Canadian Art Therapy Association Journal

ISSN: 0832-2473 (Print) 2377-360X (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/ucat20

Verbal to the Second Power: An Encounter

between Lacan and Expressive Arts Therapy

Mavis Himes Ph.D., C. Psych.

To cite this article: Mavis Himes Ph.D., C. Psych. (2013) Verbal to the Second Power: An
Encounter between Lacan and Expressive Arts Therapy, Canadian Art Therapy Association
Journal, 26:1, 26-33, DOI: 10.1080/08322473.2013.11415576

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/08322473.2013.11415576

Published online: 15 Apr 2015.

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 ARTICLE
Verbal to the Second Power: An Encounter Between Lacan and Expressive Arts Therapy
Mavis Himes, Ph.D., C. Psych.
Abstract: As many before him, Lacan in his later life, revisited many of his concepts, with the hindsight of his years of work. And while he had always
insisted on the scientific and logical underpinnings of his theory and praxis, it was only in his later seminars that he more directly acknowledged the
‘poetic’ and the ‘arts,’ While his theory offered many points of interest to analysts and academics, it important to see how his ideas are of also of
importance to those working in less traditional forms of therapy such as the expressive arts therapies.
Mr. Z: If the speaking function isolates man, what
about pre-verbal manifestations like painting, music,
all the arts that don’t pass through the ‘talking cure?’
The act of painting is the result of an opening, but
through a continuity that would be like when you
have strings – it makes caramel.
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Lacan: I think your preverbal is completely modeled
on the verbal, I would say it is almost hyper-verbal.
What you call strings, filaments, are profoundly
motivated by the symbol . . . . . I try to say that art is
beyond the symbolic. Art is a kind of know-how, the
symbolic is at the heart of creating. I believe there is
more truth in the saying (dire) that is art than in any
amount of blah-blah-blah. Beyond the symbolic. That
doesn’t mean that it’s created in any old way. And it’s
not pre-verbal. It’s verbal to the second power. 1
This curious exchange, occurring during one of his last
seminars, reflects a re-examination, a musing by Lacan
about key concepts he had originally elaborated very early in
his career. I would say it is a poetic re-working or a creative
rendering of that triumvirate of terms - the Imaginary, The
Symbolic and the Real – which had served as one of the pillars
in his understanding of psychic life.
As many before him, Lacan in his later life, revisited many
of his concepts, with the hindsight of his years of work. And
while he had always insisted on the scientific and logical
underpinnings of his theory and praxis, it was only in his later
seminars that he more directly acknowledged the ‘poetic’ and
the ‘arts,’ the above interchange being one such an example.
So while his theory offered many points of interest to analysts
and academics, it important to see how his ideas are of also
of importance to those working in less traditional forms of
therapy.
North Americans are intimidated by Lacan. Based on his
reputation as a difficult and inaccessible writer and analyst
and limited to a smattering of secondary source materials,
most ‘psy’ people unfortunately do not appreciate the
contributions that Lacan, both in his rereading of Freud and in
Editor’s Note:
Mavis Himes (Ph.D., C. Psych.) is a psychoanalyst in private practice and a consultant
at Wellspring, a psychosocial cancer centre in Toronto. She is director of Speaking of
Lacan Psychoanalytic Group Toronto) and a member of Apres Coup Psychoanalytic
Association (New York). She is the author of several articles on psychoanalysis, as well
as the book The Sacred Body: A Therapist’s Body (Stoddart) which details her work in
the cancer field.
26 Canadian Art Therapy Association Journal Volume 26, Number 1, 2013
his own elaborations, has made to the field of psychoanalysis.
They either do not know him at all or they are familiar with his
famous dictum “The unconscious is structured like a language.”
The use of expressive arts as a therapeutic modality in
North American practice has traditionally been considered
a clinical technique that goes “beyond words and language”
aiming at the expression of affects, cognitions and beliefs
through the use of alternative (creativity-based) modalities.
