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Culture & Psyche

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The Abject to the Sublime

Otherness in the Art of Francis Bacon

Mark Winborn

To cite this article: Mark Winborn (2022) The Abject to the Sublime, Jung Journal, 16:3, 132-145,
DOI: 10.1080/19342039.2022.2088998

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/19342039.2022.2088998

Published online: 01 Sep 2022.

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 The Abject to the Sublime
Otherness in the Art of Francis Bacon
MARK WINBORN

According to philosopher Hans-Georg Gadamer, art represents “the essence of an experience

per se” (2004, 60). My focus is on the experience of otherness as mediated through the artwork of
Francis Bacon, the Irish-born twentieth-century figurative painter known for his raw, evocative,
and often bizarre imagery. Although Bacon’s various biographies and interviews indicate that he
experienced significant trauma during his life, paradoxically he steadfastly claimed that his art was
not autobiographical or narrative. In fact, he repeatedly indicated that he was attempting to move
away from imagery that would explicitly narrate an event. Bacon preferred to disrupt narration so
that the viewer of his work is left to confront and digest the pure and raw emotional experience
reflected in the painting. He attempted to capture the emotional impact of experience in his
subjects. In a somewhat cryptic expression, Bacon says, “I would like my pictures to look as if
a human being had passed between them like a snail, leaving a trail of the human presence and
memory trace of past events as the snail leaves its slime” (Ritchie 1955). Elsewhere (in Sylvester
2016, 46) he says, “What I want to do is to distort the thing far beyond the appearance but in the
distortion to bring it back to a recording of the appearance.” This would obviously indicate
Bacon’s wish to present raw and unmediated imagery that would allow the viewer to experience
the subject in its more deconstructed state. This style is what made Bacon’s work so provocative
and enduring and why he is considered one of the most famous modern artists of our time.
Here, I will explore Bacon’s artwork utilizing 1) Bion’s (1963) concepts of β-element, α-
element, α-function, containment, and reverie; 2) Jung’s concept of shadow; and 3) Burke’s
(1756) concept of the sublime.

Otherness
The encounter with otherness, so essential to the analytical process, as well our engagement
with the world around us, is also central to Bacon’s art. We cannot experience otherness in life
or analysis if we feel we already know what we are looking for. Jung points out that otherness is
at the experiential heart of his psychological model, indicating that the complex will be
experienced subjectively as something alien or other: “it . . . involves an experience of
Jung Journal: Culture & Psyche, Volume 16, Number 3, pp. 132–145, Print ISSN 1934-2039, Online ISSN 1934-2047.
© 2022 C.G. Jung Institute of San Francisco. DOI: 10.1080/19342039.2022.2088998.
 Mark Winborn, The Abject to the Sublime 133

a special kind namely the recognition of an alien ‘other’ in oneself, or the objective presence of
another will” (1967, CW 13, ¶481).
Bacon’s work confronts the viewer with elements of experience most would prefer not to
contemplate. Through distortions of body, expression, and space, Bacon meditates on and
reveals the abject, distorted, alienated, and painful aspects of experience: elements of experience
that are often avoided, shunned, or remain unrepresented in our psyches and the psyches of our
patients.
For example, in Bacon’s 1962 painting, Three Studies for a Crucifixion (https://www
.francis-bacon.com/artworks/paintings/three-studies-crucifixion), the skin of the figures does
not fully function as a container; the inside of the body finds itself outside; the skeleton is
relieved of its role as a supporting frame for the body; and the parts of the human body are
arbitrarily recombined in improbable configurations.
Although this article will include some analysis of Bacon’s work, the primary focus is on
the experience of otherness evoked in his paintings, in a sense, to permit Bacon to “analyze” us
through an encounter with his artwork. He confronts and reveals by providing us with visual
evidence of these dimensions of experience. Through engagement with Bacon’s work, we are
potentially transformed by it as we become better able to imagine and contain experiences of
otherness—for ourselves and the otherness encountered with those around us. Ultimately,
I propose that confrontation with the abject is also an inevitable pathway toward an experience
of the sublime, an experience that Edmund Burke (1756) describes as a unique experience of
transcendence at the intersection of awe, terror, beauty, and boundlessness.
I came to an interest in Bacon in 1990 following the release of the movie Jacob’s Ladder
(1990; see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KuE8DXDTYag). The film traces the film’s
protagonist, Jacob, played by Tim Robbins, as he makes a progressive descent into
a fragmentary, frightening world of hallucination and delusion. However, the viewer is con­
stantly left in doubt as to whether these experiences are happening in an imaginary world or in
Jacob’s actual world. Because of the uncertainty of perspective, the film is an extremely
unsettling experience for the viewer. I left the movie wondering, “What did I just witness?”
In reading about the movie, I discovered that the director, Adrian Lyne, was strongly
influenced by the artwork of Bacon in creating the visual atmosphere of the movie. Lyne
incorporates cinematic interpretations of the grotesque shapes, odd movements, uncertainty,
dismemberments, and reconfigurations of the human form found in Bacon’s artwork. As Jacob
is wheeled through the disorienting and grotesque landscape in an asylum on a hospital gurney,
it is difficult for the viewer to avoid identifying with the panic, helplessness, and dread reflected
in his face.

