Surrealism and the Sacred: Celia Rabinovitch

Freud was not popular in France during the twenties and thirties because he was viewed as “too German”. After World War I the French had a historical hatred towards the Germans. Anti-Semitic literature linking Freud and others to corruption of Germanic purity found its way to France. Later writers such as Rosalind Krauss looked to the psychoanalytic theory of Jacques Lacan as a major influence on surrealism. This was the intellectual approach of Breton. However, surrealist artists used everything that was available to buttress their ideas. I doubt if, in making their art, the Surrealists used psychoanalysis other than a method — as automatic writing and painting. What many art historians tend to forget, so obvious to every artist, is that every work of art, every poem, becomes an original document that embodies knowledge. Art doesn’t need an intellectual argument to justify its existence. Its meaning is like music, evident only through itself — it requires no further explanation other than the fact that we experience it directly. I think we can enjoy Freud for his vivid, often witty yet always self-examining writing style. It has its own momentum.

Why would Freud perceive “the ambivalence of the uncanny” as a neurosis? This is, what’s wrong with anyone, not only children, with perceiving dolls as being animate, possessing spirit? What’s wrong with letting our imaginations wander wherever they want to, if there’s no overall meaning to ourselves and the world?

I’m not certain that Freud actually did understand the ambivalence of the uncanny as neurosis. He began in an article (1921) with the idea of the uncanny as a “peculiar aesthetic emotion” and to me that is still one of the best definitions of the uncanny.

I think his later definition of the uncanny having to do either with castration, death, or the loss of the mother, seems to be pushing it. The sense of the uncanny appears in all cultures as an obscure sense of significance, a sense perhaps of being observed or controlled by another, a psychological doubling. Every culture has the myth of the double. While this may be a denial of death, it is still an aesthetic emotion: it’s best left at that.

What is the connection between the surrealist’s understanding of the uncanny and a religious or quasi-religious experience?

Surrealists found the uncanny to be nameless or formless — it was closer to the idea of the informe of Steiner and Lacan. I don’t think they connected it to a religious or even quasi-religious experience, because they rejected religion. But in their command of that threshold between the imagination, dream and the sacred they stumbled across the notion of an external power that can invade the most ordinary object or event. That heightening of experience was the sense of the uncanny. Because the sacred, in its raw sense of power, is the source of attraction and repulsion, the uncanny could be seen as one of its vernacular manifestations.

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