By Michelle Galanter, Ed.M. 

One of the problems with psychoanalysis is that the unconscious, the subject of its study, lurks in the shadows and disappears when the lights go on. We are then, as either analyst or analysand, always squinting into the middle distance for something sensible to take shape. Unfortunately, we do not always get as lucky as the Queen in the fairytale “Rumpelstiltskin,” accidentally overhearing the name she sought while wandering in the woods. And yet, we have to continue to try to pin down those shadows. 

Words sometimes fail us when trauma, or even old, pre-linguistic, unconscious material is at hand. Words describe a thing, but images can ‘function as the thing itself’ (Kandinsky). In this way, I think images—imagined, drawn or seen—can work well in the psychoanalytic process. My favorite form of images is comics. I would define the comic image as the simplest form of a thing that still carries the meaning of the thing. It is like the atom of human intention, and comics have several features that are relevant to the psychoanalytic quest. 

First, comics are a distinctive kind of symbol. In this way, they can function like dreams which operate on a decidedly symbolic system. However, the symbolic meaning of comic imagery does not derive from associations, as it does in dreams, it derives from qualities within the image itself. The weight of the meaning of the comic image can be fully felt, as is, without having to uncover symbolic associations. It is as if an actual artifact from the unconscious appears before your very eyes when you draw or look at a comic image. Why do I claim comics have this special connection to the unconscious? Because they don’t have any embellishment or unnecessary detail to claim conscious attention. The simplicity of the comic image ensures that it is created (or read) predominantly by the unconscious. The comic image does not dazzle or delight. It is merely the most compact way of communicating a thing, and it is in that economy in which the most profound meaning can be made visible. 

Additionally, comic drawings are composed of lines. As we’ve seen from the impressionists, not all art is made of lines. In fact, nothing in the natural world is made of lines. Human beings created them because they are just so useful. Lines do many things but mostly they define. They define what is a thing and what is part of that thing, and what is not the thing nor part of it. One of the features of the psychoanalytic process is to make the inchoate nature of a person’s self more grounded and determined. We do this by finding boundaries within ourselves. This is ‘me,’ this is ‘not me.’ Once something is defined by a boundary, it exists—we can look at it, we can see it. In effect, boundaries move material from the unconscious into awareness. The leap from psychological boundary to drawn line barely takes us off the ground. It is almost not an overstatement to say a boundary IS a line. Through the use of lines, comic drawings define what is and what is not. Through lines, comic images create shape. The shapes in comics are not nebulous, but solid, and we are able to pour our thoughts and feelings into them to be contained. As Ivan Brunnetti in his book Aesthetics writes: “The calligraphic quality that I see in cave paintings is still there in Kandinsky and in Leonardo’s beard in red chalk and in the way Charles Schulz drew Patty’s hair in the early Peanuts strips. The line in all its incarnations is, to me, the mind asserting itself, absorbing and transforming experience.” 

Comic images not only contain efficient symbolic significance and boundaries, but they also activate imagination. Piaget and Inhelder wrote that [even the simplest drawing] “presupposes some kind of anticipatory scheme.” What this means is that the viewer of a comic is doing something to the image. The viewer is making something happen. Paul Klee remarked that a “line is a dot that went for a walk.” When we draw or look at line drawings like comics, we ‘go for a walk,’ too. We begin an imaginative and transformative process in the same way that analysis requires imagination and transformation. 

There are some things too powerful to look at—Medusa, the sun, the fire in the prisoner’s cave in Plato’s story. Perseus is given a reflective shield and he is then able to safely look at the gorgon’s reflection on the shield and not be petrified. We often consider the contents of our unconscious as being too horrible to see as well. Comic images can give us this kind of safety in reflection. We don’t have to stare too strongly at our own truth, we can take it in through a symbolic form that defines boundaries in its use of lines and symbolizes through quasi-imitative imagery. Through comic images, we can see our unconscious, define it and work with it in a future forming, meaningful way. I feel that in addition to the therapeutic benefit of interventions that involve making art, there are worlds of meaning to uncover in the psychoanalytic process by simply looking at art, specifically comic art, and by observing what is felt. 

 

Michelle Galanter, Ed.M., is a Psychology lecturer at Monroe College in the Bronx, and a first year candidate in the Licensure Qualifying Program at the Manhattan Institute for Psychoanalysis.

 

References:

Brunetti, Ivan. Aesthetics: A Memoir, Yale University Press, 2013

Piaget, Jean and Inhelder, Barbel. The Child’s Conception of Space, W.W. Norton and Company, 1967

Kandinsky, Wassily. “On the spiritual in art and paintings in particular.” Kandinsky Complete Writings on Art, Edited by Lindsay, Kenneth C. and Vergo, Peter, De Capo Press, 1994

Klee, Paul. The Diaries of Paul Klee, University of California Press, 1964

Lionells, M., Fiscalini, J., Mann, C. H., & Stern, D. B. (Eds.). (1995). Handbook of Interpersonal Psychoanalysis. Analytic Press, Inc.

  

 

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