so many thinkers unproblematically side by side (Freud, Fromm, Jung, Laplanche & Pontalis, Winnicott, Panofsky, Cassirer, Gadamer, Lyotard, among many others) blunts the sharp edges they point to one anther and eventually makes their commentary superficial.

            Things do not get better when one turns to the therapeutic part of the book. To be sure, this section has the merit of dealing with a wide range of artistic genres, such as painting, sculpture, and architecture, belonging to different historical periods, from Dürer to the present. Yet, the lack of specificity of “art” in the first part is mirrored here in the kind of analysis (in both senses) carried out. From the point of view of aesthetics, interpretation is just too much content-oriented, disregarding matters of formal organization, and the appeal to the artist’s biography (not in itself reproachable) helps little in the unveiling of meaning. For example, in relation to Claudel’s “L'implorante”, one reads the following two-sentence paragraph: “If we turn again to the artwork, it becomes clear that the gesture of “pleading” encompasses all the surrounding space. Kneeling, the artist is fighting to be understood, to have her individual and social situation accepted. A spiritual crisis seems to be indicated.” (p.67) This neither contributes to the interpretation of the sculpture, nor to the understanding of what would be specific of Claudel’s life; it is a remark that could have had any kind of representation as its source, artistic or not.

            The same difficulty is to be found from the point of view of the treatment. Whether or not art-psychology works out concretely is of course something that cannot verified here; what can be observed, however, is that patients’ reactions registered in the book were far from exceptional, verging at times on commonplaces. Thus the following responses to Dürer’s “Melancholia I”:

“The Angel seems to be thinking a lot, but he’s also tired and weak. But he continues to think, somehow.”

“The Angel looks bored, but thinks, no doubt he’s worried.”

“The Angel is thinking and around him it’s a mess.”

“The Angel gives you a sad impression.”

These impressions are not developed or worked on, but lead to the conclusion some pages ahead: “These statements and the results presented of the therapeutic work with the engraving “Melancholia I” attest that Dürer has given expression to the essential traits of melancholy.” (p. 96)

            The same is true of Claudel. Again, a whole paragraph: “Contemplating Camille Claudel’s sculpture, a client remembered a situation in her childhood, her mother’s painful rejection of her. Her pleading for empathy also remained unheard in her childhood. Understanding is not only significant for the therapeutic process, but leads us from childhood on. Thus, when someone facing an acute crisis verbalizes this lack of understanding, I can explain this process using art as an example.” (p. 68) A taunting critic might say that in order to elicit this kind of effect a soap opera would be more suitable.

            The best interpretative moment of the book seems to take place in spite of itself. It happens at the end of the chapter on Dürer, when Franzen sketches the following reading: “The flooding in the background may be seen as the symbol for the emergence of the unconscious in the conscious mind [Bewusstsein]. In this context, the engraving as a whole could be psychologically interpreted also as dream-representation [Traumbild]. […] The stone in the foreground represents the interrupted work on “I”.” (p. 98) These allegorical indications are fruitful because they involve formal elements of the engraving; moreover, and this is more important, they must be clearly posited as one interpretation, which uses the healing process itself as its master code. Put in these terms, the analysis (again in both senses of the word) becomes more convincing, for the patient would then be working on, or struggling against, a particular reading of the artwork, which would be both immanent to it and at the same a projection by him or her. But this procedure could not be grounded on supposedly universally human capacity to symbolize; it should rather acknowledge its own status as just one more interpretation. Yet, this would not prevent that curious dialectical movement take place, whereby a given reading, not aspiring to absoluteness, is so strong and cogent that it attaches itself so perfectly to the text’s surface to become its truth, something that, added, projects an always-already-there. Our happiness and joy is that this degree of objectivity is eventually corroded by time, a new truth sooner or later being bound to emerge.