In my view, this dichotomy between language/verbal versus
arts/nonverbal has created an artificial division that narrows
the potential for an alternative reading of the arts as a form of
therapeutic intervention.
It is not surprising that these alternate modalities would
be helpful and instructive as a therapeutic tool since any act of
creativity, like a psychoanalytic act, always implies something
new. It entails a ‘going beyond’ - a going beyond of words, of
the everyday, of the collective - touching something of the
singular and the unique. As speaking beings, we are ensnared
and entrapped by the limitations of language as a form of
human communication and exchange. In the free associative
process of psychoanalysis, it is through the medium of words
that we approach our work. However, it is within the realm of
art and artistic production that we may, at times, more easily
approach that which is non-symbolizable and non-thinkable
and which Lacan defined as the register of the Real.
Given certain parallels between the psychoanalytic act
and the creative act, I would like to consider how we can we
begin to think of the relation between these two domains in
a more integrative way that allows for a different therapeutic
encounter. For example, does the transcendence of words in
dance or music offer a potential avenue for a different kind of
analytic work? Should Lacanian analysts consider a place for
artistic expression in their work with analysands? Does Lacan
have anything to contribute to the community of expressive
art therapists? And do Lacanian analysts have anything to
learn from the arts that can be incorported into their own
work?
I will begin with a brief history and overview of the
1
 Lacan, J. (1976-77) L”Insu que sait de l’une bevue, s’aile a
mourre, p.31
 trajectory of the expressive arts therapy in North America.
Then I will discuss some of the basic tenets of analytic theory
that touch on clinical practice from a Lacanian perspective:
language and the Symbolic order, the impossibility of the Real,
and truth and knowledge in analytic discourse. And finally,
I will explore some of the openings and overlaps that allow
for an exchange between the expressive arts and Lacanian
theory: the introduction of the arts into a clinical practice.
* * * * * However, these trends in psychiatry were subsequently
Expressive arts therapy2 is a hybrid discipline blending
elements from both the arts and psychology/psychiatry into
a model of therapeutic treatment. A multi-modal field of
enquiry and praxis, it prides itself on being a “‘meta-verbal’
treatment modality,”3 meta meaning ‘beyond’ and therefore a
modality that is ‘beyond words.
The history of expressive arts therapy in North America
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closely followed the trends in therapeutic approaches and
modalities of psychiatry and mental health treatment in
general. The early pioneers of art therapy in the 1940’s
(Naumberg, Kramer) were well grounded in psychoanalytic
theory and praxis. Naumberg, considered the mother of art
therapy and herself a trained psychoanalyst, believed that
the value of art therapy was strikingly similar to the Freudian
doxa of making the unconscious conscious thereby enabling
an insight into one’s conflicts (“Where id was, there shall ego
be”).
Art was considered a potential medium for releasing
repressed (unconscious) material through imagery and
discovering unconscious fantasies and impulses. Terms such
as sublimation, catharsis and projection, transference and
counter-transference all predominated the writings of this
early period. Artwork was perceived as symbolic speech and
its spontaneous production the equivalent of free association.
The role of the symbol was seen as bridging the worlds of
reality and fantasy, as noted by Freud.4
Along with Freud, the second other major influence in
the art therapy movement was Jung. It is well-known that
Jung, after his break with Freud, began himself to paint and
to use artwork with his patients. For the Jungian-inspired
art therapist, a patient enters a relationship with an image
that speaks to him about a certain personal Truth; symbols
produced by the art images and dreams are all expressions
of an unconscious considered to be of collective origins.
Within this framework, the healing significance of the artwork
is related to the acceptance of these images and symbols as
projections of the unconscious.
The classical period of psychoanalytic thinking in the
2
 I am using the term expressive art therapy interchangeably
with art therapy unless specifically indicated otherwise.
Moon, Bruce – Introduction to Art Therapy: Faith in the
3  
product. Springfield: Charles C. Thomas, 1994.
