Across the arts the artist sees to it that the object he makes has a certain look, that—to appropriate a word, just for its generality—it has a certain surface—a visual surface, an auditory surface, a narrative surface—and this look, this surface, has been chosen just so as to bring down upon the work of art the projection of some specific mental constellation.
—Richard Wollheim, The Sheep and the Ceremony: The Leslie Stephen Lecture 1979
§1. Well summed in my epigraph, a single theme unites the several and somewhat disparate contributions made by Richard Wollheim to the theory of art and especially to the theory of painting. For lack of a better term, I might call these contributions technical. Typically they have been canvased in reviews of the elements of Wollheim’s philosophical aesthetics. These elements include his materialism, partly expressed in his doctrine of the identity of type and token in art, that is, of the identity of art and its objects, a term that had a triple meaning for Wollheim (though in Art and Its Objects [1975] he emphasized the physical object of art); his analysis of seeing-as and (in a later elaboration) of seeing-in in our sensuous understanding of visual art; his focus on the “secondary meaning” of artworks, that is, the unconscious significance for the artist of the activity of making them and on their “instrumentality” or felt capacity to “change the world”; his doctrine of the “internal spectator” in the artist; his critique of so-called formalism in pictorial criticism and, to a lesser extent, of formalism in the configurative approaches of certain pictorial artists; his accounts of pictorial representation, “twofoldness,” and “pictorial organization”; and his emphasis on the communicability of artistic intentions, that is, the transfer of pictorial meaning to properly attentive beholders of the artwork who become—as participants in this transfer—spectators of, and in ideal cases privy to, the depths of the artist’s mind. The theme of all this conceptualization (often highly original) is best expressed by using the phrase that I just employed. The depths of the artist’s mind have a peculiar surface, and this surface—the work of pictorial art—is related to those depths in such a way as to require analysis in the Wollheimian terms I have enumerated. I will take the strongest possible view of this matter: the terms were developed by Wollheim entirely in the service of this theme. They were elements in consolidating it as art theory.
But we will not find a single systematic discussion of the theme in Wollheim’s strictly philosophical work in aesthetics and the philosophy of mind, even though he acknowledged it at innumerable junctures, and in The Thread of Life (1984), in Painting as an Art (1987), and in The Mind and Its Depths (1993) he came close to presenting it outright. It is, of course, the psychoanalytic frame, substance, and conclusion of his art theory. The key to this psychoanalytic substance—the heart of its conclusion—is encoded in the simple phrase that I have already deployed three times, namely, “the mind and its depths,” especially in the final all-important s in the plural word depths. Because the mind has depths, plural, it is necessary to approach the surface of painting (insofar as it is a product of the depths of the mind) in a certain way. This approach is related to (but it cannot be the same as) the way in which we approach the visual relation between painted surface and pictorial depth, singular. The visual relation between painted surface and pictorial depth relays relations between the several depths of the mind; hence it externalizes and can transfer those depths to us. It follows that any technical or theoretical clarity we can get about the relation between painted surface and pictorial depth—for example, in models of seeing-as, seeing-in, and pictorial organization or in a critique of so-called formalism—might help us to get clear about relations among the depths of the mind. But what goes on in the depths of the mind determines the relation between surface and depth in painting: Wollheim’s accounts of seeing-as, pictorial representation, and formalism were tailored specifically to show this.
Hence the subtitle of this chapter: “Freudianism, Formalism, and Richard Wollheim.” A Freudian’s concern for the depths of the mind and a formalist’s concern for the surface order of the artwork would seem to address different entities—even to operate on entirely different planes. Indeed, the terms depth and surface have quite different literal extensions in Freudianism on the one side and in formalism on the other. But Wollheim’s interest lay in working out their interconnection. In the final twist in his project, the literal optical relation between surface and depth in painting helps confirm the validity of the master metaphor of the depths of the mind—its model of personal psychological history as a stratification and sedimentation of images. If psychoanalysis frames Wollheim’s philosophical account of painting, then, his philosophical account of painting in the end warrants the psychoanalysis. We can plunge into this creative tautology at any point: with the painting, with the philosophy, or with the psychoanalysis.
§2. I will begin my discussion of this matter by making some ground clearing remarks about tasks that I will not undertake to discharge fully. The psychoanalytic framework within which Wollheim developed his philosophical account of painting was largely Kleinian. (It goes without saying that Wollheim’s own lengthy analysis was Kleinian.) I will come back to the literal question of the “aspectivity” of internal objects in Klein’s sense; Wollheim’s model of pictorial surface and psychic depths partly turns on it. Wollheim’s Kleinianism was inflected at certain crucial points, however, by the terminology of the British theorists of object relations, notably W. R. Bion and Hanna Segal.1 In addition, though probably less happily from Wollheim’s point of view, it reflected the general theory of the elements of internalization—incorporation, introjection, identification, and imagination—developed within the so-called ego psychology associated with Heinz Hartmann and Rudolph Loewenstein and synthesized in a text cited several times by Wollheim in his essays in the philosophy of mind, namely, Roy Shafer’s Aspects of Internalization (1975). I say unhappily because Wollheim explicitly rejected Hartmann’s own notion of a “conflict-free ego zone.” He regarded Hartmann’s influential formulation as a departure from psychoanalytic fundamentals, and in particular as a revisionist view of the ego, or part or phase of the ego, that must be inconsistent with the Kleinian account of the ego as the site of primal and persisting anxiety.2