Bion
In considering the psychological implications of Bacon’s work, Bion’s (1963) model of the
psyche is relevant. He describes a layer of the mind not specifically articulated in the Jungian
model (Winborn 2018). Bion’s concept of β-elements portrays psychic experience that has not
134 J U N G J O U R N A L : C U L T U R E & P S Y C H E 1 6 : 3 / S U M M E R 2 0 2 2

yet been sufficiently digested, coalesced, and integrated to be represented in the psyche. Some in
the field have also come to refer to this level of experience as unrepresented states, nonrepre­
sentational states, or nonfigurability.
Nonrepresented states, or β-elements, are raw bits of unmetabolized, undigested proto-
experience. These states reflect psychic states and structural capacities that were disrupted or
failed to develop. β-elements are associated with sensory, affective, and somatic processes that
lack psychic representation and therefore are absent the verbal content, imagery, or symboliza­
tion that would make them available for reflection. Words and images that are available for
mediating experience have become represented in the psyche. Bacon’s work engages a similar
process of transforming sensation into image. Deleuze (2017) refers to Bacon’s work as
revealing “The Logic of Sensation.” Bacon (in Kimmelman 1989, ¶37, online edition) states,
“I want to create images that are a shorthand of sensation,” and “One wants a thing to be as
factual as possible and at the same time as deeply suggestive—or deeply unlocking of areas of
sensation” (in Sylvester 2016, 56).
Most concepts central to Jungian theory are formulated around material that has pre­
viously been represented in the psyche, such as imagoes, complexes, meanings, narratives, words,
internal object relations—all of these refer to representations in this use of the term. Because β-
elements operate outside awareness, and have not yet been represented, they do not have
meaning and are not sufficiently formed or coalesced to be reflected upon or repressed.
Therefore, it would be a mistake to make a one-to-one correspondence between Jung’s concept
of shadow and Bion’s concept of β-elements. For Jung, the primary genesis of the shadow
complex is the repressive and dissociative defenses of the psyche and the operation of the ego.
Therefore, β-elements have never been sufficiently represented in the psyche for their existence
to be at direct odds with the individual’s ego ideal. Ultimately, β-elements are our deepest
experience of otherness, an otherness that is only experienced as sensory, affective, or somatic. It
is part of our experiential subjectivity that has not yet sufficiently registered as part of our
known experiential landscape.
In Bion’s model, the work of analysis continues to involve the understanding of symbolic
content, which reveals unconscious meanings, but analysis also becomes a process of metaboliz­
ing unsymbolized aspects of experience that have never been conscious or repressed. Only by
working on this level can those experiences become available for reflection and symbol
production. Bion proposes that emotional experience is the foundation from which the
capacity for increasingly complex forms of reflection emerges. β-elements must be transformed
into usable elements of experience, which can then become represented, remembered, named,
and reflected upon.
Bion refers to experiences that have become sufficiently coalesced to be reflected upon as α-
elements. α-elements do not yet have meaning but are capable of being worked with as
psychological events, somewhat analogous to the way in which words can be grouped together
to form sentences and paragraphs that have narrative meaning. α-elements become building
blocks of experience that can be utilized to create meaning.
 Mark Winborn, The Abject to the Sublime 135

