Williamson

© Beth Williamson 2008
The idea of students being asked to confront themselves may explain why
some complained that what they experienced was not art teaching but
psychotherapy. 51 If this were the case, then the teaching space of the studio
might reasonably be equated with the clinical space of the consulting room,
allowing us to draw more directly on psychoanalytic theory. Ehrenzweig talks of
the artist as a parent to the artwork. ‘The rigid artist is like a bad parent who
does not allow his child to develop according to his own mould, and tries to
keep tight control.’ 52 What Ehrenzweig describes here is a kind of aestheticised
anaclisis. What I mean by this is that he takes the relationship between artists
and artwork and reframes it in very precise psychoanalytic terms. The term
anaclisis is more usually employed to mark the relationship between infant and
mother as one of libidinal attachment, an attachment that has to be successfully
worked through in order for the infant to grow in independence and eventually
develop as an individual, wholly separate from the mother. 53 In this frame, the
artist’s relationship with the work approaches the separation-individuation
dynamic of mother and child in psychoanalytic terms. It is, in fact, the anaclitic
condition of the relationship that problematises the completion of the work. For
it is only when the artist can achieve separation from the work, once again
locating them in a unique independent space, that the (psychic) work can be
considered complete.
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