I have no special comments on any of this. But I would like to remark Wollheim’s constant and sometimes strained tendency to convert Freudian narratives of psychic history into Kleinian narratives. For example, in his interpretation of the neurosis of the Wolf Man (drawing on the Wolf Man’s memoirs of his life as well as Freud’s reconstruction of his early childhood), Wollheim emphasized the patient’s anxious, guilty response to the death of his sister Anna when they were young adults, leading to the patient’s continuing inability to find an object—a female erotic and familial partner or a male friend and mentor—that was “free of anxiety.”3 This feature of the Wolf Man’s psychic history depended on a triggering episode, the death of Anna, that occurred relatively late in his life. Therefore it barely entered Freud’s narrative of the constitution of the Wolf Man’s obsessive-compulsive neurosis (or complex of neuroses) in his earliest childhood—a time in which the boy’s sensuous and scopic relations with his father, with his nanny, with a serving maid in the family home, and with certain teachers (including a Herr Wolf) were just as important as his jealous fondness for his sister, even though that bond was deeply significant. (Wollheim was well aware, for example, of Jeffrey Masson’s recovery of documents that purported to show that the little boy’s nanny had prematurely eroticized his anal region along lines that were later expressed in his specifically homosexual neurosis as an adult, namely, his inability to move his bowels without the help of an enema rendered by a favorite manservant.) Freud had given as much emphasis to this “object relation” in the Wolf Man’s neurotic complex as to the patient’s tendency to stalk certain women in the streets. To be sure, Wollheim offered perspicuous criticism of Freud’s rhetorical convolutions in narrating the Wolf Man’s original “primal scene,” his supposed real glimpse (at the age of one and a half) of his parents making love (during which his father supposedly entered his mother anally or at least “from behind”), reiterated in such later images as his fascination (at the age of five or so) with the upraised buttocks of the maid at work and eventually in such transfers (at the age of seventeen or eighteen) as his desire to present his own buttocks for his manservant. As Wollheim wrote, “the very factor that had led Freud in 1897 to reject the seduction theory [namely, that sexual seductions were sometimes or always fantasized] should have led him in 1914 [in the case history of the Wolf Man] to care rather less about the historical reality of the child’s perception of the servant-girl bent over her humble task or of the parents locked in copulation.”4 But my point here is that Wollheim took the case to reveal a Kleinian history of pre-oedipal anxiety about the destructive results (for the self and for others) of the ego’s projection of sadistic aggressive desires, whereas Freud had emphasized the constitution of the Wolf Man’s childhood neurosis (his fantasies of being and of being devoured by a wolf) in oedipal conflicts, in particular in the “castration anxiety” evoked by the primal scene and its reiterations. Both the Freudian and the Kleinian reading of the case materials had to be psychoanalytic constructions, even historical reconstructions. But Freud was more exposed than Klein to criticism about this unavoidable feature of the analysis—of any analysis—because he devoted so much attention in the published case history of the Wolf Man to the historical and hermeneutic problems of the reconstruction as such, that is, to the issue of discovering the first or original layer, the “primal scene,” in what later became the depths of the patient’s mind.5
Early on, Wollheim noticed the complementarity of the Bradleyan ethical theory that had occupied his graduate studies, including his earliest philosophical publications, and Kleinian analysis. In 1975 he addressed the matter in an elegant lecture, “The Good Self and the Bad Self,” in which he compared the “moral psychology of British idealism and the English school of psychoanalysis.”6 Here he suggested that “Kleinian theory pulls in the more numerous and ethically more ambiguous figures of the inner world” than Bradley’s ethics tended to do; Klein envisioned a mind that is more murky, morally less clearly divided, than the purely “good” and “evil” centers of knowing that Bradley had identified as the notional poles of our moral life, our “interior moral dialogue.”7 In the same lecture Wollheim also dismissed the late-Freudian doctrine of the superego, however important the “structural theory” of the psyche might have been to the definition of Klein’s psychoanalytic metapsychology. For him the notion of superego, however popular, was neither a helpful contribution to imperativist moral theory, as some writers would have it, nor a satisfying substantive account of our inner moral dialogue. As he wrote in a closely related essay, “the identification involved in the formation of the super-ego is somewhat special, in that the super-ego once introjected remains peculiarly distant from the ego—as Freud puts it, ‘it confronts the other contents of the ego’—whereas ordinarily in identification the introject becomes very much part of the ego.”8 It would be a psychological error, then, if not a philosophical mistake, to root our moral thought and action in the superego if human motivation really arises in the ego (and indeed largely in its specifically unconscious regions). As Wollheim said in his lecture on Bradley and Klein, the “injunctions or fulminations of internal figures not lying at the core of the ego [i.e., lying instead in the supposed superego], play at the best an unreliable, at the worst a deleterious, role in the moral life.”9
As the last-quoted sentence might suggest, Wollheim’s gaze was always trained on the “core of the ego.” Here it is essential to notice that Wollheim’s concept of the ego, characteristically, was specifically Klein’s in reaction to—in rivalry with—Anna Freud’s. Pace Anna Freud, the ego, for Klein and Wollheim, is not a relatively late-coming defensive development. Instead it is an original and primitive “bodily ego,” to use the term Wollheim proposed in a crucial essay with that title and that he continued to use in his later publications in the philosophical psychology of mind and the psychoanalytic theory of art. Bodily ego is the most primitive self, virtually an animal bundle of sensations and reflexes, that has been constituted in basic instincts and archaic pre-oedipal incorporations and expulsions of early objects.10
Given all this, Wollheim’s major interest (like Klein’s) lay in the unconscious history of the ego in its development from the primitive incorporative phases of selfhood to the more integrated ones, involving complex hierarchies and recursions of introjection and identification, including self-identifications predicated on the prior emergence of the primitive self—especially as the ego passes through the “paranoid-schizoid” and “depressive” positions identified in Kleinian theory. Again I have no special comment to make here. As far as I can see, Wollheim’s terms always remained familiarly Kleinian: I will take it that there is no controversy about this, and in the remainder I will simply assume it. Still, the fact that Wollheim’s philosophy of mind (we might better call it a psychoanalytic philosophy of unconscious ego thought) was almost always strictly Kleinian seems to be a point that has escaped many analytic-philosophical commentaries on it. Or, if it has not escaped them, it has certainly embarrassed them: analytic philosophers who have been respectful of Wollheim’s technical philosophical work would rather the Kleinianism simply wasn’t there. To take a recent example, in a wide-ranging anthology of analytic-philosophical expositions of Wollheim’s theories of depiction, representation, and expression, and despite the incisiveness of the contributions, the name and the ideas of Klein are never mentioned, even if the authors occasionally address the psychodynamics of art as Wollheim understood them.11
§3. I can now set up one of my primary arguments about Wollheim’s work. In Wollheim’s Kleinian model of the person, the depths of the mind must be the successively interleaved phases of ego integration. To introduce a point that will need further exposition: early on Wollheim evidently realized that the phases of ego integration stand to one another in the historical development of the subject (i.e., the human person) essentially as pictures stand to the object-worlds they are pictures of. Each successively emergent phase of the ego-in-integration as it were pictorially represents—it iconically virtualizes—the more primitive internal world of objects and figures that has historically constituted it.
