Images of Trauma: Pain, Recognition, and

Disavowal in the Works of Frida Kahlo and

Francis Bacon

Joerg Bose

Abstract: The role of art in the encounter with trauma and destructiveness is compara-
tively studied in the works of Frida Kahlo and Francis Bacon as examples of a direct
and a more indirect way of dealing with such experiences. A creative product may
function intrapsychically as a kind of messenger between dissociated self-states and
consciousness, and it may also serve as a witnessing presence in a self-supporting and
self-constituting way. Artistic work may thus be used by the artist for an expressive as
well as for a protective purpose, as a means of sympathetic participation in painful ex-
perience, or as a medium for a view from the outside. The act itself of finding and of
making expressive forms at the time of traumatic experience is a remarkable assertion
of the human capability to synthesize and to counteract fragmenting dissociative
processes.

This essay is concerned with the role of art in the artist’s life in the face of
destructiveness and trauma. In particular, I am interested in the way artistic
work may serve the artist in coming to terms with personally devastating trau-
matic experience.
Artistic work at first seems to be no match for the crushing force of violent
and destructive human behavior. And yet such confrontations do take place in
the face of enormous odds, as, for example in the case of the cellist in Sara-
jevo who played in the midst of a plaza targeted daily by snipers. What makes
such an incident particularly remarkable is its implying the presence of a state
of mind that not many can maintain in the face of overwhelming destructive-
ness. Such courageous standing up against brutal military and political forces
finds a moving parallel in the lives of patients who overcome severe trauma
in childhood and youth.
I want to consider the artists Frida Kahlo and Francis Bacon and their
work as examples of direct versus indirect ways of dealing with such experi-
ence. Artistic work can be the means to a more vibrant contact with painful

Clinical Associate Professor of Psychiatry, College of Physicians and Surgeons, Columbia

University, Director, Training and Supervising Analyst, William Alanson White Institute of Psy-
chiatry, Psychology and Psychoanalysis

Journal of The American Academy of Psychoanalysis and Dynamic Psychiatry, 33(1), 51–70, 2005
© 2005 The American Academy of Psychoanalysis and Dynamic Psychiatry
52 BOSE

reality (as in Kahlo’s work), or it may also serve as a protective barrier

against it (as in Bacon’s case).
In studying the interrelationship between artistic work and psychic mecha-
nism, I mean to go beyond the classical view of art as a process of disguising
repressed material in order to bypass the censor. Instead, I want to use the
concept of dissociation to formulate a different view, positing the function of
the creative product as a kind of messenger between areas of dissociated ex-
perience and consciousness. Also in going beyond the customary focus on
verbal processes, I will examine the role and function of concreteness and the
value of the art object as an external presence as opposed to an internal object.
As an external object, the artwork serves self-supporting and self-constitutive
functions: as a witnessing presence, as a contemporary elaboration of the
imaginary companion of childhood, or as a new cultural object (in the sense
of Kohut’s alter ego selfobject function). In addition, I am interested in ad-
dressing the question of the person’s overall synthesizing capacity.
I find the medium of painting especially compelling for the study of the re-
lationship between trauma and creativity in part because an image, in its con-
creteness and analog presentational character, is optimal for conveying in an
instant the sudden impact of trauma and has a strong demonstrative and testi-
monial quality for the viewer. The two well-known painters I am relying on
for this essay each used painting to present shocking and difficult scenes, in
Kahlo’s case, representations of physical pain and suffering, and in Bacon’s
case, imagery of terror and disfiguration. So in each case, the work presents
experiences that would tend to be dissociated and likely unavailable if it were
not for the intervention of the artwork.

