A Dangerous Method – and Psychoanalysis and Literature Event

The recent BFI London Film Festival included a screening of David Cronenberg’s ‘A Dangerous Method’, based on the play (and screenplay) by Christopher Hampton about the relationship between Freud, Jung and Sabina Spielrein. The topic has widely been regarded an unusual one for Cronenberg, mostly known for his contributions to the horror genre. Rather refreshingly, the film doesn’t appear overly concerned with trying to either justify or deride Freudian psychoanalysis. Audience questions after the screening, to actors Keira Knightley, Viggo Mortenson and Michael Fassbender, centred on how the actors researched their roles, or whether anyone had objected that characters were not portrayed as they “really” were.

Surely such portrayal is a well-nigh impossible feat: more so given both the highly narrative and interpretative nature of psychoanalysis (and its history) itself and the difficulty of assuming that personality traits and attitudes are universal and unchanging through time. After all, it is a modern audience that the film seeks to reach, and thus contemporary concerns and ideals may often prove more pertinent than early twentieth century ones.

Nonetheless, some of the comments made by the actors spoke to the difficulty of interpreting historical concepts for a modern audience. Keira Knightley’s portrayal of the young Spielrein as a patient in Geneva has received both praise and criticism but, as she admitted after the film, it was hard for her to know how Spielrein might have behaved on admission. Knightley explained that the hospital casenotes included such descriptions as “has a hysterical fit” without ever explaining or describing what was meant. Indeed, late nineteenth and early twentieth century commentators often spoke of the “protean nature” of hysteria, a disorder considered capable of imitating almost any other disease. In late nineteenth century Paris hospitals, for example, hysteria was viewed as closely synonymous with epilepsy, while in a middle class London drawing room it might be a very different matter: associated, perhaps, with exhaustion, fainting, stomach pains or “emotional excitement”.

Psychoanalysis and literature have often been closely related, and blog readers might be interested in a forthcoming event at the Royal Society of Literature on 21 November, at which psychotherapist and popular writer Adam Phillips will reflect on the relationship between creativity and mental health, ask whether we try too hard to be happy, and explore his belief that psychotherapy is ‘a king of practical poetry’.

‘A Dangerous Method’ is out on general release in the UK on 10 February 2012.

The Artist and the Asylum, 1 December

A measure of consolation is available for those who missed the recent Richard Dadd exhibition in an upcoming event at Tate Britain. At 6.30pm on 1 December, Nicholas Tromans, author of Richard Dadd: The Artist and the Asylum will be in conversation with author Mike Jay about Dadd’s legacy.

Bookings to be part of the audience for this event are being taken online.

In the Frame for November 2011

A recent genealogical enquiry from an indirect relative of Wilmot Ferdinand Maine (1880-1947) has inspired the Archivist to choose Peter Nolan Lawrence’s Beach Party with Grandfather as this month’s featured picture. Lawrence was one of Maine’s grandchildren, and in 1993 donated both the picture and a photograph of his grandfather (dressed vaudeville-style as ‘The Rajah of Chutney-pore’ for a music hall production of the early twentieth century entitled The Nautch Girl) to Bethlem’s Archives & Museum.

According to Lawrence’s own notes, Beach Party with Grandfather depicts Wilmot Maine dressed in green, his features drawn from the photograph, as he ‘totters under the spell of the whisky he drank to anaesthetise his fore-brain and forget his mad folly’ in the company of contemporary stalwarts of the Chiswick Empire theatre and – for good measure and in an imaginative leap – of the British and Chinese Empires. At first sight, writes the artist, it is ‘a frolicsome picture but one with a sinister meaning…All seem to be having a good time, but is not the beach overcrowded? Will overpopulation drive us into the sea?’

Still, this picture is possessed of too much pop-art naïveté and sheer joie de vivre to be understood (in the phrase used elsewhere by the artist) as ‘a painting of Armageddon’. Its creator once laconically described himself as ‘an extreme, long-cycling bipolar manic on lithium and haloperidol’ who was ‘proud of his hypomanic condition, his three dynamic sons and of his wonderful, long-suffering wife’.¹ Though never a patient at Bethlem Hospital, he was in the 1990s a volunteer at its Community Centre Library, and nowhere is his irrepressible good humour more apparent than in the artwork now held here at the Archives & Museum.