For Bion, this is initially achieved using the analyst’s α-function, which he equates with a state of
mind like the mother’s reverie when she is holding her infant and the infant’s needs in her mind. Bion
also equates it with what he calls the container/contained mode of functioning, in which the mother/
analyst serves as a container for the infant’s/patient’s experience that requires containment, such as
anxiety, frustration, hunger, thirst, fatigue, and pain.
For the patient to learn from experience, the α-function of the analyst must be used to
reflect on the β-elements of the patient until the patient develops sufficient α-function to
participate in the process as a mutually constellated α-function. Interventions emerging from
the analyst’s α-function, primarily active during states of the analyst’s reverie, are not intended
to give the patient understanding or meaning per se, but rather to facilitate the organization of
previously unorganized experience. This occurs by helping the patient register these experiences
while developing language and imagery for describing and remembering them.
The α-function operates similarly to the transcendent function; however, in Jung’s model
the transcendent function operates to generate symbolic material and functions intrapsychic­
ally, whereas in Bion’s model the α-function operates intersubjectively and on the level of the
pre-representational. We can think of the α-function as operating on a more fundamental level
of transformation that is precursory to the processes of the transcendent function. These α-
elements become the building blocks of larger shifts involved with the symbolization process of
the transcendent function and the capacity to individuate. Ultimately, it is likely that the α-
function and the transcendent function both reflect a common underlying psychological
process capable of operating at different levels of experience.

Conceptual Link with Bacon’s Art

Using Bion’s conceptual tools I will now turn to Bacon and his art. I propose that Bacon’s paintings
operate in a similar fashion as the α-function within the psychic domain. Bacon’s artistic reverie opens
him to impressions of his subjects, including himself, that the subject would have difficulty detecting,
articulating, imagining, or representing. As he puts it, “All I do is cast my rod into the sewers of despair
and see what I come up with” (in Farson 1996, 116). Bacon digests or metabolizes aspects of the
human condition that are recognizable when presented but unimaginable without the aid of his artistic
reverie. He makes invisible forces and experiences visible through their impact on his figures. Bion
termed this capacity “non-sensuous intuition”—meaning a perceptive capacity of the psyche that was
not dependent on direct sensory input. Anton Ehrenzweig (cited in Russell 1979, 22) indicated that
Bacon was a master of “unconscious scanning,” which is the term Ehrenzweig applied to active but
unfocused attention by the artist, resulting in discoveries made and correspondences established that
are unavailable during ordinary, concentrated, focused attention. Ehrenzweig’s description of “uncon­
scious scanning” by Bacon is almost identical to the description of reverie offered by Bion (see
Winborn 2014, 70–96). Bacon described his process as structured but leaving room for “chance” to
alter the painting—elements he referred to as “accidentals.” Elsewhere he states (in Sylvester 2016, 56),
“I want a very ordered image, but I want it to have come about by chance,” even down to the
movement of the paint, saying “I don’t, in fact, know very often what the paint will do” (93).
136 J U N G J O U R N A L : C U L T U R E & P S Y C H E 1 6 : 3 / S U M M E R 2 0 2 2

Bacon’s First Displayed Work

Bacon’s first publicly displayed work, a triptych titled Three Studies for Figures at the Base of
a Crucifixion (Figure 1), occurred in April 1945 as part of a group exhibition at the Lefevre Gallery
in London. According to John Russell, the images were
So unrelievedly awful that the mind shut snap at the sight of them. Their anatomy was half-human,
half-animal, and they were confined in a low-ceilinged, windowless and oddly proportioned space. They
could bite, probe, and suck, and they had very long eel-like necks, but their functioning was mysterious.
Ears and mouths they had, but two at least were sightless. One was unpleasantly bandaged . . . They
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. (1979, 10)

The intense, heavily defended reaction to Bacon’s initial work points to the need for an artist
such a Bacon who can imagine the unimaginable, just as Muriel Dimen speaks of a similar need
in the psychoanalytic session: “The psychoanalytic session is a chance to say the unspeakable
and think the unthinkable. To imagine what does not yet exist” (2013, 61).