FRIDA KAHLO

Frida Kahlo, who lived from 1917 to 1954 in Mexico, has received much
recognition in recent years and ranks now as one of Mexico’s foremost
painters along with her husband Diego Rivera. Probably what is most remark-
able and important regarding her work is the way that it responds to trauma in
a personally reactive, nondissociative way. As Carlos Fuentes (1995) writes
in his introduction to her diary, it is because she gives form to her own pain
that pain does not render her mute:

Her scream is articulate because it achieves a visible and emotional form. Frida
Kahlo is one of the greatest speakers for pain in a century that has known per-
haps not more suffering than other times but certainly a more unjustified and
therefore shameful, cynical, programmed, irrational and deliberate form of suf-
fering than ever. . . . Frida Kahlo as no other artist of our tortured century trans-
lated pain into art. (p. 12)
 TRAUMA IN THE WORKS OF KAHLO AND BACON 53

Frida Kahlo had fallen ill at age 6 with polio, which resulted in muscular
atrophy and an irrevocably withered leg. As a result, she turned from a lively
and pranksterish child into a somber and withdrawn one. An emotional injury
followed in an incident with her half-sister Maria Luisa, in which Frida
pushed Luisa, causing her to fall over with her chamberpot. Luisa retaliated
furiously by telling Frida that she was not their parent’s child but had been
found in a trash can. Frida was deeply affected by this, became very with-
drawn, and began to relate mostly to an imaginary companion she invented at
that time. She would visit this imaginary friend, who was cheerful and could
dance as if weightless, by passing imaginatively through a door she would
draw in the vapor she had breathed on a windowpane. Her coming up not
only with a companion but also with the concept of a door that she could draw
that would take her into a better place heralds most poignantly her capacity to
fashion a creative reponse to traumatic injury.
The event that was to change everything in Frida’s life occurred when she
was 18 years old. She was riding together with her boyfriend Alejandro in a
streetcar in Mexico City when disaster struck in form of a bus that plowed
into the wooden trolley. Frida was severely injured, with numerous fractures
to her spine, ribs, pelvis, and right leg. The iron rod from a broken handrail
pierced her from her pelvis through her vagina. She had to undergo numerous
surgical procedures, followed by frequently having to be in plaster corsets for
months on end. She never completely regained her health and suffered contin-
ual pain in her spine. Ultimately, osteomyelitis and poor circulation defied all
medical and surgical efforts. Nothing could hold off her continuous decay,
leading to her early death at the age of 37.
Her painting began following her accident, in part because it seemed a way
to pass the time, for she now was required to keep bed rest for hours. A spe-
cial easel had been made so that she could paint lying down.

Painting: Self Portrait Wearing a Velvet Dress (1926)

Among Frida’s early efforts is a compelling portrait of herself, which she

sent to Alejandro, perhaps in part as an attempt to retain his waning interest in
the relationship, an attempt that proved to be futile over time. One year after
her accident, Frida suffered a serious relapse when three of her lumbar verte-
brae were found to be severely misaligned, a consequence of the inadequate
treatment at the time of the accident. This led to 32 surgical procedures and
unending pain in her spine. She had to wear a total of eight plaster corsets for
months on end. The accident foreclosed for her all hopeful and optimistic per-
spectives on life others her age could have.
“I became old in an instant, . . . I knew that nothing lies behind”, she wrote
to Alejandro,”. . . how much would I like to explain my suffering to you
54 BOSE

Self Portrait Wearing a Velvet Dress, 1926. Collection, Fundacion Dolores,

Olmeda, Mexico. Courtesy of Banco de Mexico.

minute by minute—pity is stronger than love” (Herrera, 1983, p. 65). Such

lines speak for Kahlo’s deep investment in telling the other about her situa-
tion, and so she likewise uses her paintings to communicate with and to move
a potentially avoidant audience to stay with her in her pain. It is important to
note here that not only was Alejandro drifting away, but also her family did
not want to acknowledge her suffering. On the contrary, her mother held her
somehow responsible and apparently tried to make her feel guilty for burden-
ing her family with her misery.

