The Scandinavian Psychoanalytic Review

ISSN: 0106-2301 (Print) 1600-0803 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rspr20

Walter Benjamin and psychoanalysis

Judy Gammelgaard
To cite this article: Judy Gammelgaard (2014) Walter Benjamin and psychoanalysis, The
Scandinavian Psychoanalytic Review, 37:1, 69-70, DOI: 10.1080/01062301.2014.909220
To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/01062301.2014.909220

Published online: 07 Apr 2014.

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Date: 28 April 2016, At: 06:42

The Scandinavian Psychoanalytic Review, 2014

Vol. 37, No. 1, 6970, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/01062301.2014.909220

COMMENT
Walter Benjamin and psychoanalysis
A comment on Dag T. Anderssons Salvaging images
Judy Gammelgaard*
Department of Psychology, University of Copenhagen, Copenhagen, Denmark

Downloaded by [Princeton University] at 06:42 28 April 2016

(Received 22 January 2014; accepted 9 March 2014)

In his reading of Walter Benjamin, Dag Andersson has

chosen the phenomenon of remembrance as his main
topic. According to this great poet of philosophy, remembrance comes to us through images. While the subject of
remembrance was just as important to Freud as it was to
Benjamin in fact, taking a leading position throughout
Freuds writings the same cannot be said for images. In
this short comment to Anderssons rich paper, I shall focus
on the subject of the image and its position and signicance in Freudian theory. Where in Freuds theory do we
nd a conception of the image, parallel to Benjamins? My
answer to this question is that with the concept of primary
process, Freud pointed to the unconscious process of
image making, based on the psychic ability to perceive
similarities where our waking consciousness would only
see differences. And as Aristotle pointed out, it is a sign of
genius to speak in images or metaphors, [f]or the right
use of metaphors means an eye for resemblances
(Aristotle, 1982, p. 91).
Quoting Benjamin, Andersson underlines that remembrance is not rst and foremost a question of storytelling.
Images, in other words, do not appear through language
and consciousness but have the character of the
unthought known to use a term from Bollas (1987).
Images of remembrance make their appearance beyond
our voluntary attempts to remember. Benjamins philosophical speculation on remembrance is greatly indebted to
Marcel Proust. True memory, said Proust, is involuntary; it
just happens and it has, according to Benjamin, the structure of awakening accompanied by small shocks.
Benjamin has given us many examples of this kind of
image not least in his Berliner Kindheit um neunzehnhundert (1950) and in Das Passagen-Werk (1982). These
works of personal and social remembrance demonstrate
the inspiration from Proust and his Remembrance of things
past, while the small essay The image of Proust addresses
Prousts image-making directly. While Proust may be
singled out as the modernist writer on time and remembrance, from the perspective of subjective experience,
*Email: Judy.Gamelgaard@psy.ku.dk
2014 The Scandinavian Psychoanalytic Review

Benjamins project is grounded in a philosophy of history,

which renders the 19th century perceptible as the prehistory of his own time. To both authors, time is of central
importance, as they make visible the time that has passed,
through the medium of the image. However, it is not
linear, chronological time but the convoluted time as
Benjamin calls it; time in its most real, lived and experienced form. Recollection does not belong to the work of
voluntary efforts and does not rest in the faculty of cognition, but on the senses and on our ability to form images
out of separate sensory impressions.
This image making can only succeed if we loosen our
usual focused, vigilant and goal-directed attention. In our
practical-rational life, we tend to ignore or become insensitive to the state of mind that makes possible the appearance of involuntary memories, as Proust calls them. The
psychoanalytical arrangement with its couch, the free
associations and the evenly suspended attention might be
said to further a process like that described by both
Benjamin and Proust, as it invites images of the past,
whether in the form of dream-images, screen-memories,
or merely as memories that have gone unnoticed in the
purposeful activity of our daily life.
Benjamin (1950) uses an image taken from one of his
favourite childhood games: the stocking which has the
structure of a dream-image: when rolled up in the laundry
hamper, it is a bag and a present and he remembers
how he repeatedly turned the bag and its contents into a
third thing, namely the stocking. He extracts from this game
the lived experience that form and content to hide and the
hidden is one and the same thing. Benjamin, in other
words, created a metaphor and used it to describe, how
Proust like the child playing with the stocking could not
get his ll of emptying his self to keep garnering that
third thing, the image which satised his curiosity indeed,
assuaged his homesickness (Benjamin, 1999, p. 200). We
all have this capacity to create images and we exercise it in
dreams. Freud (1900) coined the term primary process for
the form of thinking that characterizes dream-work and

