Act out turn on - neurosis and psychosis in art

ArtForum, April, 1994 by Laurence A. Rickels

According to Donald Kuspit's owner's manual to acting out in the arts, it's possible to control the on/off switch to acting out's motor or mechanism, the "splitting" Freud first tested in his essay on fetishism. Splitting psychs out loss or separation through split-level transmissions (now you see it and now you don't) that "oscillate" (this is how Freud put it) "between neurosis and psychosis." This spliting image of how, then, the trauma of loss "goes" (what's absent is both identified and not seen) is what's along for the drive in acting out, which since World War II has been the overriding label that gets stuck on this mobilization of or access to the shifting border zone between neurosis and psychosis. Acting out splits the trauma scene, divides and conquers, at least for the time being, the immediate evacuation effects of the first strike of loss, and thus skips the downbeat of psychotic shutdown. By keeping the split open, acting out gets around the fixed-front war on repression and its consequence in psychotic cases: the withdrawal of all libido from the outside world (which is thus destroyed) back into the ego, which overloads, short-circuits, disconnects. Acting out's bypass operation around repression puts it up there with sublimation on a direct line to that different way some still call art. Acting out, however, goes where no sublimation has gone before. Into the borderline zone between neurosis and psychosis.

The study of "object relations" (both a focus in psychoanalytic theory and a specific school of analysis) is where splitting and acting out ware assigned the terms of their transferential cure: the acting-out patient, who has a low threshold of tolerance for ambivalence, sets his relations in the concrete by splitting and bouncing apart his "objects" into "good" and "bad." In the everyday life of the child we can observe little one, once the tantrum subsides, announce that the bad child is gone now and the good one is back. Acting out rides out this split in every moment of reception, including that of the concept's own itinerary or history (acting oat always catches on). Only around World War II did the study of object relations employ the term acting oat in a sense compatible with, for example, Kuspit's art appreciation of delinquency and deviance. But this World War II application was never in sync with Freud's use of the term "acting out" (Agieren), which he referred exclusively to the analytic setting where repetition and remembering must face off in the transference. That's why, in 1967, Anna Freud convened the international psychoanalytic conference around the topic of acting out, calling for clarification of a concept that by then "covered" its distance from her father's use of the term. The all-out attempt at the 1967 conference to address or redress the "diffuse expansionism" of the term, as the disconnection between Freud's sense of acting out as local to the transference and those applied psychosocial meanings that are still with us, had never left the transference contest between remembering and acting out or repetition, a contest that pervades the concept's history.

Only by getting stuck in a groove on the war record of psychoanalysis could pep analysis advance the actors out of delinquency and deviance as the true veterans of the 20th century's psychological war efforts. This latest resort of the psy-fi colonization of the outer space of "psychosis" for treatability or adjustment (for the survival of the species) was first brought to us by Freud's close encounter with war neurosis during World War I. Freud's introduction to "Psychoanalysis and the War Neuroses" made possible the consolidation of the preliminary findings on narcissism or ego libido. Thus from World War I onward (soldiers!), the severer "narcissistic neuroses" or psychoses shift from the allegorical to the functional, from limit concept to borderline case. It doesn't really matter whether psychoanalysis in fact presented a cure-all for the war neuroses: in theory, a new-found no-man's-land or borderline had opened up between neurosis and psychosis for advances or occupations by analytic therapy.

When the German military-psychological complex decided in 1918 that psychoanalysis was to be the treatment of choice for war neurosis, and even planned construction of analytic institutes and clinics near the front lines to that end, it was of course already too late; but it wasn't too late for psychoanalysis to score PR-wise on all sides of the peace that everyone was out to win. The myth of the healed war neurotic was to be the greatest success story of the analytic model, which thus gained admission into every department or discipline of psychological interventionism. But only the German military, psychological, and military-psychological establishments stayed with the analysis-inspired research into war neurosis: its cure and inoculative prevention on one's own side and its infliction across enemy lines through psychological warfare. When World War II started up, Allied military psychologists suddenly saw themselves as way behind their German colleagues, with whom they had to catch up. In Britain, advances were made under the pressure of total air war. World War I had for the first time provided large-scale uniform or uniformed populations for study under the new laboratory conditions of total war. In World War II it was the new research resource of children and adolescents evacuated out from under the shadow of total air war that enabled the analytic exploration of human subjects in a wider range of developmental stages. These children and adolescents were granted analytic or therapeutic supervision right from the start because it was assumed that the shocks to the target areas they inhabited struck them the same way the hard shell of front-line combat affected symptomatizing soldiers. But then it was discovered that trauma #1 for the children was the separation from their mothers, which evacuation had brought about. That's how the British object-relations school of psychoanalysis (Wilfred R. Bion, W. Ronald D. Fairbairn, and D. W. Winnicott, among the other followers of Melanie Klein), which was developing under this air pressure, came to realize what Freud had already stressed for World War I neurotics: separation anxiety cuts down the dotted line along which even the presenting problem of war neurosis first tears into childhood trauma. The object-relations analysts switched at this time and for these cases from individual therapy to group therapy, which is where the modern concept of acting out was first coming up for air war. In the zones of evacuation where the fit of juvenile delinquency with group therapeutic "management" was first recognized, Winnicott saw through acting out as the repeater attempt to get back at the present and get back to a past prior to the trauma of deprivation and loss, which is thus the delinquent's disowned but perpetual present tense and tension. This condition called for the kind of intervention (based on Klein's one-on-one approach, but now shifted to the group level) that works regression real close to the borderline at which the analyst is stationed and granted access to the psychosis. It's the nonstop interpretation of the transference, right down to the meganarcissistic demand