Painting: A Few Small Nips (1935)

In response to such attempts at downplaying her troubles, she resorted to

irony, as in the 1935 painting of her condition following her 32 surgical pro-
cedures, which she titled A Few Small Nips.
 TRAUMA IN THE WORKS OF KAHLO AND BACON 55

A Few Small Nips, 1935. Collection, Fundacion Dolores, Olmeda, Mexico. Cour-
tesy of Banco de Mexico.

Even though her relationship with Alejandro ended, Kahlo continued to

paint. Two years later, she met Diego Rivera, whom she had sought out for
comments about her paintings. He noticed her talent and was impressed by
her “quick and unconventional mind” (Herrera, 1983, p. 94). A year later,
they entered a marriage that was turbulent but essentially loyal and of signifi-
cant support to Frida personally and artistically until her early death in 1954.
The role Diego Rivera played in her life could be viewed as that of a transfor-
mational object in the way Bollas (1978) conceptualizes a relationship that
provides an encounter with ideal experience that will inspire and serve as a
template for what the individual aspires to become herself.

Painting: Self Portrait (1940)

In the following years, Kahlo succeeded rapidly in developing her own ex-
pressive signature; this included frequent self portraiture. Lowe (1995) has
noted a masklike appearance, which she describes as serving the purpose of
hiding Kahlo’s emotional life. However, I would suggest that there is more to
56 BOSE

Self Portrait with Thorn Necklace and Hummingbird, 1926. Collection, Fundacion
Dolores, Olmeda, Mexico. Courtesy of Banco de Mexico.

this characteristic quality—that it captures both the pain and the massive ef-
fort required to endure that pain, and it’s this combination that is especially
powerful in Kahlo’s work. The contained stoic expression, rather than being
simply a mask, is the ideal embodiment of what she wanted to achieve and
often enough did: to conquer her despair; to assert her ability to maintain
form and cohesion in the face of experiencing continuous destructiveness and
the fragility of her body. Such a purpose may have priority in a condition of
severe trauma, where the need for structure will become as important as the
expression of feelings. Structure may even take precedence over expression
when the pain is so extreme that there is a threat of falling apart and of losing
the capacity to be a whole person.

Painting: The Two Fridas (1939)

The painting The Two Fridas was done while Kahlo was in the process of
a divorce from Diego Rivera. During that time while they lived apart for 2
 TRAUMA IN THE WORKS OF KAHLO AND BACON 57

The Two Friedas, 1939. Collection, Fundacion Dolores, Olmeda, Mexico. Cour-
tesy of Banco de Mexico.

years, Rivera later commented that his wife had turned out some of her best
work. Perhaps this does testify to the way she responded to an experience of
disintegration with the constructive and restorative effort of painting. What is
remarkable in the painting of The Two Fridas is how she responds to aban-
donment by creating her own double image, reminiscent perhaps of her creat-
ing an imaginary companion in childhood, an event now concretizable
through her artistic skill. Kahlo painted a number of such paired or double
self-images. In her own somewhat cryptic comments, she stated that the two
Fridas represented the one that Rivera loved and the abandoned one on the
left with the damaged heart.
Kahlo’s moving effort to keep painting in the face of extreme adversity has
58 BOSE

been understood as the artist’s effort to give herself through the art object the
reflective mirroring experience she did not have with her mother, neither as a
child nor now in her time of physical martyrdom (Knafo, 1991). One may
think of an additional conceptual model in Kohut’s formulation of the twin-
ship or alter-ego experience as a lifelong need to encounter similarity and
sameness in support of identity and sense of self (Kohut, 1984). Perhaps for
Kahlo the relationship with her own artistic objects allowed her to overcome
the isolation of feeling different from her peers and ostracized by surrounding
herself with the likenesses of herself.
Kahlo’s work has been related to surrealism, most closely to Dali and
Magritte. But if the essence of surrealism is “an insistence on the imagina-
tion’s ascendency over the objective world” (Szaz, 1992, p. 151), then Kahlo
eschews that label. As she stated herself: “I paint my own reality” and ”the
only thing I know is that I paint because I need to.” All her paintings are di-
rectly about her and about her suffering, and they are not just allegorical or
symbolic, nor do they transcend an objective view of her immediate condi-
tion. Not that all her paintings address her physical trauma, but it is an impor-
tant theme from the beginning and becomes increasingly frequent in the later
years.