4 
Freud, S. The interpretation of Dreams. 1916-17, p.90
Canadian Art Therapy Association Journal
forties and fifties was gradually replaced by the newer streams
of analytic thinking, such as object relations, self psychology
and relational models. Correspondingly, the expressive arts
therapy movement became increasingly under the influence of
the works of Klein, Kohut and others. In particular, Winnicott’s
notions of transitional space and ‘playing and reality’ further
paved the way for a theoretical basis supporting the use of
play, artwork and creativity in treatment.
relaced by the humanistic approaches to psychiatry with the
‘heady seventies’ ushering in the ‘third force of psychiatry.’
This time of blossoming movements and developments
inaugurated a new decade and a new generation of optimism
and hope. Human nature and the human condition shifted
to a spirit of optimism in which all people could assume
responsibility for their own fate through a process of growth
and development
Expressive therapies also found a theoretical home in
the works of May, Rogers, Maslow and Moustakas, amongst
others. Existential therapy, gestalt therapy, and other client-
centred approaches were all introduced at this time, as a
backlash to the perceived determinism of psychoanalysis and
behaviorism. This was the burgeoning of a therapeutic world
view based on humanistic principles in which the creative
process itself was considered to be a powerful integrative
force. Through self-exploration, release, and a letting go
within a creative process, one could move beyond emotional
disturbance and inappropriate behaviours to “free-spirited
parts of one’s personality.”5
Within the broader cultural context of this era of
openness, parallel movements also existed in the field of arts.
The fifties was the height of the ‘beat generation’ of innovation
and experimentation with the breakdown of conventional
boundaries separating the fields of dance, theatre and music.
The decade of the sixties, reflected in the socio-political
climate of the hippies and the political revolutions on university
campuses, further splintered boundaries in a variety of areas.
Artists were re-creating mutil-modal works, multi-media
theatre and stripping art forms of old constructions, by taking
art into the streets, parks, museums and dilapidated buildings.
This transitional period was then replaced by the
‘fourth (spiritual) force’ or the introduction of transpersonal
psychology into the ‘psy’ field which, in addition to the notion
of spirituality, also included many of the holistic principles of
humanistic psychology. The imaginative use of expressive
arts was felt to lead, on the one hand, to an existential
encounter with vision, faith and revelation, and on the other,
to a confrontation with illusion, hallucination and delusion
reminiscent of various healing practices.
In the current zeitgeist, there is an even further shift that
5
 Robin, Judith (ed.) Approaches to Art Therapy, second
edition. London: Brunner-Routledge, 2001.
Volume 26, Number 1, 2013 27
 I would call ‘a fifth force’ characterized by a relational shift
from the therapist as ‘expert on a patient’s illness’ to that of
‘consultant to a client.’ Rather than perceiving the therapist
as the one who applies principles and makes interpretive
pronouncements, this disparagement of the role of the
therapist has led to the role of the therapist as a co-creator of
the treatment process.
Today different streams still exist within the expressive
arts therapy spectrum: one more classical and psychoanalytic,
a second more ‘alternative,’ and a third more post-modern in
which the search for alternate models still continues. In terms
of the actual practice, there are therapists working with a
variety of clinical populations in a variety of clinical settings
(eg. with prison inmates, with autistic children and adults,
with the sexually abused, holocaust survivors, psychiatric
individuals living in residential programs, traumatized refugees
and seniors) and there are those, both therapists and ‘clients’
seeking a creative outlet for existential angst and who are
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searching for meaning, for solace and for an alternative truth.
What, if anything, can we say about all these various
practices? How can we begin to characterize this diverse field
with so many dissenting voices and differing approaches?
One common denominator, in both psychoanalytic and
non-psychoanalytic trends, is the criticism of a perceived
overemphasis on speech and language with a devaluation of a
sole reliance on ‘words.’ Consistent throughout the literature
and typical of such comments are the following:
The primary reliance of words with psychoanalysis
undermines the significance of artistic expression.
