CERJ LALONDE
SELECTED ARTIST'S WRITING
ADDITIONAL
ME, ART, and PSYCHOANALYSIS
Lecture at
Concordia
University
Montreal
by
CERJ
LALONDE
1993
First: excuse my English.
Informal.
Suzanne invites me to talk to you about the influence of
psychoanalysis on my practice and on my live as an artist.
I would like to start by a quick foreword to position very
simply let say my philosophy of art in that regard. I often said that it
is not the object witch defines art, but rather the kind of relation
which develops between object and subject. Whatever this object is. A
playing in a movie, a painting, mathematics, or any kind of work. Any
kind really. Whatever you do, you can do it with art. Being an artist is
more to me a way of live, than a career or a profession. I think it is
the social division of work, prevalent in our societies, which
structurally produces an ideology which names and specifies the object
of art, and then the people which realize these objects.
Now, I would say that psychoanalysis came to me like...
naturally. But in fact it is me which went to psychoanalysis. And this I
did almost naturally. I say naturally because, psychoanalysis helping,
it seems that soon, in my live, major elements tent to keep burning the
focus of origin and of the cause-and-effect complex. And we know how
psychoanalysis is interested in problems of origin, specifically the
problem of origin of human being as a person. So the interest of
psychoanalysis first came to me in that global idea of better knowing
myself, I would say that it was at that time, which is twenty five years
ago, it was the idea of really knowing myself, and also to free myself.
And it came to me through literature, I mean meeting Freud in my
readings already fascinated by the myth of origin, and it is keeping the
trend with the history and evolution of psychoanalysis that I met the unavoidable
Jacques Lacan, almost twenty years ago.
I would say that today, my emotions are, to say the least,
quite mixed about the influence of psychoanalysis and Lacan in
particular in my live and practice. But it is a very complicated
subject, between else because I have been involve in a lacanian
psychoanalysis for almost six years, and also because that I have been
involve in various other kind of “psychotherapeutics” experiences - to
know myself better - and I think that the exclusive focus on language, as founding
of the lacanian unconscious, can become a very serious resistance to the emergence
of emotions in the therapeutic space (see Alice Miller).
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