Painting: The Broken Column (1944)

Kalo’s portrait of herself showing her chest enclosed in a steel corset with
a pillar replacing her spine sends the message of her extraordinary ordeal and
powerfully compels the compassion of the viewer. This image, although not a
realistic one, may also be meant to shock an avoidant viewer as well as to
challenge the kind of emotional avoidance so characteristic of her family.
This image represents a passionate alternative to the way Kahlo often pre-
sented to the public and to her family a persona that was gay and generous,
acting happy in her effort to appear strong, unbowed, and unbroken.
During the last four years of her life, Kahlo turned to painting still lifes, as
if with her deteriorating health and the nearness of death she could no longer
depict her own physical self but required the more indirect images of fruits
and vegetables in various states of disintegration.

Painting: Bride Frightened at Seeing Life Opened (1943)

In this 1943 still life, called Bride Frightened at Seeing Life Opened, the
jagged cut watermelon now symbolizes traumatic experience. The brutal
threat of a certain reality that would kill her before her time, something that
she had always lived with, became insurmountable when in 1953 her right leg
had to be amputated because of gangrene. She registered this as a nearly un-
bearable destruction of her sense of herself as a whole complete person; it
 TRAUMA IN THE WORKS OF KAHLO AND BACON 59

The Broken Column, 1944. Collection, Fundacion Dolores, Olmeda, Mexico.

Courtesy of Banco de Mexico.

may also have returned her to the terror of her early youth when she was os-
tracized as “pato palo,” peglegged Frida. It was as if the amputation shattered
irrevocably her body image as it shattered her confidence to be able to mount
again her previous efforts at stopping the process of fragmentation.

Figure: Sketchbook (1953)

After Kahlo had somewhat recovered from the amputation, she drew in her
diary the image of severed limbs with the caption: “Feet what do I need them
for, if I have wings to fly.” These lines testify one more time to her determi-
nation not to have her spirit crushed. The image of wings is also part of sev-
60 BOSE

Feet What Do I Need Them for, If I have Wings to Fly?, 1963. Collection, Museo
de Frida Kahlo, Mexico. Courtesy of Banco de Mexico.

eral other diary entries and part of the last image in her diary. Wings are per-
haps another version of the door she once drew as a child onto the window
pane through which she entered into the realm of imagination to visit with her
imaginary companion. It was through her art that Kahlo remained able to re-
spond feelingly, and to hold onto her will not to be paralyzed in the face of
overwhelming adversity. It was with a spirit that is ultimately beyond any
psychological explanation that Frida Kahlo at a time not far from her death
was able to say “In spite of my long illness I feel immense joy in living”
(Kahlo, 1995a, p. 257)
 TRAUMA IN THE WORKS OF KAHLO AND BACON 61

FRANCIS BACON

In contrast to Frida Kahlo, a painter who was explicit about her own suf-
fering in her painting, Francis Bacon claimed that he had little interest in what
he called the narrative and illustrative artistic form, and he accepted no inter-
pretive linking of his art to any personal experience of violence or abuse. But
when Bacon entered the art scene with Three Studies of a Crucifixion as a
participant in a group show in London in 1945, he presented to the public im-
ages that were chracterized by eyewitness John Russell as “so unrelievedly
awful that the mind shut snap at the sight of them”(Russell, 1993, p. 10).

