The Routledge Companion to Research in the Arts

insight and rigour

‘it’s he [the ego] who speaks of him’ in a fundamental dissociation of conscious from
unconscious thought. however, it is also worth noting that in The Psychoses, lacan
refers to the dangers of an ‘authentication of the imaginary’ in analysis that begins to
address the question of why dalí’s invention of a paranoiac- critical method, despite its
shift from personal and passive automatism to collective and active automatism, may
not fully confer the mandate of ‘artist- researcher’ on dalí. The most obvious reason
is that the supposedly collective interpretations of the paranoiac- critical method all
belonged to dalí himself. Rather than accepting the Freudian wager of the researcher
who knows nothing confronting the subject who does not know that he knows, dalí
decided to use a method that allowed him to know everything himself. although some
members of the surrealist group enthusiastically embraced dalí’s ideas when dalí
joined the movement in 1929, the method was used by dalí alone. The outcome of
this was an emphasis on the authentication of the dalían image as a focus for public
spectatorship. as has been previously discussed, in psychoanalysis, unlike science, it is
not the adoption of a particular method that confers truth, but a focus on the material
truth of the utterance. in The Psychoses, lacan claims that Freud’s key innovation
consisted of substituting recognition on the symbolic level, the level of the utterance,
for recognition on the imaginary level. This recognition depends on a shift away from
the study of life experience towards the investigative position of the analyst:

i’m not going to fall into the myth of immediate experience that forms the basis

of what people call existential psychology or even existential psychoanalysis ...

Freudian experience is in no way pre- conceptual. it’s not a pure experience,

but one that is well and truly structured by something artificial, the analytic

relation.

(lacan 1993 [1956]: 8)

how would someone who was interested in adopting a psychoanalytic paradigm
within arts- based research avoid the pitfalls of dalí’s paranoiac- critical method? The
most important focus would be on the difference between dalí’s ‘active’ automatism and
the act of becoming a researcher. While dalí’s method was self- consciously active and
socially directed, none of this activity amounted to a decisive act that would place dalí
beyond his ‘comfort zone’ as an artist, as his insistence on using his own interpretations
within the paranoiac- critical method demonstrates. an act or artwork undertaken in
the name of research, that puts an artist or a designer outside this comfort zone, points
away from an affirmation of the imaginary or a dialogue with the ego, and towards the
juncture of self and utterance, or conscious and unconscious. This is the locus of the
psychoanalytic investigation. The following section offers a particular genealogy for
this form of investigation in arts- based research.

Practice, theory and psychoanalysis

in an article entitled ‘phantoms of the studio’ published in the Oxford Art Journal in
1990, the artist Terry atkinson asserted that ‘nowhere has the idea of the unconscious
been more symptomatically half- digested, and nowhere is it a more entrenched agency
of meaning- fixing ... than in art school teaching’ (atkinson 1990: 51). atkinson’s