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Regan Rosburg
Advisor: Deborah Davidson
April 13, 2015
The Call of the Redwing Blackbird
Using Sigmund Freud’s description of mourning, melancholia and mania, I
outlined in my previous papers a comparable theory; many members of global
society are suffering from an unresolved, overlapping, arrested kind of
“environmental melancholia.” The melancholia, and the resulting symptoms of
mania, is rooted in an inability to properly mourn the ecological deaths around the
planet. My last paper drew direct correlation between how investigating the ways in
which the human brain deals with melancholic ambivalence (defensive feelings of
splitting, detachment and denial of reality) could help foster reparation in those
individuals who suffering from environmental melancholia.
In this paper I will address how overcoming environmental melancholia can
be achieved by transforming these un-mourned ecological losses by using
symbolism as a transformative act. In so doing, the ambivalence is addressed and
emotions are transformed into reparation. Furthermore, I believe that the artist,
who is versed in symbolism, can play a substantial role in fostering the healing of
others by encouraging symbolic, transformative grieving through the artist’s work.
In this paper, I will show how my own work intentionally explores this idea by
addressing the only grief I could possibly fully comprehend: my own.
Renee Lertzman pointed out that psychology is a useful too to analyze how
the human brain processes distressful information, often resulting in disassociation
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and splitting (3). She goes on to say that human beings are capable of profound
reparation if they can acknowledge feelings of ambivalence surrounding grief and
loss. If the object of loss is intangible (like a melting glacier one has never seen, or a
distant rainforest frog who is losing its habitat to logging), the loss is abstracted.
Naturally, feelings of ambivalence arise because of wanting to help, feeling helpless,
feeling overwhelmed by the magnitude of loss, and feeling ineffectual. The space to
mourn the situation or object (or frog) does not exist. However, in psychology, if an
individual creates a symbol of the lost object, or performs a symbolic act, then even
an intangible object and the ambivalent feelings surrounding its loss can be
addresses, and one could begin to move through stages of grief (7).
Creative formation of symbols to elaborate a loss is the mind attempting to
healthfully psychologically process the intangible loss. It not only acknowledges the
ambivalence, it also provides an emotional bridge for one to step over into healing
and reparation. As psychologist Hanna Segal wrote in her groundbreaking work, A
Psycho Analytical Approach to Aesthetics, “…symbol formation is the outcome of a
loss; it is a creative act involving the pain and the whole work of mourning” (7). She
also points out that the very essence of art is the use of symbols (7).
Proust is a perfect example of touching his grief. As he continuously lost his
family and friends later in life, he began to write them into stories as a conscious
way of recapturing them, and rendering them eternal through his work (3). Proust
reveals what Segal referred to as an “acute awareness” to what is inherent in all
artists, and that is the desire to recreate a once loved but now ruined or lost object, a
“ruined internal world and self” (3). The love for the object exists in the self, and the
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artist addresses the ambivalence successfully, unconsciously pulling together the
fragments of memory of the object and expressing it in a creative work. This applies
to music, poetry, sculpture, visual arts, performance, etc. The artist re-assembles
and re-creates his or her loss, which is healthy.1 “It is only when the loss has been
acknowledged and the mourning experienced that the re-creation can take place,”
according to Segal (2).
The “ruined internal world and self,” quoted in the paragraph above, is an
important statement. A few psychologists have studied the relationship between
two unlikely types of people: neurotic/psychotic patients, and artists. Normal
individuals, artists and neurotics can all experience profound feelings of
ambivalence towards a variety of life factors. What psychologists find interesting is
that, although artists and neurotics can experience the same “difficulties of
unresolved depression, the collapse of his internal world” (Segal 7), the artist
possesses (over the neurotic) a high, inherent tolerance for anxiety and depression.
Put another way, while the neurotic patients defaulted to “manic defenses
leading to a denial of psychic reality”2 (7), artists were acutely aware of both their
inner reality which they outwardly express, and the external reality of the materials
in which the expressing happens.
Segal regards artist as having an acute sense of reality (7), despite the
common misconception that artists are out of touch, or flakey. More importantly,
1 Segal gives examples of artists who were inhibited in their ability to make work because of the inability to
work through depressive anxieties, which can lead to a full stop of creative production or the production of an
unsuccessful product (Segal 3).
2 This mirrors the same manic defenses listed in previous papers regarding defense mechanisms due to
unresolved environmental melancholia.
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their ability to step into fantasy allows the artist to communicate his fantasies to
others. This is done with symbols.