Studies for Base of Crucifixion (1944)

This kind of painting, at the time, had no precedent. These ghoulish, dis-
figured creatures with their half-human, half-animal features and threatenen-
ing poses conveyed hatred and terror, voracious greed, and other unnamable
threats, and were received with shock. As John Russell, who attended the
opening, writes (1993), the paintings caused total consternation: “We had no
name for them, and no name for what we felt about them. They were regarded
as freaks, monsters, irrelevant to the concerns of the day, and the product of
an imagination so eccentric as not to count in any possible permanent way”
(p. 10). Of course, Bacon’s images did wind up counting, and later, when
Margaret Thatcher asked the director of the Tate Gallery who the greatest
contemporary painter was and was told Francis Bacon, she exclaimed: “Not
that dreadful man who paints those horrible pictures!” (Farson, 1993, p. 228).
Bacon took exception to this perception of his work as horrible, and to the
assumption that he intended to depict the abyss of life. In an interview with
David Sylvester, he said, @EX:People always seem to think that in my paint-
ings I’m trying to put across a feeling of suffering and ferocity of life, but I
don’t think of it at all in that way myself. You see, just the very fact of being
born is a ferocious thing, just existence itself as one goes between birth and
death. It’s not that I want to emphasize that side of things—but I suppose that
if you are trying to work as near to your nervous system as you can that’s
what automatically comes out. . . . Life . . . is just filled, really, with suffering
and despair” (Davis & Yard, 1986, p. 110). In spite of this comment on life in
general, this was a conviction born out of personal experience.
Bacon was born in 1909 in Dublin to an English, upper-class, Protestant
family, one of five children. His father Edward, who had been a major in the
British army, was a descendant of the 17th-century philosopher Francis
Bacon. Not much of a philosopher himself, however, Edward was a gambler
and a passionate breeder and trainer of horses in Ireland. Bacon’s mother,
coming from a wealthy industrial family, appears to have been distant and un-
62

Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion, 1944. © Tate, London, 2005.
© 2004 The Estate of Francis Bacon/ARS, New York/DACS, London.
 TRAUMA IN THE WORKS OF KAHLO AND BACON 63

involved in her son’s upbringing. Francis was essentially raised by a devoted

nanny who remained with him until she died in 1946. Francis grew up with
very little formal education. “I had no upbringing at all” he once said. “I used
simply to work on my father’s farm” (Farson, 1993, p. 17). This astonishing
neglect, considering his family’s social standing, was compounded by his
having childhood asthma, by the family’s frequent moves, and by his finally
being expelled from home by his father at the age of 16. Besides this pattern
of emotional deficit, there were also abundant violent traumatic experiences
in Bacon’s childhood and youth. Regarding specifically traumatic experi-
ences, extra mural and intramural violence were abundant in Francis Bacon’s
childhood and youth. As a 6-year-old in London during World War I Bacon
was exposed to alarms, bombing raids, antiaircraft fire, and blackouts; he saw
people being killed, and he commented on that time by saying: “I was made
aware of what is called the possibility of danger at a young age” (Farson,
1993, p. 16). After the war, when the family returned to Ireland, there was the
constant external threat of political violence. The experience of a constant ex-
ternal threat had its parallel in the many moments of terror Francis encoun-
tered at home when he became the victim of his father’s rages and rejections.
Edward Bacon was a belligerant, dictatorial man with no friends who had no
use for his physically awkward son, whom he left to the care of the stable
boys. Though Francis abhorred country life and horsemanship, he was forced
to participate nevertheless. When he suffered an asthma attack, his father
arranged for his “cure” that he be “be systematically and viciously horse-
whipped by his Irish grooms,” several of whom also “broke him in” as Bacon,
using the language of horsetraining, characterized his initiation into homosex-
uality at the age of 14. Bacon retaliated by calling his father a “failed horse-
trainer,” an “absolute bastard,” and a “silly old cunt,” but was apparently also
sexually attracted to him, as he became aware of later on. “It was only
through the grooms and the people in the stable I had affairs with that I real-
ized it was a sexual thing with my father” (Farson, 1993, pp. 71–72).
The family on Bacon’s mother’s side was also rather eccentric. His mater-
nal grandmother, who lived close by, had remarried the wealthy owner of a
colliery who often abused her physically and amused himself by killing and
mutilating cats and hanging their skinned bodies up on the porch.
At age 16, Francis found liberation when he was thrown out of the house.
From his earliest years, Bacon had been interested in playing with dolls and in
dressing up in female clothing. One day when he was 16, he was surprised by
his father in the act of putting on his mother’s underwear. Banished, he
moved to London with his loyal nanny, living on an allowance of 3 pounds a
week ”between the gutter and the Ritz” (Farson, 1993, p. 22) as he put it, de-
pending on the kindness of friends and on an occasional petty theft. After 2
years, he moved to Paris, where he first began a career as an interior decorator
64 BOSE