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70

J. Gammelgaard

opposed it to the secondary process of waking life. Thus the

psyche encompasses two distinct, parallel systems, each
with specic energetic, affective and cognitive
characteristics.
The primary process has not always been appreciated
according to its merits. There is a tendency to consider the
primary process primitive, and when linked to the word
regressive, it denotes a form of thinking which in most
respects is inferior to the secondary processes. This has,
however, introduced a paradox in psychoanalysis when it
comes to the question of developing a psychoanalytic theory of art. While art is commonly judged to be a sophisticated and culturally appreciated activity, it supposedly relies
on these primitive primary processes (Hansen, 1999).
Ernst Kris (1952) offers a theoretical solution to this
contradiction with the concept of regression in the service
of the ego. The ego maintains control and autonomy in
relation to unconscious processes during the artistic creation. According to this argument, the work of art can be
apprehended as coherent while at the same time it makes
possible an emotional redemption in the spectator.
However, this does not seem convincing. To evoke in
the spectator this emotional redemption, the work must
in itself contain contradictions and ambivalences, which
force the spectator to confront works of art differently than
we, as rational beings, confront the world of reality.
The Austrian-British creativity researcher Anton
Ehrenzweig (1967) suggests a solution to the dilemma inherent in the ego-psychological approach to art. He proposes
that we recognize as a supplement to the integrative, synthesising and linear activity of the psyche, a cyclical eithereither structure, which follows the principle of repetition.
Ehrenzweig underlines the efciency of the primary
process as an instrument for creative scanning. This is a
normal unconscious ego-function, which is far superior to
the discursive function when it comes to seeing new
aspects of the well-known as exemplied by Benjamins
stocking and to nding new ways of problem solving.
According to Ehrenzweig, a non-coherent differentiation
is not a regression and a return to primitive psychic
process, but a necessity if we want to grasp unconscious
ideas. A work of art is in its making and its reception
conditioned on the ability to oscillate between two psychic
systems. Primary process not only deserves our interest

because of its content but equally because of its form, or

as Freud would formulate it, because of the way it works.
In his Interpretation of dreams, Freud (1900) maintained that there are two very different working processes
in the psyche. The manifest dream is one example of the
main way the psychic apparatus works. The primary process of the unconscious works via the tropes and gures
we know from rhetoric. However, it is important to understand that the gures like metaphor and metonymy do not
belong to the unconscious process sui generis but are the
imitation at the manifest and conscious level of the undifferentiated process of primary process.
To return to Benjamin, we may conclude that the
image of his stocking is a metaphor produced by his use
of the primary undifferentiated process, which implies the
ability to see the similarity between two things that appear
distinct in our discursive thinking.
Dag Andersson has rightly proposed that remembrance
in psychoanalysis is fragmentary compared to the kind of
remembrance we nd in Proust and I would add in
Benjamin as well.
To regress into the world of dream-images does not
make us all artists. Nonetheless, we ought to appreciate
the richness of dream-images as a potential for creativity.
We also ought to recognize in a work of art a non-logical
structure, which evokes in the spectator the shock of
cultural rupture, an upheaval of conventional meaning.
References
Aristotle. (1982). The poetics. London: Harvard University Press.
Benjamin, W. (1950). Berliner Kindheit um neunzehnhundert.
Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag.
Benjamin, W. (1982). Das Passagen-Werk. Frankfurt am Main:
Suhrkamp Verlag.
Benjamin, W. (1999). Illuminations. London: Pimlico.
Bollas, C. (1987). The shadow of the object: Psychoanalysis and
the unthought known. London: Free Association Books.
Ehrenzweig, A. (1967). The hidden order of art. London:
Phoenix Press.
Freud, S. (1900). Die Traumdeutung. ber den Traum.
Gesammelte Werke l/ll. London: Imago Publishing Co., Ltd.
Hansen, U. (1999). Kunstvrkets uundgelige inkoherens [The
inescapable incoherence of art]. Ny Poetik [New poetics], 9,
724.
Kris, E. (1952). Psychoanalytic explorations in art. New York,
NY: International Universities Press.