The artwork is downplayed, becoming a diagram
upon which therapeutic language is pinned. . . .
Words impose order. The organization of meaning
can be defensive, aimed at keeping the unconscious
at bay . . . . . Art therapy must strive to perform the art
within non-verbal forms of communication.6
The arts provide a psychotherapeutic milieu that is
not dependent on words. As we look at the work of
our patients/artists, we must wrestle to uncover and
focus on the feelings, thoughts, physical effort and
the soul of the piece. We must always engage an art
work as if it were a sacred icon, the symbol of a holy
story . . . It is beyond words.” 7
Although we have worked through psychoanalytic
theory to find the roots of creative action in the
world, we cannot rely on psychoanalytic practice as
an adequate foundation for expressive arts therapy.
6
Pamela Whitaker – The art therapy assemblage. In Burt,
H. (ed. Art Therapy and Post-Modernism: Creative Heling
though a Prism. London, Jessica Kingsley Publishers, 2012,
p. 361. 362
7  
Bruce Moon, op cit. P. 30
28 Canadian Art Therapy Association Journal Volume 26, Number 1, 2013
This practice uses metaphorical speech and the
shaping of the relationship between patient and
analyst by means of the word, while expressive arts
therapy practice is based upon action, a doing rather
than a speaking about. The word and language are
essential expressive tools; but they are seen from this
perspective as one among other expressive forms
and not necessarily the dominant one.8
Each of these therapists points to the limitations of
language either as a mode of practice, a tool for interpretation
or a component of the treatment intervention. One of the
authors (Whitaker), in fact, states that it is only within
the disciplines of social work, psychology, psychiatry, and
psychoanalysis that words are primary as if there were
something malevolent about ‘the verbal’ or any interpretation
that introduces ‘meaning.’ I believe this bias against language
comes from certain misconceptions of analytic work, or from
more currently popular analytic models and praxes.
A second point that strikes me in my reading of the
literature has been the absence or confusion around the
theoretical underpinnings of the expressive arts therapy
practice.
For example, one therapist writes:
Expressive art therapy is a ‘being in this world’ in
a healing relationship that understands art as a
fundamental way of living the ‘coming-to-be’ and
the ‘passing away of suffering’ . . . . . . . . Therefore,
the search for an adequate conversation becomes
a ‘re-search’ of philosophical traditions closer to
phenomenological epistemology, aesthetics, and
hermeneutics or musicology, art history, ethnology
of the arts, religious studies and anthropological
psychology than to behavioral science and clinical
psychology.9
Such attempts to place the field of expressive arts
therapy within a theoretical framework have been limited
to a few clinicians. Instead there continues to be a lingering
need for justification and a floundering for a foundational
framework that supports the various therapeutic claims made
by clinicians and practitioners within the field.
This absence of a model has led some to question and to
re-think the nature and technique of the work. Levine, in his
search for theoretical legitimacy, quotes Heidigger in saying
“art is a place in which beings come to show themselves for
what they are. . . a ‘setting-into-work of truth.” 10 He further
8
 llen Levine – Tending the Fire; Studies in Art, Therapy and
E
Creativity. Toronto, EGS Press, 1995, p.71
Paolo Knill Soul Nourishment, or the Intermodal Language
9  
of Imagination. In Levine, S. & Levine, E. Foundations
of Expressive Arts Therapy: Theoretical and Clinical
Perspectives. London: Jessica Kingsley, 1988, p. 38.
 argues that the focus on truth as an experiential process
requiring a certain unveiling lends itself to the introduction
of image-making and other rituals of art as a template
fordiscovery. The enigmatic uncovering of truth requires
this complete surrender to the art process that become the
primordial way in which personal truth becomes manifest.