and designer of furniture. At first he showed no interest in the museums and

galleries, and it was only through an accidental encounter with paintings of
Picasso in an art gallery that he began to paint, which from then on he pur-
sued in an unhurried, self-taught way.
Bacon’s adult life, which eventually brought him considerable fame as an
artist, was characterized by restlessness and much interpersonal instability.
He struggled with a resistance to painting, stopping at some point for several
years and destroying many of his earlier works. He often needed to drink in
order to be able to paint. He changed his residence frequently and alternated
in his relationships between being either a gregarious and generous partner or
suddenly cold and dismissive.

Painting: Pope Innocent III (1953)

Among Bacon’s earlier works, those most specifically related to his per-
sonal experience are his variations on a painting of Pope Innocent III by Ve-
lasquez. In Bacon’s version, Pope Innocent is seated with hands gripping the
chair arms and his mouth open in a ferocious scream. Bacon admits to having
been obsessed with, if not haunted by, a photograph of the Velasquez paint-
ing. But when in 1949 a painting of this scene was exhibited and understood
by the public as depicting Eichmann, who was on trial that year, Bacon would
dismiss such interpretations as reducing art to illustration and narrative. But
perhaps a stronger possibility is that “el papa,” or the “pope,” is related to
Bacon’s father, the tormentor of his childhood, by whom he was also awed.
Bacon turns Velasquez’s dignified pope into a frightening and furious author-
ity figure, whose somewhat spectral appearance only adds to his power across
time.

Painting: Study for a Nurse (1957)

The image of a mouth wide open in a scream returns a few years later in
Bacon’s painting of a screaming figure, taken from a still of an injured nurse
in the movie Battleship Potemkin. However, in this 1957 painting, the scream
seems to express the agony of the victim. In this way, the same feature char-
acterizes what can look like either a victim or a victimizer in Bacon’s work.
When questioned about the meaning of his horror-provoking imagery, Bacon
spoke of his intent to “return the onlooker to life more violently (Sylvester,
1975, p. 17), or “returning fact onto nervous system more violently. I would
like my pictures to look as if a human being has passed between them like a
snail, leaving a trail of the human presence and memory of past events as the
snail leaves its slime” (Farson, 1993, p. 228).
Bacon’s comments reveal, I believe, his deep connection with victimiza-
 TRAUMA IN THE WORKS OF KAHLO AND BACON 65

Study after Valesquez’s Portrait of Pope Innocent X, 1953. © ARS, New York. ©
2004 The Estate of Francis Bacon/ARS, New York/DACS, London.

tion, almost despite his conscious intent, when saying for instance about his
crucifixion images: “I have always been moved very much about images of
slaughterhouses” (Sylvester, 1975, p. 23), although he insisted that it was the
red color of meat that excited him as a painter. Perhaps all is simply said in
the way he painted the crucifixion as just one crucifixion among many.