This coming Saturday (12 November), when the Archives & Museum will be open between 11am and 5pm, the Head of Archives & Museum will give – at 2pm – a short talk on a selection of paintings that have been featured in our In the Frame series on this blog.

1 Peter Nolan Lawrence, Impressive Depressives (Manic Depression Fellowship, 1994), p. 85.

One of Many: Kim Noble Exhibition Opens on 9 November

Recently, we published a blog on Kim Noble’s autobiography, All of Me, in which we mentioned her paintings. This month, a complete exhibition of Kim’s work opens at the Bethlem Gallery. With no formal art training, Kim and 13 of her personalities (alters) became interested in painting in 2004. These 13 artists (alters) each have their own distinctive style, colours and themes; ranging from layered abstracts to challenging figurative works. Some of the work has a serene meditative quality to it whilst others contain explicit images of the trauma Kim endured in her youth. Many alters are unaware that they share a body with other artists.

“I paint from the heart not the head.” Says Noble. “D.I.D is a creative way to cope with unbearable pain.”

In the contemporary art world artists such as Gerhard Richter use a variety of aesthetics as a conscious statement to challenge the concept of the artist’s obligation to maintain a single cohesive style. Kim Noble’s motivations, however, lie in the unfathomable realm of the subconscious. Her work leads the viewer to question our understanding of the mind, and stands as a testament of her capacity to triumph over adversity.

The exhibition will open on November 9^th (3 – 6pm) and there will be an artist’s Q&A session and book signing at 2.30 pm on Saturday November 12th.

The show runs from 10 November until 2 December, on Wednesdays, Thursdays and Fridays from 11am – 6pm (and 11am – 6pm on Saturday 12th November).

 Meet the Gingers - Kim Noble (Suzy)

His Powers of Walking II

Author and guest blogger Aislinn Hunter takes up at the point left off in a previous post.

In 2004 I had the privilege of being the writer-in-residence in the Creative Writing department at The University of Lancaster. I was in the early writing stages of a novel set in a contemporary London museum and featuring an archivist named Jane. One day, on a city bus, I was reading through an anthology of letters I’d picked up at a charity shop. There, in the middle of missives from Lord Byron, Charles Darwin, Queen Victoria and the like was a short letter from Sir Alfred Lord Tennyson to the Governor of Witley Asylum, it read:

Mr. Alfred Tennyson presents his compliments to the Governor of Witley Hospital for Convalescent Lunatics, and requests him to be so kind as to take precautions that his patients should not pay visits at Aldworth, as two did yesterday (one describing himself as an assistant librarian of the British Museum). Mr. Tennyson is very glad if they in any way enjoy’d themselves here, and hopes they did not suffer from their long walk. ¹

I remember putting the book down and picturing the whole encounter. This is how it works sometimes with novel writing: a story presents itself so clearly and fully that all of a sudden there are full-blown characters tramping through the woods of your imagination, and all you can do is follow them as they head up a path to knock on a great man’s door.

Over the years as the novel has progressed I’ve taken some liberties with the letter. I’ve replaced Tennyson as the letter writer with another (imagined) great man (a Victorian plant hunter) and moved the setting north towards Lancashire. But the letter itself and the long walk made by patients at a convalescent home for lunatics remains. This September, with support from Kwantlen Polytechnic University in Canada where I teach creative writing, I spent some time in the locations where my novel is set and visited the Bethlem archives to get a better understanding of both the world my asylum characters would have inhabited and the kinds of archives my fictional archivist might be dealing with. Towards the end of the day, reading through Bethlem’s 1877 men’s casebook (because that is the year the novel is set) I happened across the record of a librarian named Robert Cowtan, a man who had been to Witley and who, according to the casebook, had a great belief in his powers of walking. I was stunned to find him, the man whose real-life escapade formed the basis of a novel I’ve been working on for seven years. In a strange way I felt like a story I’d made up in my head had flown out of my imagination and snuck back into the past to become real. The character I’ve written (called ‘Leeson’), the one who takes the long walk to a great man’s estate, has been with me a very long time. Discovering the actual man my real-seeming character was based on was, in a surreal way, a bit like finding him.

[to be continued]

1 Cecil Y. Lang and Edgar F. Shannon Jr (eds), The Letters of Alfred Lord Tennyson, volume 1 (Oxford, 1982), p. xxx, cited in Felix Pryor, The Faber Book of Letters: letters written in the English language 1578-1939 (London, 1988).