And with this truth, there is the potential to give meaning and
direction to human existence.11
Levine’s approach is consistent with the French school of
post-modern thought, as it crossed the Atlantic, along with
the influential writings of Barthes, Derrida, Foucault and
Lacan. In post-modern theory, a refusal of categorization and
reductionism, a shake-up of binary thinking and the categorical
refusal of a singular truth can be viewed as a reaction to the
frustration with an existing order that privileged simple
solutions and a kind of theoretical strait-jacketing of patients.
The search for authenticity and legitimacy within
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the therapeutic community has almost forced the recent
expressive arts therapy into this binary opposition between
non-verbal versus verbal or art-based versus science-based
approaches. Such a dichotomy is reminiscent of the classical
dual between Apollonian rationalism and Dionysian fervor
represented traditionally by the forces of reason and passion,
order and chaos or science and art.
The Lacanian model of psychoanalysis shares with the
expressive arts therapy movement a certain frustration with
the status quo of analytic praxis. Clinically, it is a technique
that also rejects the position of the analyst as some kind of
expert. Instead it defines transference as the analysand’s
expectation and projection onto the figure of the analyst in the
position of le sujet suppose savoir, or ‘the subject supposed to
know.’ In other words, it is the analysand who believes in the
ultimate knowledge of the analyst as the one who can help
him figure out the roots of his suffering. And it requires this
transferential belief in order to “awaken the unconscious.” 12
It too shares in a frustration and disdain for clinical
methods that foreclose the possibility of something new or
unexpected to emerge. Lacan would certainly endorse the
following statement written by an expressive arts therapist:
“It [expressive arts therapy] is a discipline within which we
exercise the attitude of being open to surprises while we wait
patiently and humbly . . . . The arts also provide the multiplicity
and opportunity to explore the unthinkable, a space beyond
morality, a traditional playground of light and shadow.” 13
* * * * * As a result of this, we speak and speak, trying to perfect
Psychoanalysis is a unique method that characterizes
itself in an approach that makes the subject speak about his/
10
 eidegger, M. The origin of the work of art. In Levine, S.
H give ourselves away in the subtleties of language, between
Poetry, Language, Thought. New York: Harper & Row, p.77
11 
Ibid.
12
Lacan, J. Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis
13  
Knill, P. op. cit. p. 45
Canadian Art Therapy Association Journal
her truth. In order to appreciate the significance of this simple
statement, it is important to consider, firstly, the concept of
le sujet en psychanalyse (the subject of/in psychoanalysis)
and, secondly, the nature of this truth to which Lacanian
psychoanalysis refers.
The psychoanalytic subject is not a fixed, static being
of nature nor an ever-changing individual at the mercy of a
personal history of random events. Beyond the singularity of
individual differences, the subject for psychoanalysis is the
effect of an elaboration of unconscious factors of which he or
she is not aware. The psychoanalytic subject is a subject of
desire as introduced by Freud – a subject whose unconscious is
manifested in all his unconscious formations. The paradoxical
position of the subject is that he is worked over and traversed
by effects that reach down into the centre of his psychic being.
He is ‘subjugated’ to desires and their repression, to fantasies
and phantasmatic objects, to drives and their perpetual circuit
of satisfaction. In other words, he is subject to an unconscious
that reveals itself surreptitiously and fleetingly in symptoms,
dreams and in the parapraxes (forgettings, bunglings and slips)
of everyday life. The effects of this unconscious is a possible
strangulation of thoughts, ideas and behaviours manifested
in fixations and symptoms that often bring a person into
analysis. The intractability of unconscious motivation and the
resulting repetition of patterns become rigidified into a source
of suffering and pain.
Secondly, the analytic subject is not the child or adult
identified with the “I” of a sentence uttered in everyday speech,
that “I” of an ego based on an illusion of unity and integration.
There is the subject of the utterance, the subject that begins
with the pronoun “I” and there is the subject of the enunciation,
the subject who may be saying something completely
different. It is this latter, the subject of the enunciation that
represents the production of a certain subjective truth beyond
our conscious awareness. It is this same subject that is again
revealed through the text of a person’s speech.