Painting: Fragment of a Crucifixion (1950)

Bacon’s conscious investment in his images appears to have been one of

wanting to disillusion the viewer as to the humble essence of the human con-
dition: “All I want to do is distort the reality of the human figure into reality,
. . . we are meat” (Farson, 1993, p. 141). Perhaps the most telling of Bacon’s
66 BOSE

Study for the Nurse in the Film “Battleship Potemkin,”. © ARS, New York. © 2004
The Estate of Francis Bacon/ARS, New York/DACS, London.

preoccupation with destructiveness as a primary motive rather than as a by-

product of formal and aesthetic interest is his preoccupation with death. He
said: “I am a very limited artist, I portray what I can, but after the age of thirty
what is there but death?” (Farson, 1993, p. 229). A similar pessimism is part
of his sense of human relationships when he states: “one of the terrible things
about so-called love, certainly for an artist, I think is the destruction”
(Sylvester, 1975, p. 76).
For Frida Kahlo, death had a similar imminent feeling, the threat to her
own physical integrity was ongoing and yet she fought to hold on to an affir-
 TRAUMA IN THE WORKS OF KAHLO AND BACON 67

mative vision of life. In a poem, she (1995) wrote: “Sadness is portrayed in

my whole work, but that’s my condition; I am hopeless. Nevertheles, I have
happiness in my heart, knowing that Arcady and Lina love me the way I am”
(Kahlo, 1995b, p.129). For Bacon, however, death in a way had already hap-
pened in his loveless and brutalizing childhood, leaving him, for most of the
time during his adult life, to choose between attitudes of protective cynicism
or hypomanic defiance.

DISCUSSION

Ancient mythology has given the artist Orpheus the power to stave off all
destructive forces, as he protects his fellow travelers from being lured to
death by the sirens and persuades Persephone by his song to let Eurydice re-
turn to life again. But the myth also shows how he fails and how in Virgil’s
version he is himself ultimately torn to pieces by the madwomen of Thrace.
The Myth of Orpheus speaks to both—to the life-giving power of art and its
triumph over destructiveness and death, and to its ultimate failure in the face
of death (Segal, 1989, p. 2). In the end, it has to remain wishful thinking that
art could indeed have magical power and prevail once more in the struggle
with death. For a time, the Maeneads seem to be held at bay by the sound of
Orpheus’s song “until the women’s raucous shouting drowns out the music”
(Segal, p. 2, referring to Milton, Paradise Lost, Book 7), leaving us with an
image of art’s defeat in the face of destructiveness and violence. But if art
cannot triumph over deadly reality, it has another kind of power, that is, as a
tool of survival for the living. The process of representation is crucial for con-
tending with potentially overwhelming and unbearable experiences of
trauma. It has been said that the art that arises from trauma is “the only possi-
ble medium for effective representation of trauma” (Laub & Podell, 1995, p.
995).
Looking at the devastating effects of massive trauma, theorists have postu-
lated a variety of psychopathological phenomena. Dissociation is one of the
main reactions (Davis & Frawley, 1994) which results in a loss of selfhood
(Bromberg,1998). Another consequence is the potential loss of the internal
other, leading to inner emptiness; this may also preclude the ability to under-
take creative work, because the internal other as the necessary partner for in-
ternal dialogue has been eliminated (Laub & Podell, 1995). On the other
hand, the internal other may be a toxic presence. When trauma experience oc-
curs in a family setting rather than in the context of a larger social situation
like the Holocaust, a persecutory introject may result instead of an inner void.
Finally, severe traumatic experience also abolishes the self-synthesizing,
creative, and integrative abilities of the subject because of dissociation and
68 BOSE

