In a recent blog about Eva Hesse I questioned ‘what if the performance for Hesse was the making of the sculpture, (and) the involvement of the body in making the objects?’ This question has brought me to research Karla Black’s method of working and to the psychoanalyst Melanie Klein, as Black cites Klein’s ‘play technique’ as a contextual source. This technique allowed Klein to analyse very young children through their negotiation of the physical world rather than through language. Klein developed post-Freudian theories through the observation of babies and very young children with their relationship to objects (which included people). Freud used dreams and symbols in adults to examine unconscious desires and Klein used the play technique, which she saw as intuitive, pre-linguistic and in a constant state of development.
Part of Klein’s main theory was how the child developed through the weaning process where the child has to face losses in external reality. She thought that the child at this time responds with manic defences but gradually gains contact with reality in a new way. Creativity, she saw, is developed as an attempt to recreate an external and internal world as a result of mourning.
Objects are initially understood by the infant by their functions and are termed ‘part objects’. The breast that feeds the hungry infant is the ‘good breast’ and the hungry infant that finds no breast is in relation to the ‘bad breast’. The relationship between the infant and the object is a complex one, with the object (the mother) being needed by the child to sooth all anxieties. But, as Klein argued, envy can develop, not only when the infant is not soothed satisfactorily, but even after an experience of a ‘good feed’ as the child starts become aware of her own lack. With a good enough ‘facilitating environment’ part object functions eventually transform into a comprehension of whole objects.
My reaction to this is that maybe that many artists are still involved in this process of transformation and that it is a continuing development and exchange between the external and internal world.