When we speak of the analytic subject, we are therefore
forced to introduce the world of speech and language. The
entry point for Lacan is the acknowledgement of man’s
primordial determination by discourse.14 We inhabit language,
and yet we are also ‘inhabited’ by language, or as Lacan would
say “caught up in its gears”.15 And when we speak of the
constitution of the subject through speech and language, we
are forced to acknowledge the gap, the structural lack that
forms the basis of the human subject.
our attempts at communication, believing our words to
always be taken at face value. We forget or we do not wish
to acknowledge that we say more than we realize, that we
the lines, in the nuances of throw away comments, slips of the
14
Lacan, J. –Seminar XII, IV, 3
15
Lacan, J. – Ecrits, The Function and Field of Speech
Volume 26, Number 1, 2013 29
 tongue and conflated neologisms. As Lacan says:
It is at the level of signifying material that there
are produced the substitutions, the slippages, the
disappearing acts, the avoidances that one has to
deal with when one is on the path, on the track of the
determination of the symptom and its unknotting.16
The subject who speaks is always at the starting point
of analysis. He is told to speak and so he does. He speaks
in order to convey his difficulties, his reflections on his
experiences, his problems, his symptom that brings him into
analysis. Yet it is obvious that he encounters great difficulty
when asked to speak so freely, so freely that he does not
realize the extent to which his freedom is limited by certain
fixations and satisfactions. As Lacan quips: there is nothing
random here in the random production of signifiers. For there
are certain knots, installed in the constitution of the subject,
and manifested by a knotting whose “shape, tightening or
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thread”17 is at the foundation of the symptom.
In the artificial conditions imposed by psychoanalysis, a
strategic technique characterized by demands, by transference
and by identifications with the analyst and with the insignia
of one’s past, there is an opportunity or possibility to unknot
those troubling details charged with ‘sense’ which cannot be
unknotted by other means. In other words, psychoanalysis
requires an unknotting of something that does not appeal to a
dialogue based on reason and logic. At this point, we can say
that the therapeutic aim and goal of Lacanian psychoanalysis
is a certain unknotting, and that language as the talking cure
provides a vehicle for this to occur.
What is important is not the speaking but the structure
of language into which man must “speechify himself
(s’apparoler).”18 The analyst requests the analysand to
abandon all references and meaning and simply to give himself
over to his musings, to produce signifiers that constitute
free association. In analytic discourse, the analyst occupies
a position that creates the ‘motor’ of the analytic process.
Without satisfying the explicit demands and implicit desires
of the analysand and without making his own desires known,
he sets into motion a process whereby the anaysand can
confront his own questions while “directing the cure.” This
uncomfortable position, the antithesis of the ‘one who knows’
or of the expert, is reminiscent of the ‘don’t know mind’ of a
Zen master.
On the other hand, the analyst does have a certain
analytic know-how, a familiarity with analytic technique
and its workings. This analytic knowledge is paired with a
knowledge of the patient’s swarming production of signifiers
to which he is forced to pay no attention. In this way, the
analyst moves beyond the manifest content of the narrative,
deconstructiong the fixity of its structure.The analyst also
16
Lacan, J. Seminar XII, IV, 5
17
Ibid.
18 
Lacan, J. Sem. XVII, p.51
30 Canadian Art Therapy Association Journal Volume 26, Number 1, 2013
knows that the function of knowledge is always motivated by
a certain jouissance, a jouissance that insists on its constant
repetition and that blocks the possibility of any truth on the
side of the patient. For example, the satisfaction one derives
from a facile interpretation; you are this because of that with
no resultant change on the part of the patient (or even the
response SO WHAT?)