Figure 1. Francis Bacon, Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion, 1944
© The Estate of Francis Bacon. All rights reserved, DACS and ARS 2022

Three Studies for a Portrait of George Dyer, 1963

George Dyer was Bacon’s long-time lover who committed suicide in 1971, two days before the most
important showing of Bacon’s career to that point. Bacon often utilized friends as subjects, yet many
of the artistic actions Bacon executed in his paintings struck Bacon as violent—the kind of abstract,
impersonal violence he witnessed in the slaughterhouses and butcher shops he frequented as youth.
He was not interested in depicting the violent act itself; he was interested in portraying the residue of
violence, the effect of violence, the experience that his figures are left with following violence. He is not
only referring to violent physical acts but also the violence of distorting someone’s image until it was
 Mark Winborn, The Abject to the Sublime 137

Figure 2. Francis Bacon, Three Studies for a Portrait of George Dyer, 1963
© The Estate of Francis Bacon. All rights reserved, DACS/Artimage and ARS 2022. Photo: Prudence Cuming Associates Ltd

only barely recognizable as a specific person, or even as something fully human, saying: “People believe
that the distortions of them are an injury to them no matter how much they feel for or like you. . . . If
they were not my friends, I could not do such violence to them” (in Russell 1979, 86). Bacon’s studies
of Dyer are still recognizable as Dyer (Figure 2), but through his unconscious scanning, Bacon also
reveals fissures, voids, misalignments, and distortions that may be sensed but which cannot be detected
through the ordinary aesthetic viewpoint of the camera lens.

Three Studies for Portrait of Lucian Freud, 1964

Lucian Freud, Sigmund Freud’s grandson, and Francis Bacon were mutual subjects in one
another’s art, close friends, intense competitors within the art world, and eventually they
became bitterly estranged. Freud’s art is known for his unwavering, ruthless gaze upon the
human body, most often selecting subjects whose bodies were hyper-realistically captured in
states of exhaustion, obesity, aging, or queer. Descriptions of Freud depict him as brilliant,
charismatic, self-absorbed, possessing a volatile temper, obsessively driven in his work,
misogynistic, and having a pattern of habitual infidelity. In this depiction (https://www.
francis-bacon.com/artworks/paintings/three-studies-portrait-lucian-freud), Bacon’s vision of
Freud unfolds in an almost cinematic style, each section of the triptych revealing a different
view of Freud’s personality. Bacon was not interested in creating a literal depiction of Freud,
but rather attempted to capture some essence of the being who was Lucian Freud as seen
through Bacon’s own experience of Freud. Bacon’s artistic reverie reveals elements of Freud’s
image that might otherwise go unnoticed, unnamed, or unrepresented. It is interesting to see
how the shape or lines of Freud’s face shifts or morphs but there is also a continuity, an
essence, that remains constant across the three images. The variation in the depiction of
Freud’s eyes is especially captivating. In the image on the left, Freud almost appears lifeless or
138 J U N G J O U R N A L : C U L T U R E & P S Y C H E 1 6 : 3 / S U M M E R 2 0 2 2

inhuman, as though his body and mind have been taken over by an alien creature. One eye is
open but lifeless and menacing, whereas the other eye emanates an alien glow. In the center
image, Freud’s eyes are both closed, and he holds a hand to his temple as though he is
overwhelmed by some inner conflict. In the image on the right Freud’s countenance takes on
a more focused, determined appearance yet one eye now appears to be covered by a veil of
skin while the other eye stares forward, engaged by an unseen object.