This representation specifically takes the psychological form of highly imagistic hallucinatory fantasy. By hallucination I explicitly mean to designate the features that separate fantasmatic iconicity from those pictures that visually transcribe or copy their objects. If the latter can be illusions (or trompes l’oeil), the former are delusions—a vivification, an exaggeration, and a rearrangement of what might be veridically perceived as an object for the self by the self, an internal reordering in which the self ’s self-misrepresentation plays a crucial role. There need be no external picturing here. Though fantasy represents exterior (or real-world) objects as well as interior (or psychic) objects and figures, or at least primitive part objects, fantasy as such is an internal imaging—what Wollheim ingeniously called the “mind’s image of itself.” This phrase only makes full sense in its Kleinian context. When the mind images or represents—when it sees or knows—the world, it knows it as its incorporated world of internal objects and figures having lesser or greater unity and wholeness. These objects and figures were themselves constituted as higher-order, historically devolved hallucinations of more primitive and archaic incorporations of part objects—as virtualizations of virtualizations or pictures of pictures. The mind’s image of itself, then, is a history of imagistic replications. Its depths are hierarchically ordered, historically nested Picture/ World relations in which the worlds pictured are internal worlds of fantasied objects and figures and the world pictures are fantasmatic icons, imagos. (Wollheim did not much use the last term, perhaps in view of the fact that its psychoanalytic lineage was neither strictly Freudian nor characteristically Kleinian. But it is helpful here. In Freudian and Kleinian texts in German, the one word Bild applies across a wide range of psychic and material virtualizations of objects, figures, and worlds, including dream images, imagined objects, and pictorial representations. In a tradition peculiar to British psychoanalysis and its translations of Freud, the word phantasy is used to designate that property of imaging that I call fantasmatic iconicity. The object of fantasmatic iconicity can be called imago.)
Wollheim’s perspective on these psychic perspectives, on the inner world pictures, was stated by him in several places in the 1960s and early 1970s. In particular, it was the topic of his Ernest Jones Lecture at the British Psycho-Analytical Society in March 1968, published in the following year as “The Mind and the Mind’s Image of Itself,” one of his most important writings by far.12 Wollheim’s recognition that in the last analysis there is no essential psychic difference between internal picturing, that is, the bodily origins and imagistic order of hallucinatory fantasy, and external picturing, the production of real artifacts that depict worlds of objects and figures, is central to any appreciation of his work. Of course, there are many contingent differences between external and internal pictures. Typically, for example, paintings are publicly visible and accessible. By contrast, fantasies are always imagistically and experientially inaccessible to everyone but the subject who has them in “centrally imagining” and “experientially remembering” himself and his world, to use terms drawn from Wollheim’s essays in the philosophy of unconscious mind.13 Again, paintings are made with shapes and colors on a support. Fantasies, however, project objects and figures in a virtual incarnation, that is, as a spatial and temporal manifold subjectively experienced by a person when he or she fantasizes (about) a world. While depictive paintings construct a virtual depth, fantasies have phenomenal spatiality. But the crucial feature of both paintings and fantasies is what Wollheim sometimes called their representationality, for pictoriality in the sense of depiction, on Wollheim’s account of the matter, is a function of fantasmatic iconicity—a particular relay or reiteration of it and a peculiar involution or reversion in it.14
Like Klein, Wollheim invoked internal and external “objects” and “figures,” and frequently likened the relation of an introjected external object or figure to an introjective internal object or figure to the relation of “a real-life figure and a fictional character modelled upon it.”15 Indeed, the parallel or analogy between the introjective figuration of human beings in a person’s real psychic life and the fictional representation of characters in literature seems to have been close to Wollheim’s heart; he ventured it in a number of places. As he wrote, for example, in On the Emotions:
When a fictional character metaphorizes from its real-life model, though it will inherit some of its qualities from its prototype, some will come from its creator, others from the exigencies of the narrative, and yet others, which could never be realized in this world, can be traced to the very nature of fiction. More particularly, we might find the analogue for an internal figure in a fictional character that departs from its pallid original through the grandeur, the extravagance, the horror, that it would take the imagination of Dickens, or Dostoievski, or Proust, to impart to it.16
This fictional relation is also an imagistic one. As I have put it already, the real-life personages are iconically virtualized in the inner world at the same time as the fantasmatic icons literally enable a person to see the real world around him.
But in this regard, for me the gravest defect—the most serious lacuna—in Wollheim’s general model of art and the mind is simply this: he did not offer a fully systematic account of fantasmatic iconicity as the primitive process in the constitution of these objects, figures, and images, real or fictional—of what might be called imagoing, if I might coin a phrase.
To be sure, Wollheim understood imagoing to be “primary process” in Freud’s sense, that is, to be a history of distortion, displacement, and condensation. And perhaps we do not need anything more than these Freudian principles, which transfer the logic of dream images in particular to the imagistic order of the internal world in general. But I think we need more than a generalization of the model of the dream. While the sleeper often knows the dream to be hallucination, he or she experiences the inner world as the actual world of waking life. And while the dream, according to Freud, discharges psychic energy in sleep because it cannot be discharged in waking action (supposedly it runs the discharge backwards from motor to perceptual centers), the fantasmatic world permits real action—indeed often demands it. The dream arises from the id, and it is bound by taboo; the fantasmatic world is bound by fear, anxiety, love, hate, guilt, and envy, and it arises in the ego. I believe that Wollheim would have agreed with me on these points. Two chapters of The Thread of Life of 1984 (they are titled “Iconicity, Imagination, and Desire” and “Experiential Memory, Introjection, and the Inner World” respectively) come closest to the kind of account that I think we need, what Wollheim called a “phenomenology of the imagination and of phantasy.” (These chapters were based on a quartet of technical papers in the psychoanalytic philosophy of unconscious mind written in the late 1970s: “The Bodily Ego,” “Imagination and Identification,” “Wish Fulfillment,” and “Experiential Memory.”)17 And, in turn, “the phenomenology of imagination and of phantasy” has to be assumed in order to understand Painting as an Art, Wollheim’s Mellon Lectures in 1984 (published in 1987). But The Thread of Life shied away from fully engaging the problem of pictoriality at the same time as Painting as an Art shied away from fully engaging the problem of fantasy, memory, and desire. Each book assumed perspectives developed mostly in the other.
What, then, is the account, the model of the mind, in question and at stake throughout Wollheim’s work or distributed throughout it without having been gathered together in one statement? My best attempt at a formula is this: Wollheimian fantasmatic iconicity is specifically unconsciousegoistic seeing-as. In other words, it is Ludwig Wittgenstein’s model of aspectivity or aspect-seeing written or rewritten in Kleinian terms. Here again I make no special comments (beyond noting this unremarked dimension) on Wollheim’s well-known exposition of seeing-as in Art and Its Objects and in his later projects on the nature of pictorial representation; there are many treatments of this topic in the philosophical literature. I propose only that psychic seeing-as was more important to Wollheim than painterly seeing-as. In the end, the latter is really a subset of the former. Of course, psychic seeing-as need not engage the complex literal or optical dynamics of a painted pictorial surface and the painted pictorial depth, conditioned as they must be by the mode of representation (such as perspective) and by the medium of marking (such as brushstrokes). But Wollheim’s implied general account of psychic seeing-as helps us to understand why he wanted to invoke seeing-as to account for depictivelypainted artifacts, the narrow context in which it has generated extensive critical commentary by philosophers of depiction who make little or no reference to the implied general framework, that is, to the replication of fantasmatic iconicity in painting.
