Self portrait, Bryan Charnley (1949-1991).
23rd May 1991
I really tire of having to explain my paintings. It is very much my tragedy that people cannot understand the straight forward poetic use of symbols I am employing. The blue of the portrait is there because I felt depressed through cutting back on the anti-depressants. The wavy lines are because just as I felt I was safe a voice from the street gutted me emotionally by its E.S.P. of my condition. (I was feeling proud of the painting and he showed he knew this convincingly enough to convince me I must be giving off very strong thought messages or vibrations of some readable kind). I was pleased that I was able to express such a purely mental concept as thought broadcasting by the simple device of turning the brain into a mouth that I painted it again. One is very much up against the almost impossible task of describing in paint that which essentially totally invisible. Symbols come to be employed and the appropriate one must be found, also it should have a poetic charge attached to it. Yet still people are too ignorant to see. At this stage my central worry was thought broadcasting. This would pass as I gained insight and effects of drug withdrawal wore off. I was much worried about radio and television because I seemed to intertwine with their broadcasted waves and expose myself completely which I found humiliating. People laughed at me when this happened or let me know it was for real by acute remarks. I continued my retreat from social contact.
“How are we going to define the schizophrenic here? For the moment, I propose to define him or her, following Lacan, as the subject who specifies himself or herself by not being caught up in any discourse, in any social link. I would add that this is the only subject who does not defend himself or herself from the real by means of the symbolic, which we all do when we are not schizophrenic. The schizophrenic does not defend himself or herself from the real by language, because for him or her, the symbolic is real.
It is a question of the schizophrenic’s irony, and not of his humor. Although irony and humor both make us laugh, they are distinguished from one another by structure.
Humor is the comic slope of the superego. Freud says it. The neurotic does not lack humor, the pervert is completely capable of having it, equally so the philosopher of universal maxims, and the surrealist as well. Humor inscribes itself within the perspective of the Other. The humoristic saying makes itself heard, above all, in the place of the Other. It overtakes the subject in the misery of his impotence. Think about the well-known Jewish humor which is cultivated in the ghetto, this supremely social place since it is created by segregation, where the terrible God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob encloses his children.
Irony, on the contrary, does not come from the Other. It is from the subject, and it goes against the Other. What does irony say? It says that the Other does not exist, that the social link in its very foundation is a fraud, that there is no discourse which is not a false pretense…”
—Jacques-Alain Miller, A Contribution of the Schizophrenic to the Psychoanalytic Clinic (Original title, “La clinique d’ironie”)
How to extract the object (a) of madness.
Men sitting in 112 degree heat and 95% humidity, sweating, which is funneled into flasks to analyze and compare. Image taken by photographer Herbert Gehr at a mental hospital in Worchester, 1949.