the paralysis of feeling and remembering. And yet sometimes a powerful tal-
ent may allow for the survival of the ability in times of disastrous experience
to synthesize a rearranged personal gestalt that can then be experienced as me
or myself.
Of course, artistic work can serve the cause of defense as much as the
cause of expression. In that regard, an artist like Francis Bacon is particularly
intriguing in that he achieves images of disgust and horror that identify him as
someone intimately familiar with the abyss, and yet he disclaims the connec-
tion between the images he invents and any personal traumatic experiences.
Kahlo, by contrast, differs in unabashedly representing her own victimized
situation right at the time when she encounters it.
Both artists show the multiple function that artistic work can serve, be it in
the service of defensive excluding from awareness or of nonresistive opening
up to painful experience. In regard to the medium of poetry, Segal (1989)
postulates two diverse aspects of the power of poetry, which he labels the
“immanent” and the “transcendant.” Poets can view their form, language, as a
means of sympathetic participation in and identification with the struggles
and the processes of life against death, or as a privileged medium for viewing
that struggle at a distance (Segal, p. 7). It therefore seems plausible to regard
artistic work as allowing for both, to be the tool of resistance and defensives-
ness and to be the tool of deep and liberating mourning through facilitating
expressive representation and integration of experience.
How then can we conceive of the ways in which the artist’s work affects
psychic processes? How can artwork function in the necessary restoring of
memory and feeling to consciousness from a dissociated area of experience?
In situations of trauma it has been argued that no verbal links exist between
the experiences of the two dissociated aspects of self. The abused child enacts
but is, in most cases, rendered speechless (Davis & Frawley, 1991). It is here
that the artist’s expertise with nonverbal symbolic operations may inform and
enlarge the scope of psychoanalytic thinking that has generally preferred to
rely on verbal symbolizations. In a model for understanding the use of con-
cretization in psychotic states, Stolorow, Atwood and Brandschaft (1988)
when the psychotic person at the moment of being overwhelmed by a se-
verely traumatic experience as creating a concrete symbol for the catastrophic
subjective experience by forming a delusion. Artists may similarly, when the
world imposes itself upon their awareness as chaotic or destructive, create in
the artistic work a concrete presence that then can function for the fragment-
ing self in multiple ways as an integrating or sustaining object. Thus it is
through such an understanding of concretization that the pivotal role of art in
dealing with the psychological integration of massive traumatic experience
becomes evident. The concrete art object has both an intrapsychic and an in-
terpersonal benefit, in providing poignant symbolization, in connecting with
 TRAUMA IN THE WORKS OF KAHLO AND BACON 69

dissociated affective experiences as a kind of messenger between areas of dis-

sociated experience and consciousness and in standing in for a witnessing
presence (Laub & Auerhahn 1993, Rose 1999).
Finally, in turning to the act of creation itself, which is perhaps the ulti-
mate manifestation of personhood, I wish to emphasize the need for a clinical
focus on the status of the self. We speak often of interpersonal process, or of
inner objects and of internal psychodynamic process, that is, of interaction
and content while not also focusing on the container itself and its condition.
The experience of self as agent is at its best and most “self” in the experi-
ence of expressing and finding form for what is experienced and felt and in
synthesizing and integrating what is apart. The function of the work of art, in
a reciprocal process between the art object and its maker, in the making and in
the performing of it, can then be seen as being able to reassert the ability to
find meaning and symbolic form and therewith again to communicate to an
other, to have a witness, and to also communicate with oneself and with dis-
sociated aspects of self-experience. There is then a significant relationship be-
tween artistic form and the experience the subject has through it of itself as
form. I wish to refer here to Rose (1999) when he emphasizes the function of
the art object as a witnessing presence as a provider of an empathic interac-
tion that will lead to an emotional experience. His concept of a resonant inter-
action with a creative presence can then be seen as the prerequisite for the
artist to acquire access to his or her own emotional experience, which may be
in an unformulated (Stern, 1997) or dissociated (Bromberg, 1998) state. The
presence of the artist’s self is manifest when we experience the subject’s syn-
thesizing ability in action, but we can also now know that this was only possi-
ble because of a process of interaction with the art object as a resonant other.
It is in this way that creative imagination can overcome the absence of an ex-
ternal or internal human partner as well as stand up to the fear that comes
from the presence of malignant introjects. At that point, one can speak of a
triumph of art over trauma.

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