Three Studies for Self-Portrait, 1974

In this series of self-portraits (https://www.christies.com/lotfinder/Lot/francis-bacon-1909-
1992-three-studies-for-5437853-details.aspx), in the service of transformation, Bacon does not
spare himself from the same violence and distortion that he subjects his friends to. In this series
of self-portraits, we can see a similar morphing and distortion of his own image as he utilized in
the depiction of Freud. Yet, in this series of self-portraits, Bacon’s eyes remain shut across all
three images, as though his gaze is turned inward, toward some inner conflict, pain, or focal
point of contemplation. By not burdening the viewer with his gaze, he somehow offers the
viewer a fuller experience of his fragility and fundamental lack of completeness. My impression
is that Bacon utilizes the movement of the black hole that floats before his face, at one point
becoming a lacuna in his face, as a way of capturing and portraying the subjectively experienced
“gaps” or dissociations in his psychological state.

Two Figures, 1953

The image Two Figures (Figure 3) highlights the indeterminate nature of many Bacon
figures—an indeterminacy that unsettles the viewer. Bacon offers no context other than
a faintly outlined room or space and a rumpled bed to create a stage for his figures. While
both figures appear to be male, their activity and relationship is ambiguous. Are they
making love? Are they playfully wrestling? Are they fighting? Is one choking the life out of
the other? It is an uncanny sensation to have the action so vividly reflected in the tension
of their bodies but no comforting certainty about the nature of their activity. In a sense,
this is the ever-present work of the analyst who sits with the patient in states of
indeterminacy: knowing certain elements—such as the patient’s words, tone of voice, shifts
in posture, or observable behavior—but always encountering otherness, something sensed
behind all of the knowns but not known explicitly. The analyst’s greatest challenge is
finding ways to make tangible the unknown and unseen.
 Mark Winborn, The Abject to the Sublime 139

Figure 3. Francis Bacon, Two Figures, 1953

© The Estate of Francis Bacon. All rights reserved, DACS/Artimage and ARS 2022. Photo: Prudence Cuming Associates Ltd
140 J U N G J O U R N A L : C U L T U R E & P S Y C H E 1 6 : 3 / S U M M E R 2 0 2 2

Study after Velázquez’s Portrait of Pope Innocent X, 1953

Bacon’s study based on Velázquez’s portrait of Pope Innocent X (see Figures 4 and 5) is perhaps
his most famous work. It includes one of his recurring visual motifs, that of the outlining frame or
structure that surrounds many of the characters in his paintings, as though the frame both
highlights and accentuates the emotional experience of the figures, but also confines the subjects
to that moment in perpetuity, like Sisyphus continuously pushing the stone up the hill. Perhaps
the most unsettling aspect of his study of the Pope is the interminable scream that is occurring in
a vacuum. The awfulness of the scream created by Bacon lies in the invisibility of the event that led
to the scream. Deleuze (2017) observed that the scream in Bacon’s work is not just a scream of
pain or terror but also becomes a mechanism by which the body seeks to escape from the painful
imprisonment of itself, to escape the battle between the competing forces of soma, desire, affect,
thought, and sensation. By comparing Bacon’s study with the original painting we may glimpse
what Bacon perceives happening behind the guarded gaze captured by Velázquez.

Figure with Meat, 1954

In Figure with Meat (https://www.francis-bacon.com/artworks/paintings/figure-meat), Bacon
continues in his preoccupation with Velázquez’s painting of Pope Innocent X, but in this
painting the figure morphs. The cage previously imprisoning the Pope is still present, but it is
now more transparent, and the intensity of the scream is diminished. Here Bacon introduces
another recurring element of his paintings, the image of flesh or meat. The figure of the Pope is
now flanked by fully split halves of a cow with the inner cavity exposed. Bacon felt we needed
ongoing glimpses of the inert, dead, unanimated qualities of our lives as well as the living,
organic qualities. Of this element Bacon said, “All I want to do is distort the reality of the
human figure into reality . . . we are meat” (in Farson 1993, 141). Elsewhere Bacon says, “If life
excites you, its opposite, like a shadow, death, must excite you. Perhaps not excite you, but you
are aware of it in the same way as you are aware of life” (in Sylvester 2016, 78).