Interpretation – those who make use of it are aware
of this – is often established through an enigma. It is
an enigma that is gathered as far as possible from the
threads of the psychoanalysand’s discourse, which
you, the interpreter, can in no way complete on your
own, and cannot consider to be the avowal without
lying. It is a citation that is sometimes taken from
the very same text, on the other hand, from a given
statement – such as the one can pass for an avowal,
provided that you connect it to the whole context.19
In other words, interpretation is a quotation of the
anaysand introducing an enigma. On the one hand, by
virtue of the signifier connections, the mappable objectivity
of subjective configurations allow for the possibility of
interpretation; on the other hand, in order to make the patient
work, comments must be limited to an equivocation, an
evocation, a half-saying (un mi-dire), an incomplete question, a
scansion that punctuates the narrative of the patient, forcing a
pause, a hesitation, a questioning on his part. In this way, there
is always the openness for a new formation, a new reading, a
new emergence on the part of the patient.
It is in the potential duplicity of meaning in every signifier,
the inscrutable know-how and intervention of the analyst that
makes of the reading of a patient’s speech an act of poetry.
Even early on Freud was quick to point out the metaphorical
aspects of language with its ambiguities, double meanings,
homophonic equivalences. The unconscious participates
enthusiastically in the equivocations of sound and meaning,
(eg. jokes)20, and it is on this logic of the unconscious, as
opposed to its grammar, that the analyst capitalizes.
You may be wondering, why all this focus on language?
What about the person who doesn’t wish to speak, who
cannot express himself so succinctly, who gets stuck easily
on words? Or what about the artistic expression that seeks an
outlet beyond words? Where is the creative potential of the
human subject? How is it possible to touch something that is
beyond all of these words, this knotting and entanglement?
Is all of this necessary in order to work with someone? Does
your Lacan have anything to say about that?
And here, dear, patient reader, I will introduce that third of
Lacan’s registers of psychic life – the Real – before answering
these questions. As Lacan himself said:
19
Ibid p.38
20
Freud, S. See, for example, Jokes and the Psychopathology
of Everyday Life.
 I began with the Imaginary, I then had to chew on the
story of the Symbolic, with this linguistic reference
for which I did not find everything that would have
suited me, and I finished by putting out for you thus
famous Real in the very form of a knot. 21
What can we say about this register that defies description
and which is used interchangeably by many to refer to the
unconscious, the unknown, the mystical?
Consistent throughout Lacan’s teachings is the notion of
the Real as that which escapes symbolization, an ‘impossible
to say’ that flees the chain of signification, yet whose
impossibility of saying is always at the core of what is said.
The Real represents something that is utterly impossible
and yet quintessentially real, unbearably intolerable and yet
invariably enduring, most invisibly present in its absence yet
veiled by language.
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The experiences of extreme terror and horror of death,
the anxiety of the uncanny, the non-compatibility of sexual
difference and rapport, and the joyous luminosity of our
shared humanity - all of these touch on aspects of the real
of life. The Real is the territory and topographical setting for
the arts, for creative expression, for spiritual longing, and
mystical yearnings, as well as the backdrop for the emergence
of something new.
An encounter with the Real is a subversion of reality – it is
to define reality in an alternative way. It is not the construction
of an alternate reality but the production of a what Lacan in
his later years will call a sinthome. This term, which is a play on
‘symptom’ is Lacan’s proposition to introduce into analysis the
potential for change. The sinthome is the invention of a new
knotting (or writing), a personal production that goes beyond
the normal understanding of representation in the direction of
what is veiled by representation and words, such as we see in
artistic production.
If psychoanalysis is not the encouragement of a new
knowledge or understanding to replace an older version, it is
an attempt to unknot the entanglements of certain engrained
symptoms. Lacan, in his later seminars, himself used
topological knots in order to avoid and evade the obstacles
of knowledge. “The desire to know meets obstacles. In order
to embody the obstacle, I have invented the knot,” Lacan
suggests. 22 Knowledge in/of the Real, the seat of that which
escapes symbolization, is not stored as data awaiting to be
decoded by means of signification, but rather it requires a
form of “invention,’ or the creation of something new.
