insight and rigourthis chapter, is that the only properly psychoanalytic view in research is not the view
from a theory or a practice, but the view from a subject position that has initiated
the investigation. in the final section of this chapter, i show how this subject position
that constitutes the rigour of the researcher, could arise as the response to a challenge
to the identity of the creative practitioner. in this instance, the challenge arises not
from an authoritative interpretation of art and design objects, but as a request for the
articulation of the ‘function’ of the artist in a scrawled note at the 2008 Turner prize.
in order to demonstrate why a psychoanalytic framework is useful to arts- based
research, it is first necessary to understand why the transition from creative genius to
creative practitioner, has preserved the primacy of identity while raising the tantalizing
possibility of research. This possibility or potential for research is constrained by the
bounds of a lifeworld or life nexus that establishes the domain of practice within which
the creative practitioner is said to operate. here, the researcher cannot refute the
identity of the creative practitioner without simultaneously eliminating the field of
research activity. nor can the artist- researcher effectively bracket their own identity
in order to conduct research; their research must in some way prove its self- reflexive
or self- conscious character. in this respect, this chapter differs from the analysis of the
self in arts- based research offered by morwenna griffiths in this volume. While i would
concur with the way that griffiths raises the issue of hiding behind identity (Chapter 10),
her analysis employs the model of a reflexive self ‘embodied and embedded’ in physical
and socio- political contexts. in this chapter, i am more concerned with a Freudian
‘determinism of mental life’, in other words how the relation of psyche and self produced
by an unconscious, affects the relation of self and world. The inherent constraints that
the self- identity of the creative practitioner can produce, are also expressed by Kozel in
this volume, that ‘practices point to different models of knowledge and the models offer
up refinements of the practice’ (Chapter 12). The crucial distinction she introduces
here between ‘different models’ of knowledge and ‘refinements’ of practice, is an
indication of the limitations that may be placed on research activity by the identity of
the creative practitioner. These foreclose the possibility that research might lead to the
more radical outcome of different models of practice, as well as the potential for change
that Kozel herself attributes to ‘the virtual’.
it is at this point of impasse, where the identity of the creative practitioner becomes
an irrefutable element of the research equation controlling the parameters of the
research outcome, that psychoanalysis can make a contribution to art and design
research. however, it is first important to identify the epistemological basis of that
contribution. psychoanalysis, which offers a means to disregard creativity at the
level of identity while examining it at the level of an unconscious utterance, thereby
establishes a distinction between its own way of operating, and models of research in the
humanities and social sciences and in the natural sciences. psychoanalysis is not part of
social science or humanities research because it does not begin with the idea of social
actors in the context of practice or life nexus. it is not part of natural science research
because it asserts that the statement or utterance itself is what matters, rather than the
content of the utterance, such as a scientific formula or equation. This chapter begins
with an elucidation of this epistemological difference, with particular focus on the
distinction between sigmund Freud and Wilhelm dilthey’s approach to genius. While
dilthey offers a model for psychological and social scientific research in which artistic