To repeat, then, for Wollheim a pictorially marked surface is not the most important kind of imagistic representationality. The real psychological significance of seeing-as lies in virtual-fantasmatic rather than merely optical aspectivity. Indeed, virtual-fantasmatic aspectivity determines optical aspectivity. Ordinarily psychic seeing-as does not encounter the material configuration of a pictorially marked surface; rather it sets up an internal virtual world of object-aspects and figure-aspects. For this very reason the much-debated issue of seeing-as and seeing-in at the special interface between (and as the reconciliation of) marked surface and fictive depth, and its connection with the “twofoldness” of pictorial representation, is an entirely subsidiary problem. Better, the twofoldness of pictorial representation is Wollheim’s description of the surface of what I will call the essentially tertiary structure or threefoldness of fantasmatic iconicity. I will turn to this in the final sections. But another topic must intervene.
§4. It is now appropriate to recall the mediation of Kleinian psychoanalysis that had the most powerful impact on Wollheim’s interrelation of art and the mind, namely, the psychoanalytic art criticism, art theory, and art history of Adrian Stokes. As early as 1959 Wollheim had nominated Stokes as a critic who deserved to be “one of the most influential” of the twentieth century. In later writing he consistently acknowledged the hold of Stokes’s criticism on his own approach to vision, art, and consciousness; Wollheim’s long introduction to a selection of Stokes’s writing, given the revealing title The Image in Form, published in 1972, remains the gold standard of commentary on Stokes. What was the essential message of Stokes for Wollheim? In strictly historiographic terms, Stokes translated the late-Victorian aestheticism of Bloomsbury, in particular Roger Fry’s doctrine of artistic sensibility and Clive Bell’s doctrine of significant form, into the terminology of British psychoanalysis. In turn, Wollheim inherited, improved, and amplified this translation. What is its substance?
For this we must go to one of Wollheim’s earliest efforts to write about art theory and art criticism, namely, the above-mentioned essay on Stokes of 1959, a review of Stokes’s recently published Greek Culture and the Ego.18 In the course of his review, Wollheim expounded Klein’s model of incorporation, “the rhythmic process of introjection-and-projection which sets up a kind of oscillation in all early object-relations.” Incorporation gradually ensures that objects (whether taken in or expelled) can increasingly be recognized by a maturing child as “different aspects or moments of the same ‘whole-object.’” (If you like, there is no integration without multi-aspectivity, and no multi-aspectivity without integration.) Despite a degree of integration and the formation of almost-whole objects, the child (or the child in every adult) continues to fantasize the destruction of objects that cause him anxiety or frustrate and frighten him. And he continues to feel guilt and anxiety about this destructiveness as well as dread the loss that it would entrain, hoping to repair it if only to serve his own narcissistic aims of self-gratification in loving and being loved. To emerge into this “depressive position,” then, is nonetheless to remain bound in an unhappy dynamic of fear, anxiety, guilt, and reparation. A fully repaired and wholly loved whole object deintrojected from the primitive egoistic self and reincorporated as an Other, an ideal of ego integration, must be extremely difficult to attain. The ego’s moves against it are the cause of its own melancholia, its depression upon its destruction of what it wants to love and to be loved by. Indeed, “successful transcendence of the depressive position,” as Wollheim put it, might well seem to be impossible in virtue of the psychic structure of introjection itself, that is, in virtue of the fact that the ego is constituted in incorporating objects that fantasmatically must be destroyed (as dangerously independent and unpredictable Others) in egoistic assimilation and expulsion.19
But consistent with the primordial aestheticism that Wollheim shared with him, Stokes proposed that form in art can “amend, by the construction of whole objects, for [the ego’s] elemental destructiveness.” This was especially true, Stokes thought, of the highly perfected figurative art of the Greek and the Renaissance naturalists (see figures 2, 6, 19, 22, and 23) and of the French classicists and some modern realists (see figures 32 and 33). In Greek Culture and the Ego Stokes urged that artistic form can repair us because it can mirror the ideally integrated ego as “essentially bound up with a sense of physical identity and uniqueness.”20 In the ego the material persistence of the body in corporeally self-identifying a person to himself as himself enables the self to fantasize its wholeness in terms of a physical wholeness, stability, and self-sensateness, despite the hallucinatory virtuality of the fantasmatic part objects, unstable figure imagos, and primitive self-fragments that envelop it and out of which its provisional integration has been devolved. To use Stokes’s term in Greek Culture and the Ego, this “corporeal form” can be projected into art form and fantasmatically returned to the ego (for emphasis, Wollheim capitalized Art and Form). When introjected, art form, then, can serve ego integration beyond the depressive position. Strictly speaking, this psychic or subjective location, this ideal position of personhood, is not the immediate subject of psychoanalytic inquiry, at least insofar as full repair has actually been attained. Aesthetic analysis—even art criticism—would inherit the task of psychoanalytic therapeutics. In conversation Wollheim noted the congruity between Stokes’s notion of the ideally reparative artwork, which he adopted, and Schopenhauer’s model of the amelioratory and redemptive horizons of art (see chapter 2). He seems to have felt, too, that Freud’s pathographies of artists and artworks (see chapters 7 and 8) had typically underestimated or undervalued this psychic work of art—the psychically revolutionary potential of art and the concomitant possibility that art might effect social transformations.
At this point I should note the deep division between Klein’s and any other ego psychology, on the one side, and, on the other side, Jacques Lacan’s antitranscendental telling of the very same story of fantasized corporeal fragmentation, projected corporeal formality (Stokes’s “corporeal form”), and introjected formal corporeality (Stokes’s “form in art” or Wollheim’s “image in form”). According to Lacan, fantasmatic ego fragmentation finds only a delusionary mirror imaging in an “inexhaustible quadrature of the ego” (as Lacan put it) in the symbolic register, that is, in the translocation of the terms of the subject’s emergent selfhood (what Lacan called the dialectic of the ego’s self-verifications) from the fantasmatic-iconic domain or Innenwelt (what Lacan and his coworkers called the Imaginary) to the cultural-linguistic domain or Umwelt (the Symbolic).21 The earliest version of Lacan’s doctrine was formulated without reference to Klein. As I have pointed out elsewhere, Lacan’s famous essay on the “mirror stage” drew on the ideas of his rival Hartmann and his own analyst Loewenstein (founders of non-Kleinian “American-style” ego psychology) and on Paul Schilder’s work in the 1920s on the body image and the body schema.22 Even later on, Lacan did not directly address Klein’s theory, perhaps because Klein did not envision aesthetic transcendence or artistic revolution of the depressive position (indeed, in The Psycho-Analysis of Children Klein used children’s art to interpret the paranoidschizoid and depressive positions of the young artists). Such aestheticism was left to Stokes and Wollheim.
