Introductory remarks

Drawn to the Asylum: In Search of Missing Parts (on the way to a possible conversation)

Good morning. I am Dr. Terri Egan. I'm a member of the Academy for the Study of the Psychoanalytic Arts, and I serve on its Program Committee. On behalf of the Academy, I am happy to welcome each of you to this conference, and to thank you, Dr. Vida, for coming here to share with us something of what you have learned and experienced from art - and from the creative ways in which people use art to present, represent, and re-present aspects of our basic humanity.

Making use of whatever is available to us, like painting, film, dance, literature, music, poetry, drama and so on, the arts, philosophy, and the humanities provide us with rich samples of the limitless ways in which we as human beings find and make use of opportunities to construct and express ourselves. Using these diverse forms of expression we portray those ideas and emotions, beliefs and values, pleasures and angst which reside in our innermost being and constitute who we are. We might think of it as a self directed and never-ending conversation with ourselves in search of ways to communicate about what life and the world is all about, as it is seen and understood through each of our own unique perspectives.

Dr. Vida describes herself as a psychoanalyst who has been "taught by art", through a process that she says involves an opening up of self to art, to oneself, to others, and to life. To open oneself, to learn from, and to speak about the unbelievably different and creative ways in which people construct, interpret, and (re)present their private, subjective reality stands in stark contrast to the practice of analyzing it and imposing meaning. To simply receive, think together about, and learn from someone's personal pictures (whether they be in the form of paintings and drawings, or in the form of words and images in a psychoanalytic hour) is perhaps to expand our own repertoire of experience and understanding beyond its existing boundaries. This approach to the productions of a fellow human being contrasts sharply from that of "instruction", or teaching pre-established methodology and rules of interpretation, whether that be in an art studio, a psychiatric institution, a psychoanalytic consulting room, or right here in a psychoanalytic society gathering.

The Academy consists of people from various parts of the country who have not found a biomedical and scientific framework either useful or even relevant for helping people understand themselves and their personal difficulties. Like a Procrustean bed that forces every shape of person into a "one size fits all" frame, a biomedical picture of problems in living forces persons into a diagnostic framework of mental illness. DSM categories label certain thoughts and feelings as deviant from, and deficient in certain socially established norms, defining people as sick and in need of certain kinds of treatment.

The Academy, in search of alternatives to this medicalized way of understanding people, strives to preserve the freedoms necessary for a different kind of conversation to take place - a non-medical , free-associative psychoanalytic conversation. A psychoanalytic discourse which involves a way of thinking, listening, learning, and talking with people that considers everyday-life decisions, behaviors, actions and feelings to be creative and meaning-filled forms of communication about oneself - nonlinguistic "conversation", we might say. It involves thinking about people as creators of their own subjective reality who, if you will, actively paint pictures of that reality every single day, onto the living and breathing life canvas of assumptions, patterns, values, beliefs, and ways of being. The art of bringing this personal collage of human expression to language requires abandoning reliance upon theoretical, diagnostic and medical frameworks that limit, impede, and literally have nothing to do with a psychoanalytic discourse in which private meanings can be talked about, explored, and understood rather than pathologized. In so doing, the Academy redefines psychoanalysis as art - as a process in search of self-understanding for its own sake.

The title of Dr. Vida's presentation is, A Drawn to the Asylum: in Search of Missing Parts (on the way to a possible conversation). Could we think about a non-medical psychoanalytic conversation as one that might involve a very personal search for missing words? Not "missing" as in lacking or deficient, but perhaps missing as in not yet consciously available to oneself, despite their already being "spoken" in a different language - the "language" of behaviors, feelings, reactions, choices, and other ways of being? Could we think of what is missing in the sense of something one might be secretly longing for and desiring? Or missing, as perhaps in personal losses, missed opportunities, and risks never taken? Can there be a space in which to simply search for and find unspoken aspects of self on the way to a conversation in which it is possible to talk freely about one's pictures of life, of how it is to be living that life, and all of its private meanings, whatever those might be, for the sole purpose of finding them, knowing them, and speaking them in search of self understanding ... if one so chooses?

Dr. Vida's ideas enrich our study of the psychoanalytic arts. We are about to hear her talk with us now about ways in which pictures painted and drawn by persons who once lived in European psychiatric institutions have expanded her own self understanding, and have powerfully changed her own pictures of what is it to be human.