The formal language of art is displaced, allusive and laden with invented imagery; it is not a question-and-answer exercise, but questions about basic trust can be discovered and stated, with the artist’s visual answers to the question of interactive suffering and repair put into words and evaluated.
There is nothing more vital to human experience than the ability to regulate emotion, to be assured that this is possible and to have access to the means of repairing defects and failures of self-regulation originating in developmental mis-attachments. The creative arts are central to this psychological function and they need critical looking at in the light of what is known about secure and insecure attachments. Artists are celebrated because they capture and visually convey collective anxieties. They dare to encode our most anxious fantasies, avoidances and accommodations for public recognition. Artists are mainly purveyors of more or less socially disruptive group fantasies, and they are expected to work dangerously, often “on the edge” of mental breakdown. They also propose modes of self-regulation to relieve the anxious content of fantasies, doing so in detached esthetic terms. But their constructions always bear on real-life situations, which are essential context for the art to be fully intelligible. They are experts in seeing, but what and how they see can be very problematic. Hence the need for psychobiography to reconstruct the origins of anxious attachments necessitating creative attempts to solve essentially interpersonal and intra-psychic problems.
The artists studied here are examples of attachment pathology, and its imagery, raised to the level of cultural heroics. This usually is as far as it goes, with false adulation and limiting claims for the artist’s personal autonomy and the inviolability of his work. Yet the most arresting work, that which defines eras and shapes cultural history, carries powerful messages about anxieties between the sexes, pointing towards the true meaning of mood regulation and repair of weakened or damaged attachment systems. I believe that the lives and works of Picasso, Bellmer, Balthus, and Cornell are samples enough to show where the most pervasive and disabling recent cultural anxieties lie, and how avoidant male artists have taken the risks to engage with that which frightens them most. Their fright (consciously denied and dismissed) can be enlightening if reasons are given for certain bizarre presentations of female faces and bodies found in their art. This is an ambitious thesis, a try at connecting basic research in attachment with cultural manifestations. Sooner or later the attempt would have to be made, and it is hoped that my psychobiographical reconstructions are convincing enough to recommend the method.
Notes
1. Sigmund Freud, “Leonardo da Vinci and a Memory of his Childhood,” in Five Lectures on Psychoanalysis (1910), vol. XI, Standard Works (London: Hogarth Press, 1957). The controversy over Freud’s distortion of Leonardo’s story was summarized by Jack J. Spector in The Aesthetics ofFreud: A Study in Psychoanalysis and Art (New York: Praeger, 1972), p. 54f, and has since been continued by many commentators.
2. William Todd Schultz, ed., Handbook of Psychobiography (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), p. 7, p. 16-7
3. Patrick Waldberg, Surrealism (New York/ Toronto: McGraw-Hill nd), pp. 16-17.
4. Otto Rank, Art and Artist: Creative Urge and Personality Development (New York/ London: W.W. Norton, 1989), p. 107.
5. Ibid., p. 107.
6. Ibid., p. 108.
7. Jude Cassidy and Philip R. Shaver, eds., Handbook of Attachment, Theory, Research and Clinical Applications (New York/ London: Guilford Press, 1999) p. 290f. For historical background see Inge Bretherton, “The Origins of Attachment Theory: John Bowlby and Mary Ainsworth, in Attachment Theory: Social, Developmental, and Clinical Perspectives (Hillsdale N.J. / London: The Analytic Press, 1995), pp. 45-84.
8. For stability of early attachments over time see Jeremy Holmes, John Bowlby and Attachment Theory (London and New York: Routledge, 1993), p. 111; but for reservations see Peter Fonagy, Attachment Theory and Psychoanalysis (New York: Other Press, 1999), pp. 20-1. Most commentators on the avoidant attachment style assume continuity over time, allowing for age-related adaptations.
9. Holmes, John Bowlby, p. 108.
10. Mary Main, “Avoidance in the Service of Attachment: A Working Paper”, in K. Immel-
mann, G. Barlow, L. Petrinovich and M. Main eds., Behavioral Development: the Bielefeld Interdisciplinary Project (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1981), p 651.
11. Ibid., pp. 654-5.
12. Ibid., pp. 656-7. See also pp. 662-663 and the findings about child and adult avoidant/ dismissive defensive differences in R. Chris Fraley, Keith E. Davis and Phillip R. Shaver, “Dismissive-Avoidance and the Defensive Organization of Emotion, Cognition, and Behavior”, in Jeffery A. Simpson and W. Steven Rholes eds., Attachment Theory and Close Relationships (New York/ London: Guilford, 1998), pp. 249f. Such studies tend to miss the hostility inherent in the avoidant defence so clearly established by Main.
13. Kim Bartholomew, “Avoidance of Intimacy: An Attachment Perspective” Journal of Social and Personal Relationships, 7 (1990):173.
14. Ibid., p. 174. For further clarification see Bartholomew, “Attachment Styles Among Young Adults: A Test of a Four-Category Model,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 61, no.2 (1991):226-44.
15. Assistance in understanding the A/C construct is found at: “Attachment Theory, Psychopathology and Psychotherapy: The Dynamic-Maturational Approach” www.patcritten-den.com Further clarification is found in Crittenden’s “Peering into the Black Box: An
Black Box: An Exploratory Treatise on the Development of Self in Young Chil-dren”Disorders and Dysfunctions of the Self: Rochester Symposium on Development and Psychopathology, ed D.Cichetti and S.L Toth (University of Rochester Press: 1994) 5:79-148.
16. Allan N. Schore, Affect Dysregulation and Disorders of the Self (New York: W.W.Norton, 2003), p. 64. While representations of attachment states are of interest to researchers, artistic creation itself gets little, if any, attention. Uses of language are measured in AAI assessments, and visual images have been used by Main et al. to help ascertain security of attachment in children. But the creative processes themselves, as adjuncts to anxious attachments, escape notice. If, as S. S. Tomkins asserts, “human beings have a fundamental need to reduce affect inhibition” then one might suppose the expressive arts to be of interest in research. As it happens, only glancing references to the attachment precursors of creativity appear in reports: for example in a recent account of affect regulation to the American painter Edward Hopper. Hopper was notably avoidant in social relationships and controlling in his marriage, but what function did his bleak pictures have? It is that question we are addressing here. (Cassidy and Shaver eds., Handbook of Attachment, pp. 790-1.)
17. Ibid., pp. 180-1. See also pp. 186-7.
18. Ibid., pp. 188-9.
19. Ibid., pp. 142-3. See Schore’s bibliography for papers on interactive repair by E. Z. Tronick and mother-infant gaze exchange by B. Beebe and F. M. Lachmann. Early studies are found in Rene Spitz, A Psychoanalytic Study lf Normal and Deviant Development of Object Relations (New York, 1965).