Wollheim vehemently objected to Lacan’s emphasis on the Symbolic. Chiefly he expressed distrust of Lacan’s hypothesis of the linguistic structure of unconscious primary process. As he wrote in the second edition of Sigmund Freud, “Lacan obliterates the more recognizable features of the psyche as Freud saw it: the urgency of desire, the pain of conflict, the looming presence of heavily corporeal figures, and the enduring power of sensuous preverbal sensation.”23 In other words, and to use my terms, Wollheim thought that Lacan underestimated fantasmatic iconicity, the subject’s conflicted desire to have or to be (or to avoid or to expell) figures founded in bodily perception and sensation if repictured in fantasy (i.e., imagos). But what Wollheim really disliked, I think, was Lacan’s—or the inevitable Lacanian—non-or anti-aestheticist conclusion that art can offer us no imaginative reparations, no possibility of “transcendence of the depressive position.” Instead it enforces a symbolic quadration of the ego, a squaring-up or straightening-out that must function as alienation (and even as repression) relative to fantasmatic iconicity and its emergent images of corporeal formality and formal corporeality.
Regrettably I do not have space to address this important dispute here. It would require discussion of Wollheim’s response to such advanced Lacanian cultural analysis as the virtuoso literary criticism of the late Joel Fineman, to whom Wollheim’s Thread of Life was codedicated.24 At the theoretical level, the dispute defines the schism between Kleinian-Wollheimian art criticism and the main (that is to say, the Lacanian) drift of much quasi-psychoanalytic cultural criticism practiced in the 1970s and eighties by academic humanists, although not by psychoanalysts in the English-speaking world, who have mostly preferred some variant of Freudian-Kleinian object-relations and imago theory as the obvious (perhaps an all-too-obvious) platform for critical interpretation of symbolic form in culture. But it is certainly worth noting that the academic fortunes of Wollheim’s Stokesian criticism probably suffered because of its overt incompatibility with the broadly Lacanian direction of the psychoanalytic criticism promulgated by writers in such disciplines as film studies and art history. Ironically enough, Wollheim believed that his criticism was most adequate or most apposite to the political aims of academic humanism in the 1970s and eighties—namely, to one or another variant of socialism and multiculturalism. But he made no sustained effort explicitly to connect his technical writing in moral-political philosophy (for example, on the paradoxes of democracy and social representation) and his psychoanalytic theory of culture. Thus the latter could easily be taken as a merely antiquated or backward-looking outgrowth of late Bloomsbury and Weimar-era socialist aestheticism—of the intellectual world in which Wollheim had grown up—rather than as a fully contemporary late-twentieth-century cultural politics.25
We must count it as a strength of Wollheim’s interventions in this arena, however, that his psychoanalytic criticism of painting, notably in Painting as an Art, never overestimated the reparative possibilities of art, as psychoanalytic aesthetics has often tended to do, often too affirmative by far about the psychic work of art. Despite his Stokesian heritage, Wollheim would have rejected the very notion of psychoanalytic aesthetics, I think, if said aesthetics introduced idealism into psychodynamic history—the idealism, for example, of the “transcendence of the depressive position” in art imagined by Stokes. Wollheim always remarked painting’s difficulties in shifting the self from narcissistic and paranoid-schizoid fantasmatic investments to depressive and ultimately to reparative fantasmatic ones.
Why does painting have difficulties? Because its inherent representationality (its order and history as what I have called psychic seeing-as or imagoing) requires that even if its surface (or form) imagines a reparation, its depth (or image) continues to imagine destruction and loss. We might call this difficulty the psychic double bind of pictorial twofoldness. Put another way, in virtue of the fantasmatic iconicity or hallucinatory structure of the Imaginary itself (regardless of the “linguistic” structure of the unconscious described by Lacan), the ego cannot fully transcend the depressive position. The mind’s image of itself cannot wish away the primitive objects and figures in which the mind itself has been constituted. As Wollheim put the point in The Sheep and the Ceremony, “the peculiar inescapability of the human body, or the way in which in any deep conflict, such as that which necessarily surrounds the submission to the ethical, the body, particularly in its more primitive functioning, is likely to make an appearance on both sides—on one side as fact, or in its own reality, on the other side as idea, or lending content to certain crucial internal representations—sets new and altogether dramatic limitations upon human aspiration.”26 In recognizing this constraint, Wollheim’s criticism detranscendentalized Stokes’s aestheticism even as he accepted that Stokes had identified the ideal teleology of artistic form, namely, as the ego projection to be (re)introjected by the ego as an external model of its provisional integration.
Here we touch the bottom in Wollheim’s general project. As I have implied all along, there must be an intimate connection (I have described it in terms of psychic seeing-as and fantasmatic iconicity) between the corporeal form of the bodily ego and Form in Art as it might be addressed by the strange analytic technique, the quasi-psychoanalytic technique, that was tailored for it, namely, so-called Formalism.
