Analyst of the Imagination by Pearson Jenny;

Author:Pearson, Jenny;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Routledge

III

Where previously psychoanalysis had followed Freud in seeing illusion negatively as a failure to adapt to reality, Milner and Winnicott came to view it positively as a means of adaptation. Milner told her biographer designate, Margaret Walters, of the stimulus that she had found to her thinking about illusion in Christopher Caudwell’s Marxist history of the social function of poetry, Illusion and Reality (1937). Classical Marxism had been as impotent as classical psychoanalysis in finding a way to value the artistic activities of human beings. Caudwell, however, typically of his time, had married the world-views of Freud and Marx and developed a view of art and science as parallel exercises in illusion through which individual men and women sought to resolve the contradictions between themselves and the world around them. “It is the characteristic of the artist”, Caudwell argued, “that his products are adaptative, that the artistic illusion is begotten of the tension between instinct and consciousness, between productive forces and productive relations, the very tension which drives on all society to future reality” (p. 119). Artists in the subjective sphere of art, and scientists in the objective sphere of scientific theory, react to the constraints of reality by developing fictions; they pursue illusions that have been abstracted from the real phenomenological world, and that may prove useful in the unending struggle of men and women to accept or to resolve the tensions within their social experience.

Caudwell’s belief that the illusions of art and science were fundamentally adaptive was influential on Milner and, through her, on Winnicott, although this influence took a depoliticized form that focused upon the individual struggle to maintain creative autonomy rather than upon the collective struggle to remove the contradictions of bourgeois society. Caudwell’s Marxism was itself adapted by Milner to the liberal world of London psychoanalysis, with its professional interests in individual and family psychology. There were, moreover, particular tensions within that world which helped to shape the adaptation of Caudwell’s ideas. Milner and Winnicott did not altogether agree about illusion, as we shall see; but it is significant that their ideas had a common origin during the 1940s, in the aftermath of the supposedly scientific quarrels within the British Psychoanalytical Society between the supporters of Melanie Klein and those of Anna Freud. Both Milner and Winnicott found in the concept of illusion a way of preserving their own individual creativity within that professional world; and in this way the concept was developed to perform the function that it describes. It recovered its long-standing countercultural value in their hands, as a weapon to be wielded against scientism and what Winnicott called “split-off intellectual functioning” (1971, p. xii). It was no accident perhaps, in the context of those “scientific” quarrels, that while Caudwell stressed the similarities between art and science, Milner and Winnicott so often stressed their differences.

Milner’s explorations of the positive value of illusion came in her book On Not Being Able To Paint, first published in 1950 and revised in 1957, and in her

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.