Portrait of George Dyer in a Mirror, 1968

This image highlights Bacon’s use of the mirror to reveal rather than reflect (https://www
.francis-bacon.com/artworks/paintings/portrait-george-dyer-mirror). In the “actual” figure, the
body and face of Dyer are arranged in a seemingly haphazard fashion. It is difficult to tell where
his arms, legs, hands, feet, and torso begin and end. An indefinite head and unrecognizable face
balances at the top. It is difficult to discern how the elements of the face are arranged on the
head. In contrast, a face that is more recognizable as Dyer is depicted in the mirror, yet severely
split or fractured, as though Dyer’s face is like a ripe melon cleaved in half by some unseen
dismembering force. The viewer is left to wonder which, if either, of the images portrays or
reveals the real Dyer.
 Mark Winborn, The Abject to the Sublime 141

Three Figures and Portrait, 1975

In Three Figures and Portrait (https://www.francis-bacon.com/artworks/paintings/three-figures-
and-portrait) Bacon utilizes a portrait hanging on a wall to similar effect as the mirror in the Dyer
painting. In many respects, the figure in the portrait is the most recognizable figure in the image.
Yet even the figure in the portrait remains disjointed or fragmented. Meanwhile, the other three
figures are only partially recognizable as humans—all being subject to contortions of body that
ordinary humans are not capable of. Some have body parts, such as a spine, externalized, whereas
another figure has a large orifice of unknown function where no orifice should be. Bacon also
heightens the uncertainty of the image through the addition of the mysteriously suspended lenses
that magnify particular aspects of the subjects yet without discernable intention.

Abject to Sublime
In aesthetics, the abject refers to those elements of experience that are cast off, alien, unseen,
unacknowledged, or only existing at the edges. In analytical psychology, the abject would be
associated with the shadow, and in alchemy, the prima materia. However, the domain of the
abject also includes the β-elements from Bion’s model. The abject defines the beginning of an
arc of experience that culminates in the sublime.
The notion of the sublime originally appears in print around 1554, but Edmund Burke’s
1756 treatise Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful brought the concept into wider circulation.
In still life paintings, the sublime was often captured in images of fruit painted at the highest
point of maturity just before decomposition—creating an indeterminate space between life and
death, fullness and decay (Civitarese 2014).

Caspar David Friedrich—Abbey in the Oakwood 1810

Friedrich’s Abbey in the Oakwood (Figure 6) reflects the element of the mourning always present in
the sublime. It brings together the abbey in ruins, trees stripped bare, an abandoned cemetery, and
small human figures dwarfed by the elements of nature. As interpreted by Giuseppe Civitarese:
The sublime reveals in visual forms the fracture between infinite and finite, between the immeasurably
large and the incredibly small . . . however, the feeling of deprivation gives rise to an emancipatory
impulse . . . At one moment one feels dragged down and then is seized by something that pushes one up
to the heights. This is why we say the pleasure given by the spectacle of the sublime in nature is
a negative order, because it arises from the violent contrast with a sense of danger that is an integral
process of it . . . In other words, for an image to constellate the sublime there must be an element of
threat in it, a direct threat to self-preservation, and only by struggling to come to terms with the threat
do we experience the beauty of transcending the threat . . . The sublime reveals the abyss which
existence looks out into. (2014, 1062–1063, 1076)
Bacon threatens by deconstructing the known and by confronting us with images of
the unknown. Bacon’s images are still recognizable as experience, but he confronts us
142 J U N G J O U R N A L : C U L T U R E & P S Y C H E 1 6 : 3 / S U M M E R 2 0 2 2

Figure 4. Diego Velázquez Portrait of Pope Innocent X, circa 1650

(Public domain, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portrait_of_Innocent_X)
 Mark Winborn, The Abject to the Sublime 143