Psychologist Carl Jung was a contemporary of Sigmund Freud. Both men
were interested in psychology of the unconscious, and shared many similar
viewpoints. They agreed that neurosis/psychosis and artistic expression were
closely related, but Freud believed that all complexes3 (Berk 19) were derivative of
one drive: the sexual drive. Furthermore, any symbols in dreams or divulged in
therapeutic sessions were repressed subliminal desires derived from the libido’s
sexual drive.
Jung, however, believed that this view of Freud’s was short sighted. He
believed there were many drives, including a creative drive that had nothing to do
with sexual repression (20) Also, subconscious symbols were, to him, a result of not
only the personal subconscious, but also the “collective unconscious” (13). He
deduced that symbols had been stamped in our evolved human subconscious over
time. Also, he thought that the unconscious mind was not repression, as Freud
believed, but rather a “constantly renewed origin of consciousness (…) that we can
return to (…) especially when we ourselves are involved in a creative process” (29).
In other words, the symbols were driven by millions of years of ingrained
archetypes, accessed and made part of a culture’s mythology, and were the driving
inspiring force of inspiration behind science, philosophy, art, and religion.
So an artist accesses symbols by harnessing and using fantasy thinking, but
there is an important clarification to make between a symbol and a sign. A sign is
3 Tjeu van den Berk describes a complex as a collection of images and ideas that are clustered around an
unconscious drive (17).
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bound to a code, it is explained in only one way. A symbol, on the other hand, is
unconsciously picked by an individual’s psyche to represent something else,
particularly something lost.
In my experience, I did not choose the symbols. Rather, the symbols chose
me. My father gave me a coffee cup last summer. At the time, I found to be a kind of
chatchki item, not to my taste at all. I almost threw it away. Two and a half weeks
ago, my father died unexpectedly. That object now has come to represent a symbol
of connection with him on a daily basis. The loss of his physical presence in my life
had, without my conscious intention, transformed itself into a tangible object that I
could touch every day. In so doing, I could once again feel connected to him. My
ambivalence was transformed, and my grief focused into an actual object.
I will present another example. The day my father died, my brother and I
were on a walk, four miles from the hospital. Our conversation was interrupted by
the sudden presence of redwing blackbirds calling to us on power lines above our
heads. I remember the color of the sky, the sound of the birds, and the strangeness
of their insistent call. Moments later my phone rang and my uncle told me my
father’s heart had stopped beating. Somewhere in my acutely aware internal world,
always poised on the verge of collapse, experiencing a sudden loss and ruin, those
red-wing black birds became symbols of my father’s soul calling to me from four
miles away in his hospital bed as he departed this earth. I could never run as fast as
those birds could fly.
The experience of recognizing personal symbolism from my father’s untimely
death has provided me with insight into my own artwork. After years of
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begrudgingly resisting the idea of didacticism in my work, I finally understand the
correlation between symbols, signs, didacticism, and layered artwork. Signs
(images, quickly associated documentation of things that have come to signify
destruction and habitat loss) are didactic. In the viewer they lead to a conclusion,
and in the case of challenging ecologically collapsing themes, they can put the
viewer on the defensive and lead to a classic defensive response: emotional shutdown or avoidance. Symbols, however, are a softened (but not overly) conceptual
approach.
In my own work, the adoption of symbols is like a language I have begun to
write, with characters I follow. Some have free associations that could be universal,
like the freedom of birds. Some could have the literal association of my political
views, like my materials of plastic. However, I have come to realize that it’s the true
and authentic connection behind the personal symbols that matters more in
communicating an attempted reconciliation of personal grief, than to have an
obvious, didactic artwork. If the artwork is personal, and executed with both an
inner grasp of reality and an outer grasp of materials, then any general emotions of
grief, loss, and ambivalence could be conveyed with ease to an audience.
As Sigmund Freud said, “What the artist aims at is to awaken in us the same
mental constellation as that which in him produced the impetus to create” (Segal 8).
Artists are always, in some way, representing what he or she sees, feels, thinks
about, experiences, or loses. The need to reclaim and resurrect what he or she was
inspired (or confounded) by is to address his or her ambivalence. This honest,
authentic, creative practice is something that both psychologists and ecologists
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could benefit from. These strengths of the courageous artist, versed in symbolic
transformation to process loss and grief, could aide in addressing the global
epidemic of environmental melancholia.
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Works Cited
Lertzman, Renee A. Environmental Melancholia: Psychological Dimensions of
Engagement. Unpublished Book. Expected Print Date: June 2015.
Segal, Hanah. "A Psycho-Analytical Approach to Aesthetics." The International
Journal of Psychoanalysis 33 (1952): 196-207. Web.
van den Berk, Tjeu. Jung on Art : The Autonomy of the Creative Drive. Florence, KY,
USA: Routledge, 2012. ProQuest ebrary. Web. 9 April 2015.