§5. Wollheim’s critique of formalism turns on the claim that the chief varieties of formalism reify the visual orders and relations of the marked surface of painting, pictorial or not. What he called Manifest and Latent Formalism, he argued, overlook twofoldness in pictorial representation, the fact that we see voluminous objects in depth as well as a marked surface. (Manifest Formalism refers to the tendency to diagram or illustrate the supposed “formal relations” of an artwork, a practice found in the work of psychologists of art such as Rudolf Arnheim and advocated by art teachers such as Erle Loran; Latent Formalism was identified by Wollheim with semiotics.) More generally they overlook representationality as such (to use Wollheim’s term in Art and Its Objects), our tendency to see a painted configuration as something-or-other and, as he later added, our tendency to see something-or-other in the configuration.27
Wollheim’s critique of formalism was not only theoretical or philosophical. He also resisted “formalist” moments in the work of artists whom he passionately admired, for example, the pictographic configurations favored in the early work of R. B. Kitaj. And, correlatively, he approved Kitaj’s move away, he thought, from formalism—the mature painter’s increasingly confident construction of deeper spaces of pictorial virtualization and, in his latest work, his willingness to allow a palpable sense of unfinishedness to resist “the canons of formalism” that he had applied to the “face” of the picture. This could be understood, Wollheim thought, in terms of the artist’s “desire to integrate the matter and the manner of the painting, the what and the how.” In this regard, formalism focuses on the “how”: as Wollheim put it, “I take it that the essence of formalism lies in thinking that the structure, or arrangement, or lay-out, of a painting can be perfectly adequately talked about independently of any reference to what is represented or expressed in the painting.” In its hard-won pictorial representationality, or what can be described as its antiformalist formal construction, Kitaj’s later work enabled the artist, Wollheim thought, to express “the teeming uncertainties of the inner world.” Supposedly this inner life would be suppressed in formalist art and ignored by formalist criticism.28
Wollheim’s interest in formalism appeared early in his career as a writer on art theory. In a short essay published in 1965, “Form, Elements and Modernity,” he adopted the arguments of the art historian Michael Podro, who had proposed a logical, psychological, and historical critique of Wassily Kandinsky’s theory of “simple or basic constituents of pictorial design” and of the art theory and pedagogy of art that had flowed from Kandinsky’s and similar investigations, including Basic Design in the Bauhaus and Josef Albers’s color theory.29 (Both Podro and Wollheim understood formalism to be a mistaken theoretical response to modern artworks in which smaller pictorial constituents have become more independent and simple compared to the pictorial complexes preferred in the naturalistic art of previous tradition.) This strand of Wollheim’s critique of formalism turns on the fact that formalism often proposes general rules of design rather than reports on a “judgment that is strictly relative to a particular composition or a particular kind of composition.”30 The point comports neatly with Wollheim’s ontology of art, namely, his doctrine (the general claim of Art and Its Objects) that token and type in art are identical, namely, the same material object. There is no series of tokens of the type that display the aesthetic value of the design principle as such, somehow rendered visible on its own or as it were considered as an artwork (or even a master plan for artworks) governing the artworks. One can infer from this objection to formalism that if it works as a recipe for visual design, and might be held responsible for the aesthetic defect of “artiness” in design, for that very reason it cannot be a method of art criticism.
By now the reader will not be surprised if I say that Wollheim’s ontological claim was tailored to admit the underlying psychoanalytic ontology I have already hinted at: art is identical with its objects in the same way as the ego is identical with its body and because the ego is identical with its body. As in the ego’s identity with its body (the self images itself fantasmatically in terms of internal objects and figures incorporated into the self and expelled from it) so too in art: the identity of art and its material object is mediated in the virtual world it constitutes. The real visibility of the relation of identity (for example, the sensuous palpability of the marked surface of a pictorial artwork or its vivid illusion of an external object) hinges on the power and stability of the hallucinatory matrix. We find again, then, that the fantasmatic iconicity of psychic seeing-as underwrites the seeing-as and seeing-in that are supposedly in play in pictorial twofoldness and the representationality of artistic form. The identity of mind and body (more exactly, the identity of bodily ego and its corporeal form) was not the official topic of Art and Its Objects. But it was the pivot of Wollheim’s technical philosophical investigations of the coherence of personal identity. And its implications for the history and criticism of art were made explicit in Painting as an Art. There Wollheim assumed typetoken identity at the derivative level of art in order to expose and address the psychodynamic history within which the bodily ego was constituted—body plus mind, or better, body in mind or body as mind. Strictly speaking, this is tautology. But it is not vacuous or vicious.
As the final major element in his critique of formalism, Wollheim contested the typical formalist presumption that all the elements of an artwork “are so arranged that we could not imagine the smallest dislocation or transposition [of these elements] without the value of the work itself being impaired.”31 The force of this part of the critique, and its relation to the other parts, is somewhat obscure. But I suspect that in the end it flows from Wollheim’s view (visible as early as 1965) that dislocation and transposition are not only possible in art. They are essential to art: the surface form of the artwork dislocates and transposes images in the depths of the artist’s mind. Despite the formal perfection of an artwork and our resulting sense that everything is placed in the work just where it should be placed, there is an equally important way in which we sense that things could be placed differently. Indeed we can sense that they were placed differently in the history of the earlier imagism (the replications of fantasmatic iconicity) that extends all the way from the most archaic fantasies of the primitive self of the bodily ego to the adult artist’s preparatory studies in making the final painting. It is only by reference to this historical matrix of imagistic possibilities—complex dislocations and transpositions relative to one another and to real objects—that the order of the finished work, whatever its formal polish, can be fully interpreted. And formalism cannot hope to access this matrix if its methods do not enable it to address the images constituting the surface formal order in its psychic depths.
It might seem that Wollheim’s critique of formalism appeals to certain binary structures of art, especially painted pictorial art, that formalism putatively ignores. For example, formalism looks at marked surface, but not at pictorial or virtual depth. It looks at the “language of painting,” but not at the fantasmatic orders of particular paintings. It looks at visual order in the paintings, but not at their emergent images. It identifies the visual order of the surface with general rules of composition, not the fantasmatic history of the image. While insisting on “close looking” at art, it fails to interpret the twofoldness or representationality, the psychic seeing-as, that such looking always involves. Many of these points feed into one other. But if what I have said so far is roughly right, in the end Wollheim’s critique of formalism appeals to a tertiary structure in art. Reverting to the terms that I introduced at the beginning of this chapter, a typical formalist reification of the surface/depth relation in painting prevents it from recognizing that the depth itself has depths. These depths are not simply metaphorical mental spaces or psychic registers that we can compare to visually real virtual depth in a painting or to literal optical-phenomenal depth. As fantasmatic iconicity, they are psychologically continuous with the imaging projected in the painting as its calibration of a marked surface and the depth that is visually attendant on it in most cases. Even if formalism, then, looks all the way into the deepest recesses of painted depth “behind” the projection plane or “beyond” the marked surface, and sometimes because it only looks from the surface into this depth and back again, it overlooks the depths of the depth—its imagistic continuity with bodily ego.