Figure 5. Francis Bacon, Study after Velázquez’s Portrait of Pope Innocent X, 1953 © The Estate of Francis Bacon.
All rights reserved, DACS/Artimage and ARS 2022. Photo: Prudence Cuming Associates Ltd
144 J U N G J O U R N A L : C U L T U R E & P S Y C H E 1 6 : 3 / S U M M E R 2 0 2 2

Figure 6. Caspar David Friedrich, Abbey in the Oakwood, 1810. Oil on canvas. 67.3 × 43.4 in. (171 × 110.4 cm.)
(Public domain, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Abbey_in_the_Oakwood#/media/File:Caspar_David_Friedrich_-_Abtei_
im_Eichwald_-_Google_Art_Project.jpg)

with barely recognizable representations of those experiences. In his own words, “I’ve
always hoped to put over things as directly and rawly as I possibly can, and perhaps, if
a thing comes across directly, people feel that that is horrific” (in Sylvester 2016, 38). If
we can tolerate the initial horror that comes from the confrontation with the layers of
experience revealed to us by Bacon, then those accumulated elements of experience slowly
bring an encounter with otherness and open a pathway to the sublime—bringing with it
a terrible beauty, an unbearable ecstasy. It is an experience that frightens, inspires,
captivates, and constellates awe. By creating a rupture in our normal mode of aesthetic
sensing, Bacon forces us to activate our own capacity to survive the visual onslaught, to
take in, digest, and reconfigure old ways of sensing, and to create new elements of
experience that previously did not exist. As much as his art makes us uncomfortable,
he also expands our capacity to bear our own feeling states by making them sensorially
palpable. Fuller (1980) proposes that the opposite of the aesthetic is the anesthetic—that
which numbs. If we can find a way to bear it and expand our psychological capacities,
Bacon’s work is anything but anesthetizing; he is like a jolt of adrenalin to our sensory/
somatic/affective apparatus and his work provides a visual metaphor for imagining into
the unrecognized in others.
 Mark Winborn, The Abject to the Sublime 145

NOTE
References to The Collected Works of C. G. Jung are cited in the text as CW, volume number, and
paragraph number. The Collected Works are published in English by Routledge (UK) and Princeton
University Press (USA).

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Deleuze, Gilles. 2017. Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation. London: Bloomsbury.
Dimen, Muriel. 2013. Sexuality, Intimacy, Power. New York and London: Routledge.
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———. 2018. “Jung and Bion: Intersecting Vertices.” In Re-Encountering Jung: Analytical Psychology and
Contemporary Psychoanalysis, edited by Robin S. Brown, 85–112. London: Routledge.

MARK WINBORN, PhD, NCPsyA, is a Jungian psychoanalyst and clinical psychologist. Dr. Winborn is a training/
supervising analyst of the Inter-Regional Society of Jungian Analysts and the C. G. Jung Institute of Zürich. He
currently serves on the American Board for Accreditation in Psychoanalysis and the Ethics Committee of the
International Association for Analytical Psychology as well as the editorial boards of the Journal of Analytical
Psychology and the Journal of Humanistic Psychology. His publications include Deep Blues: Human Soundscapes
for the Archetypal Journey (2011), Shared Realities: Participation Mystique and Beyond (2014), and
Interpretation in Jungian Analysis: Art and Technique (2018) as well as journal articles, book reviews, and
chapter contributions. Correspondence: mwinborn@comcast.net.

ABSTRACT

This article engages the concept and experience of otherness, or the “stranger within,” through the artwork of
Francis Bacon. Bacon’s artwork is explored utilizing Jung’s concept of the shadow; Bion’s interrelated concepts of
β-element, α-element, α-function, containment, and reverie; and Burke’s concept of the sublime. The encounter
with otherness, so essential to the analytical process, as well our engagement with the world around us, is also
central to Bacon’s art. Bacon’s work both confronts and reveals. Through distortions of figure, expression, and
space Bacon meditates on the abject, distorted, disfigured, and painful aspects of experience.

KEY WORDS
abject, β-element, Bion, otherness, shadow, sublime