Per via di porre is a da vinci-ana metaphor, which Freud evokes in order to define, by difference, psychoanalysis; The painter's art is based on a process of covering - even the person, the mask, is an accessory as covering as possible, not to mention clothes, according to the Viennese master, the only cultural contribution of women - abrupt intelligible statement, but in - the phallocentric culture; and then the veneration of the phallus will have been a defensive one in the face of an unacceptable vulnerability, a sign of a deep trauma inscribed in socius. Rather, the woman is the guarantor of life, as a mother, but - moreover - the guarantor of the psychic life, as an exponent of the vulnerable nucleus, authentic and, especially, encapsulated in the defenses of each of us.
To cover to discover: ancestral game, alternating inscribed in phenomenal transience; and we could continue the vein: to hide to find, to hide to try to find, to re-find.
Why do people look at the object of art endlessly? What do I see in him? I see something that can't be said, just lived, animated… animate yourself. The soul, the deep realm of being, where the (re) sources of life are.
Unhappy are those who, without knowing and being able to do otherwise, build their being, possibly through cognitive mortar, trying to discover themselves where they are… only dead. It would mean that the object of art is a portal between the inner worlds separated by so much discomfort in culture, no matter how structuring this object is. What we see through art is precious, because it is our own face.
So, when we look at an art object, we re-play a prototype scene: we are Narcissus seen in the water. Water, the formless element, which takes the form of the one who summons its force.
The narcissistic scene promotes the being from the presumptive (for the intellect) unus mundus, in the dual space in which, in different degrees, the subject-object is constituted. The narcissistic self is looking for them in me or. It is only sought, because mine is found and constituted - thanks to the third - and Narcissus cannot see the beautiful Echo, eternally sacrificed in his world, as a remnant echo of the impossible third. Narcissus is a mine-r stuck in circular galleries.
Is this also our risk, of those who look, for example, at a painting?
Do we consume our own face through art, as if we had become our conjuncture?
Should art be a narcissistic occupation?
Possible. A gate that takes us to revolted spaces - Kleinian positions rather than the usual stage course - to layers of strong influence of the deep being. To the extent of this influence we look fascinated - in the good version - the object of art, as if where, where we see without knowing what we see, is the treasure. But any treasure is well guarded and hidden anyway.
Whether in the semi-personalized version of the dragon or, for example, in that of Cerberus, the path is stopped and very few touch the treasure. Unexpectedly, these guards are the key to finding the precious treasure: they are the third - a feared third, who seems to have the power of life and death. Difference and diversity are felt to be deadly. It is no coincidence that radical otherness is Death. The third party is the one who cuts, with a good scythe, any binomial.
God made the beasts of the earth after their kind, and cattle after their kind, and every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth after his kind (Genesis 1:25)
The over-specification by their kind indicates the essential need to reside within a composition and within a specific limit. Any interbreeding removes the being from its good structure and transposes it into a space of interference, transience or more precisely, in this context, transitional. The dragon is a reptile-bird hybrid, and the Cerberus, with a different order of symbolic camouflage, has the third inscribed in its composition. Last but not least, the Sphinx is a prototype hybrid. Perhaps it is not by chance that we find the assonance hybrid (from fr. Hybride) and hybris. Hybris subsumes everything that defies inflationary norms and causes, compensatory, deflation. Luciferic history may be one of narcissistic pathology, in which grandeur and demonization are the only possible and deplorable existential registers.
Oedipus understands the question of the Sphinx, a question that concerned him, as narcissistic as possible. Paradoxically, an interfering being, the Sphinx, asks a question whose answer is the respondent. The answer is his own being - in its own way (even if its history is a transgressive one). No one before him had found the answer, because they were looking for him elsewhere and were not looking at themselves. Moreover, in the essence of the question is inscribed the diachronic, procedural dimension; in other words, becoming, changing, passing. Only if you register in your original way, the process is initiated. Being means time, impermanence. All of these are structuring.
In the beginning was the word… (Gospel according to Jonah 1: 1)
The word is, per se, the third. The image is synchronous, while the word is procedural, diachronic. The context touches on the representations of things and the representations of words (Freud, 1895 and 1915). The word envelops the image, fixes it in linguistic coordinates, in its matrix of meaning. Without a word, the world of semi-distinction dominates and Narcissus looks at himself endlessly, without realizing why and for what.
Why this journey among Narcissus, Sphinxes and Oedipus? Because the volume coordinated by Simona Trifu, a creation on unbeaten paths, is one in which the fundamental psychogenetic arithmetic is inscribed. To summon the word under jurisdiction in relation to the object of art is a fundamental enterprise.
Are the ideas in this volume about the work of master Ivanov or about those who sign them, with a good art of the word?
Maybe they are about us, all those who read them. Extra-wall psychoanalysis, outside the clinical fortress, is one in which the analytical imaginary is well placed. Words are put where before it was a symbolic reality (in the sense of a multi-significant node) or even symbiotic.
Words create narrative corpora and generate stable worlds of meaning. Even if it is a unique approach to applied psychoanalysis, the principle of procedural secondary secondaryization or bionic alpha-baptism is at work. Narcissus is fulfilled through Oedipal horizons, in which the answers to the existential riddles - which each work of the master puts - are us. We can understand from the lines of this book, how analytical theory supports reality (in an anaclitic sense), generating explanatory causal volutes, sometimes of a filigree complexity that puts us to the test, other times of an elegant simplicity.
The work of master Alex Ivanov is a master field for an applied psychoanalysis. Layers of significance, through composition of hue and depth, are the favorite field of an analyst. The volume includes a good polyphonic concert, on personal voices, which produce both harmony and counterpoint, according to the artist's face and dissimilarity.
Lack of resemblance because it is not in the nature of a plastic artist of Alex Ivanov's stature to produce such a text, fortunately (and for this the volume represents a success that generates, through its appearance, an expected precedent); and in his image, because the analytical imaginary put into play by those who sign the volume accompanies, as much as possible, the evoked works, but especially because master Ivanov also makes art per via di levare. This volume is under the sign of psychoanalysis, of a sculptural approach, through which the work of art, the essence, is revealed thanks to the elimination of the layers that held her captive.
Alex Ivanov makes sculptural painting, and this way - per via di levare - is practiced by each author and, especially, by Simona Trifu, to whom we owe the joy of this unique book and we greet her creative and generous being.
Between Hiroshima and a good and final exercise in psychoanalysis and film, which flows naturally, as a story of images, from the work of master Ivanov, we invite you to a reading that intricates universes and shows us the way to get out of the maze.
Of course, everyone can, in their own way.
Prof. univ. Dr. Matei Georgescu
Psychoanalyst, Spiru Haret University