In the tertiary structure of fantasmatic iconicity, the painting iconically virtualizes the inner world of more integrated self(s) that in turn iconically virtualizes the inner world of the more primitive self(s). I am neither brave nor subtle enough fully to interleave this threefold architecture with what Wollheim described as the deep structure of “mental connectedness” as such. As he wrote in “On Persons and Their Lives”:
On the surface mental connectedness is a two-term relation, relating mental event and mental event, [but] the underlying structure is that of a three-term relation, relating mental event, mental event, and the psychology of the person, and this triadic relation allows causality to occur twice over in the orbit of mental connectedness. When two mental events are mentally connected, a causal influence is transmitted between them—occurrence one—and then—occurrence two—this causal influence is onwardly transmitted.32
I will speculate, however, that fantasmatic iconicity in the sense explored here is a species of mental connectedness in its tertiary structure. More to the deep point of Wollheim’s interests, fantasmatic iconicity is not only the form or structure of connectedness, as Wollheim suggested in his philosophy of unconscious mind. Equally important, it is the content and mechanism of mental connectedness and therefore of the coherence of the person—or of whatever coherence a bodily ego has as a person. (Of course, in this model of the mind the coherence of the ego/ person is not quite the same thing as its continuity or unity; the causal influence transmitted between images in the depths of the mind establishes their coherence—the determination of one by another by way of the replication of one in another—without inherently leading to their subjective self-conscious totalization. More exactly, any totalizations likely must be pathological images, perversely global imagos—fetishes, for example.) Whether focusing on surface effects of order or addressing the formal order of pictorial depth, then, formalism cannot handle the equation that stands at the center of Wollheim’s art theory: surface is to depth in painting as integrated ego is to primitive ego in psychic history. Expressed synthetically: primitive ego subsists in the depths of surface/ depth relations—in the images—constituted by the integrated ego; it remains visible there. Because these relations subsist as fantasmatic iconicity (and materially in virtue of fantasmatic iconicity), the analytic methods of formalism, which are designed to address the visual order of images, are notionally apposite to the psychological history. But they require specifically psychoanalytic application in order to determine how and why imagistic order has devolved from the depths of the mind to subsist as a particular visible oscillation of surface and depth in the painted pictorial field. (To be sure, the most famous and perhaps the first Freudian-formalist proposal along these lines was the reductio ad absurdum of such investigations: Oscar Pfister claimed to see a vulture-shaped form in the skirts of the women in Leonardo’s Virgin and St. Anne, an idea cited with reserve by Freud in the second [1919] edition of Leonardo da Vinci and a Memory of His Childhood, in which the “vulture fantasy” of the little boy was given pride of place in explicating the artist’s psychic history and especially his work as a painter [see chapters 7 and 8].)
In particular, psychoanalytic investigation is required in order to determine which psychic depths—which historical phases of fantasmatic iconicity—might be expressed in painted pictorial depth. Are we looking at the imagism of the relatively more archaic and narcissistic primitive self or of the relatively more integrated depressive self? In virtue of fantasmatic iconicity, it is a feature of the depths of the mind that its surface (the ideals of the integrated self) and its depth (the primitive objects and figures that constitute the self ’s formal and ideal orders and continue to disturb them) subsist as surface relates to depth in painting. They are apprehended in one another as aspects of one another, as inextricably bound or twofold—as imagistically continuous. Paradoxically, then, the surface of the painting qua painting might relay objects and figures, or visual orders and relations, transmitted from the depths of the primitive self. And the depth of the painting might relay objects and figures constructed by the integrated ego. In painting, stated more simply, the depths of the depth of the mind might well be right on the surface. But presumably this is good news for formalism and for psychoanalysis.
If I am right, obviously it would be a mistake to say that primitive or archaic objects and figures are found in their latest imagistic replication only in pictorial depth whereas the formalizations and unifications relaying ego integration are found only in their later imagistic replication on the painted surface. Something like this mistake does seem to be entrained, however, in ubiquitous subpsychoanalytic distinctions between artistic form on the one hand and psychic content (the putative unconscious meaning of depicted subject matter) on the other hand. (So-called psychoanalytic art criticism and art history is rife with this misleading dichotomy.) As Wollheim pointed out, however, citing a remark by the art historian and psychoanalyst Ernst Kris, we want to know not only about the way in which the two depicted holy women in Leonardo’s Virgin and St. Anne represent the painter’s fantasied “two mothers,” that is to say, the hallucinatory matrix of the origins of his homosexuality—as Freud had it (chapter 8). We also want to know why the women were visually ordered or compositionally arrayed by Leonardo in a pyramidlike shape on the plane. Freud’s discussion of the painting did not address this formal(ist) question at all.33
Perhaps the pyramid fantasmatically integrated the two mothers. A Stokesian critic might suppose, then, that they reduced the psychic conflict the two mothers had created in the young Leonardo, or even repaired the damaged it had done, as it were idealizing the conflicted triangle of two-mothers-and-son and projecting it into an ideal geometric form in turn reintrojected as the painter’s very basis for this artistic “transcendence of the depressive position.” But Freud’s account of Leonardo’s artistic subjectivity did not encourage this line of thought. Freud stressed that Leonardo was often unable to complete his works or to find an intellectual focus: he was integrated, if integration it was, in the neurotic form of “questing and doubting.” And in Painting as an Art Wollheim recognized that the apparent formal or configurative traces of ideal ego integration might actually relay the most primitive fantasies.
Consider, for example, the perspectival canopied bed in J. A.D. Ingres’s Death of Leonardo (1818; figure 40). Ingres obviously expended painstaking care on precise spatial specifications of the position of the heads, torsos, arms, and legs of the dying artist, the troubled king, and the watchful page boy. But the bed bearing the body of the dying painter, despite its apparent optical-geometric foreshortening, is drawn such that “no regular object can be constructed from its contours.” And therefore, Wollheim suggested, it “lies outside the world of everyday things” despite the visual particularity and precision of the scene. In turn this goes to show, for Wollheim, that we are looking in the painting and the painted scene into the domain of sexual hallucination. The depicted deathbed into which all the figures could not be fitted without palpable perspectival instability shows us another scene or scenes than the manifest one we seem to see. If we follow Wollheim, these fantasies include the scene of parental lovemaking (as in the case of the Wolf Man), the scene of the father’s coffin (whether Leonardo’s or not), and the scene of the painter Ingres’s homosexual and paternal identifications. In the painting we see parts and passages of the objects and figures coming forward or falling back in spatially ambiguous palpations that are the very type of pictorial twofoldness in Wollheim’s sense. These visually unstable oscillations of surface and depth in the painting reveal the fantasmatic depths of the ego. They come forward in the painting or fall away as its calibration of its surface and its depth. In its threefoldness—primitive, integrated, and formalized—its meaning is revealed.34
FIGURE 40. Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres (1780–1867), François I of France at Leonardo da Vinci’s Deathbed, 1818. Oil on canvas, 50.5 × 40 cm. Musée du Petit Palais, Paris. Photo Jacques l’Hoir/Jean Popvitch. Courtesy Réunion des Musées Nationaux/Art Resource, New York.
