Perhaps the richest and most rewarding example of visual art as “active imagination” (a main feature of Jung’s prescription for mental health since “active imagination” engages healing archetypes) is that of the Swiss-German Paul Klee. Klee, a Bauhaus master craftsman in line, form and colour, developed playful fantasy beyond anything previously known in modern art. Klee could “take a walk with a line” without worrying where it would lead him. He became a natural and unostentatious master of graphic magic and wonder; in addition to art, his writings and teachings inspired others and continue to do so. Klee was also a puppet-maker and performer, well aware of their expressive value. His astonishing ability to invent alternative imaginative worlds that absorbed and dispelled the anxieties of life is perhaps not to be expected of most artists, but the example was available to Bellmer had he wanted it.
Even if Bellmer had stayed with the doll theme, he might have enriched and diversified his punitive fantasies by turning the dolls into active, speaking presences.( Bellmer had long been sensitized to the symbolic uses of “objects”, the imagination-inducing “transitional objects” of which Winnicott speaks. As early as 1931, Bellmer’s mother had sent him the toys from his childhood, and these could well have started productive free-associations to traumatic pain.44) He might have made his dolls into animated puppets (even those dolls appearing to be dead), to walk, talk and speak from their hearts what it felt like to be in such predicaments. They would speak of their excitements, fears and sorrows, about their maker asking what might be his motives in bringing them into being, only to dismember them They would, in other words, become therapeutic voices in a marionette psychodrama that brought out both sides of the story—that of victims and victimizers—and would reach into the developmental reasons for why this was happening. Their voices could speak for the trauma-caused dissociated doll “alters” protectively devised by the psyche. They would thus require lines from Bellmer himself, a script filling out his narrative of traumatic pain, hope and despair and, possibly, renewal of hope. (of course a skilled therapist would have helped to unfold the sadistic addic-tion45) Nevertheless, if the dolls could enter into dialogue with their maker much would have been revealed. Bellmer could then have written a fuller, clearer and connected narrative about himself and his parenting. If so, art would certainly have assisted in easing his pain, moderating his obsessions and demystifying imagery that remains troubling to witness.
Notes
1. See Peter Webb, Hans Bellmer (London: Quartet Books, 1985), chapter. 3; Sue Taylor, Hans Bellmer: The Anatomy of Anxiety (MIT Press, 2000), chapter. 7.
2. Quoted in Webb, Hans Bellmer, pp. 107, 110.
3. Hans Bellmer, “Notes on the Subject of the Ball Joint” (1938), in Taylor, Hans Bellmer, appendix C, pp. 212-8. It is possible that Bellmer knew of the life-sized female effigies, or dolls, that had been made since the middle ages to study anatomy. These partially dissected life-sized anatomical dolls became quite sophisticated with Renaissance medical science establishing the means of human reproduction, and examples maybe seen in European museums. For example, the eighteenth-century Italian “Medical Venus” at La Specola, Florence displays a wax cut-away of the pregnant uterus. Its visual effect is both instructive and unsettling, taking the viewer beyond scientific curiosity into male sexual anxiety and implied violence against the charming young female. See Annette Burfoot, “Pearls and Gore: The Spectacle of Woman in Life and Death”, in Killing Women: The Visual Culture of Gender and Violence (Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2006).
4. Hans Bellmer, “Postscript” to Oracles and Spectacles by Unica Zurn (1954), in Therese Lichtenstein, Behind Closed Doors: The Art of Hans Bellmer (University of California Press, 2001), appendix, pp. 174-5.
5. Quoted. in Taylor, pp. 84-5.
6. Taylor, p. 88. See Alice Miller, “Oedipus: The ‘Guilty’ Victim”, in Thou Shalt Not Be Aware (New York: Meridian , 1986), pp. 143-57, for the argument that Oedipal theory masks more essential features of parent-child interaction.
7. Robert J. Stoller, M.D., Perversion: The Erotic Form of Hatred (New York: Pantheon, 1975), pp. 55, 4.
8. Quoted. in Taylor, p. 23; Webb, p. 26.
9. Stoller, p. 105.
10. Webb, p. 134.
11. Webb, pp. 204-5.
12. Taylor, p. 199.
13. Hans Bellmer, Little Anatomy of the Physical Unconscious, or The Anatomy of the Image. Translated from the French and with an introduction by Jon Graham. (Waterbury Center, Vermont: Dominion, 2004), pp. 5-6.
14. Ibid., p. 8. Bellmer read psychologists from Cesare Lombroso to Freud, becoming convinced that inner states are projected onto outer reality.
15. Ibid., pp. 11-2.
16. Unica Zurn, The Man of Jasmine:Impressions from a Mental Illness, Malcolm Green ,trans. (London: Atlas Press, 1994), p 25.
17. Lichtenstein, p. 68.
18. Taylor, pp. 275-6. n51.
19. Ibid., p. 178.
20. Webb, p. 15.
21. Franz Kafka, Letter to His Father, trans. Ernst Kaiser and Eithne Wilkins (New York:
Schocken Books, 1970). Addressing his father, Kafka writes: “This sense of nothingness that often dominates me ... comes largely through your influence. What I would have needed was a little encouragement, a little friendliness, a little keeping open of my road, instead of which you blocked it for me ...”. p. 17.
22. Webb, p. 15. See Taylor, appendix B, pp. 210-1 and Lichtenstein, pp. 176-7 for slightly differing translations of Bellmer’s “The Father” (1936).
23. Lichtenstein, p 177; (See Taylor, p. 211 for a slightly differing emphasis.)
24. Donald G. Dutton, The Abusive Personality: Violence and Control in Intimate Relationships (New York: The Guilford Press, 1998), pp. 144-5.
25. Ibid., p. 146.
26. Jude Cassidy and Philip R. Shaver eds., Handbook of Attachment: Theoretical Research and Clinical Applications (New York: The Guilford Press, 1999), pp. 131-2.
27. Webb, p. 16
28. Lichtensten, p. 48f. Webb writes that not only was Bellmer “obsessed with sex”, he was “fascinated by the sexuality of young girls and the corruption of innocence.”, p. 12. He quotes Bellmer as saying that by sexualizing art “I wanted people really to experience their bodies—I think this is possible only through sex” p. 38.
29. Ibid., p. 40.
30. Ibid., p. 174. Bellmer’s ambiguity of attitude towards women is found throughout his writings as well as his art. See, for instance, “The Anatomy of Love” where he writes, “No one will be able to painlessly disengage from this synthesis of a hurtful Eve, suffering from her own impossible formulation, a formulation of the loveless love of the heartless young girl whose only being is a head and the inner parts of her body”. (Little Anatomy of the Physical Unconscious, p. 36) On the facing page is a drawing of one of his famously “disarticulated” females, a desired but punished Eve.
31. Ibid., p. 171. See Taylor, Plate 2.
32. Ibid., p. 172. See Webb’s translations for differing emphases: pp. 16; 32-3. As Bellmer comments, “it is those things about which we know nothing that lodge themselves all too firmly in the memory”; in other words, the traumatic shocks that have to be dealt with by some such strategy as symbolic doll-making—to “triumph” over the “anxiety and unhappiness” caused by trauma, p.172. The alarming red colour of certain of Bellmer’s doll photographs may allude to the raspberry schnapps, and to childhood memories as a “pink region”, p. 144. For the red of danger, see Lichtenstein Plates 5, 7, 11.