IPTAR Celebrates Its 50th Anniversary
Psychoanalysis and the Arts – October 24th, 2009
“Oskar Kokoschka and Alma Mahler: Art as Diary and as Therapy”
Presented by Keynote Speaker Harold P. Blum
Reported by Ann Simmons
2010 marks the 50th anniversary of the Institute of Psychoanalytic Training and Research (IPTAR). In order to celebrate, Janice Lieberman, Program Chair and her Committee (Meg Beaudoin, Jared Russell, Matthew Von Unwerth, and Roz Goldner) did an amazing job in conceiving of ways to highlight IPTAR’s contributions to Psychoanalysis ranging from the arts and humanities, to theory, philosophy and research. With the help of Isaac Tylim, Chair of the Art, Psychoanalysis and Society Project, wonderful programs were planned throughout the year.
IPTAR’s celebration began with a conference, Reaching Beyond our Boundaries [Psychoanalysis in Dialogue with the Arts] on Saturday, October 24, 2009. Inaugurating the conference, Harold P. Blum, M.D., former director of the Sigmund Freud Archives and prolific author, explored how the artist Oscar Kokoschka (1886-1980) uniquely communicated his internal life through external expression. In Oskar Kokoschka and Alma Mahler: Art as Diary and as Therapy, Dr. Blum took the paintings and journal entries the artist created during the period of his tumultuous affair with Alma Mahler as a way of understanding Kokoschka’s emotional state. Kokoschka’s artistic products illuminated the intense passion, personal anguish, and questionable inner reconciliation that motivated Kokoschka’s art and marked his experience with Mahler, a remarkable, although ultimately disappointing love object.
Arguing that the relationship with Mahler inspired Kokoschka’s idiosyncratic technique and subject matter, Dr. Blum also views the paintings as externalizations of Kokoschka’s inner world. Kokoschka’s heavy strokes, thick paint and “sparkling “flashes of light …shadings, and blurred boundaries” represented a move away from traditional representation and became emblematic of the new expressionistic movement. For example, in the painting, “The Tempest” (1913), an artistic offering made to gratify Mahler’s demand for a masterpiece, Kokoschka portrays himself and Mahler, supine and surrounded by dense, thick waves of paint. The painting, passionate as it is, also exemplifies the conflict of the artist’s relationship with Mahler, in that Kokoschka initially viewed this painting as representing solace and support, but later as a portrayal of their doomed, shipwrecked affair.
While Kokoschka was engaged with Alma Mahler, his youthful life and work were ravaged by obsession, jealousy, and competition in relation to Mahler and her upper-class circle. The painting as a type of unconscious painterly diary allowed Kokoschka to work on his Oedipal conflicts and to express his deep disappointment in his relationship with Mahler. His need for security, originating, as Blum suggests, in an early rupture of the maternal bond after viewing his brother’s birth as a child, was evident in his obsessive tie to Mahler.
The period after World War I was marked by Kokoschka’s isolation and retreat from the artistic life, and the relationship with Mahler was decisively over. Kokoschka’s emergence from his artistic seclusion was accompanied, and indeed made possible by a bizarre psychical recuperation. He commissioned a life-size replica of Alma Mahler, and the doll reportedly accompanied him to dinner, outings, even to bed. Dr. Blum had much say about the fantasies that such a fetishistic object personified for the artist, including his need for a maternal figure, a sexual partner, and a personification of the aborted child that Mahler and he had conceived. The mannequin allowed Kokoschka to work through pain and disillusion, blurring reality and fantasy. After several months, Kokoschka publicly decapitated the doll, and the artist, liberated from his terrible obsession, began painting again. Speculating about the fantasy behind this particularly violent act, Dr. Blum argued that art both expressed and helped heal the artist’s internal pain.
Ultimately, Kokoschka continued his artistic and emotional growth, becoming increasingly independent as a man and artist. Still, on Mahler’s seventieth birthday, Kokoschka sent her a letter, idealizing their past love, and proclaiming her influence on his life and work, and this time, it seems Kokoschka had internalized his former lover in a way that allowed him to live a productive, passionate life without her.
Audience members were eager to add their own thinking to Dr. Blum’s presentation. In a lively exchange, members asked about Alma Mahler’s role in a society closed to most women; the way in which Kokoschka’s mother influenced the artist; and questions about fetishism and transitional objects.