§6. The fantasmatic depths of the mind are revealed in the relation of surface and depth in art. Revealed, perhaps—but how far are they communicated to beholders, and how far are they understood by them? The most difficult reconciliation that I confront in this chapter, I suspect, is to square Wollheim’s view of the depths of the mind in painting with his controversial account of artistic intentionality, namely, his proposal that in looking at art (and certainly in art history and criticism) we should be able to grasp the intention of the artist “as the picture revealed it.”35
The intention in question is partly unconscious; it enrolls the fantasmatic incorporations and identifications, primitive and integrated, that stitch up the mind’s image of itself. Ingres need not be taken to have deliberately constructed The Death of Leonardo in order that Leonardo’s deathbed fantasmatically represent the fantasied scene (for example) of his own (Ingres’s) father’s sexual life, including his love for his wife (the painter’s mother) and his son, the painter to be (that is, Ingres himself), as well as the scene of the father’s death, revival, and transformation. These images must be said to lie in the depths of the painter’s mind. But Ingres can be taken to have intended that the painting should depict the French king’s late-blooming idolatrous love for the famous painter of the Renaissance as well as the page boy’s passionate fascination (its homosexual valence is visually manifest) with the scene of the king’s erotic recognition of the artist. As Wollheim pointed out, these striking elements of the mise-en-scène were added by Ingres—must have been deliberately added by Ingres—to the customary literary and pictorial rendition of Giorgio Vasari’s story, including, for example, François-Guillaume Ménageot’s Leonardo da Vinci Dying in the Arms of Francis I of 1781, now in Amboise, a possible prototype for Ingres’s painting. And, in a particular twist (a twist crucial to many of Wollheim’s proposals about paintings in Painting as an Art), Ingres can be taken to have intended that the painting would enable him to come to pictorial terms with aspects of his own identifications with painting, painters, and patrons—to work through and possibly to surmount or transcend them. After all, the picture is manifestly a painting depictively about the latent eroticism of these very relations in the life of Leonardo.
Wollheim called this last aspect of a painting its “instrumentality.” It is the power of painting, as the art has been psychically invested by the painter, to “change the world,” that is, to change the world of the painter for the painter and possibly for an entire community of beholders who have an appropriate understanding of the conventions with which the painter worked as well as the particular inflections he has wrought in them. Instrumentality in this sense is conscious intention on the painter’s part, at least on its surface. The painter would hardly be an artist at all if he did not intend his pictures to have efficacy in his social world. But instrumentality also has an unconscious depth. The world that is to be changed by the painting is not, or it is not only, the painter’s real world. It is also his inner world.36 In particular, in Ingres’s painting, as Wollheim would have it, the depicted king’s love for dying Leonardo enabled the painter Ingres to imagine that his own father might love him, the painter, as the French king came to love Leonardo. Or with reference to the art of Leonardo himself:
The most general way of describing what Leonardo sets out [in painting] to do is to change the real world through the resources of the psychic world. Whether Leonardo could or could not become a woman, whether he could or could not merge with his mother, whether he could or could not preserve the love in which he had known such intense happiness, the transformation could not be effected in the internal theater of the mind: by a piece of impersonation designed for his own gaze.37
The requisite transformation had to be finalized in painting. In the work of putting the depths on the surface, including its depth, the painting can reform the depths of the mind. This might or might not amount to a wholesale transcendence of the depressive position in Stokes’s sense. But it certainly amounts to an autotelic psychodynamic instrumentality in art, even if art arguably has no further practical instrumentality.
Fantasmatic iconicity must be transferred from the depths of the artist’s mind to the representationality of surface and depth in the pictorial field: these fields of imagism are both historically and formally continuous. In turn, this matrix—the hallucinations of the painting—can be transferred to beholders whether or not they have any independent knowledge of the depths of the artist’s mind. For, whether or not beholders can see into the depths (plural), they can certainly see into the depth (singular). As they get clear about the visual order and disorder, the stability and instability, and the integration and disintegration of the relation of surface and depth in painting, about its representationality, they perforce will get clear—or at least they will get clearer—about fantasmatic representationality.
Wollheim’s model for this clarification, not surprisingly, was the clinical situation of psychoanalysis. The evenly suspended attention that the analyst brings to the patient is like the sustained, open looking the formalist brings to the painting. As Wollheim wrote about his preparations for his Mellon Lectures:
I evolved a way of looking at paintings which was massively time-consuming and deeply rewarding. For I came to recognize that it often took the first hour or so in front of a painting for stray associations or motivated perceptions to settle down, and it was only then, with the same amount of time or more to spend looking at it, that the picture could be relied upon to disclose itself as it was.… To the experience, to the hard-won experience, of painting, I then recruited the findings of psychology, and in particular the hypotheses of psychoanalysis, in order to grasp the intention of the artist as the picture revealed it.38
Of course, consciously beholding the unconscious intentions of another—seeing the depths in the depth—is admittedly a special activity. It is quite unlike ordinary communication or routine acts of inspecting the world. And, naturally, the clinical parallel poses immense difficulties in its own right. It is likely, for example, that what Wollheim called stray associations and motivated perceptions brought by the beholder to the painting do not always “settle down.” In other words, the fantasmatic world of the beholder, his or her history of imagoing, will likely continue to organize (and possibly to disturb) the fantasmatic world relayed in the pictorial image created by the painter. Moreover, the painting, unlike a patient in analysis, does not talk back to the beholder, and it does not literally generate associations to itself (other pictures?) or present cognate symptoms of its history unless they are actually proffered to the analyst by the painter-analysand in a clinical setting. (As we have seen in chapters 7 and 8, Freud believed that he had precious testimony from Leonardo himself about the painter’s childhood fantasy of his perturbed and puzzling maternity, but even this testimony, retrieved from the historic record, was not secured in a psychoanalytic setting.) It was precisely for this reason that Wollheim, like other psychoanalytically minded critics of the arts, substituted—why he had to substitute—a formalism of fantasmatic iconicity in painting for a clinical interaction with the painter himself.
This substitution is determined at many levels. But the most important equation by far is the one that emerges from the sequence of considerations that I have put forward in this chapter. If art is identical with its object, if ego is identical with its body, if bodily ego is relayed in fantasmatic iconicity as imagistic representationality, and if the representationality of surface and depth in a painting transposes these images into or onto the surface that we confront aesthetically, it follows that our study of the object of art is the study of the bodily ego of our missing real partner, namely, the artist himself.