The power of language resides in its poetic capacity and
its inexhaustible capacity to generate new forms of meaning.
While striving to obtain an accurate rendering of the facts,
we forget that signification does not rely on an accurate text
of our lives but on bits and pieces that become unraveled.
Our psychic life unfolds from inadvertent, fortuitous and
21
Lacan, J. Sem. XXII, RSI I974-75
22
Lacan, J. Le Sinthome, Feb. 10 and 17, 1976
Canadian Art Therapy Association Journal
undigested elements that emerge from our unconscious in our
everyday discourse.
The heart of the analytic experience is not knowledge,
not meaning, not making sense, but an approach, a striving
for what escapes it and the emergence of something new.
Psychoanalysis is not a science, Lacan said at the end of his
teachings. “It is a scientific delirium,“ a madness in which
the truth can only be glimpsed, never fully known. While
the truth is always adrift, it is still possible to establish a
knowledge of signifiers through the transference set into play
by analysis. Fortunately, the signifier has the capacity to be
stripped of its mortifying meaning and to engender new forms
of signification. In this way, psychoanalysis accentuates an
inventiveness that can be generated within language itself
and within the re-knotting of the Symbolic and the Real as the
invention of a sinthome.
* * * * *
How then do we begin to introduce other expressions
of art into such an approach that privileges speech and
discourse, the word and the text, over other art forms? How
do we apply these teachings in expressive arts therapy? Is it
possible to move beyond the Symbolic while remaining verbal
‘to the second power’?
If reason and interpretation are obstacles to analytic
treatment, it is obvious that a non-verbal medium offers an
alternate mode of intervention. However, as Lacan implies,
this does not mean that the artistic expression is without a
relation to the verbal. He reminds us that “the function of
language in speech is not to inform but to evoke.”23 Anne
Carson, the well-known Canadian poet and essayist, echoes
this when she writes, “Poetic activity is a method for getting
away from information. You leap off a building when you think
poetically. You don’t amass data and move from point to point;
you have to just know what you know in that moment.”24 And
similarly, Margeurite Duras, the acclaimed French writer, says,
“There is a madness of writing that is in oneself, an insanity
of writing, but that alone doesn’t make one insane. On the
contrary. Writing is the unknown. Before writing one knows
nothing of what one is about to write. And in total lucidity.”25
All forms of artistic expression, by definition, are evocative
and metaphorical. They move away from the literal and
concrete. Rational thought is tied to the linear, the limited and
the limiting;’ it is the gluing of a sign to a meaning. By contrast,
artistic thought is unmoored, travelling freely, roaming
wildly. Dream language is an intermediate form of psychic
functioning; it is a language that is unbound by logic and the
usual conventions of verbal discourse but is not completely
unlimited because of its relation to the dreaming subject.
In dream analysis, it is in the telling (le dire) of the dream
that the analysand modulates his discourse thereby offering
23
Lacan, J. The Function and Field . . . . . The Four Fundamentals
of Psychoanalysis p.84 (my emphasis)
24
An Interview with Anne Carson. Brick, 89, 2012
25
Duras, M. Writing. P.32-33
Volume 26, Number 1, 2013 31
 a possibility to explore signifying elements which override a
reading of manifest content. As the analysand speaks about
his dream, he is forced to introduce into his speech new
signifying elements in a translation from the visual to the
verbal representation.
Dance, music and visual arts are unmoored; like dreams,
they all potentially contain the structure of a rebus – an
enigmatic rendering or representation of a word or phrase that
contains within it a particular form of writing to be decoded.
They are the instruments of the discourse, the necessary
requirements for an analytic reading.
Consider one’s attendance at a contemporary, post-
modern performance – a Robert Lepage spectacle, a Philip
Glass opera or a Pina Bausch dance. Consider an even more
abstract concert with absolutely no representation and no
program notes as a program guide. We are touched, we are
moved, and then we begin the process of analysis. What did it
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mean? What is the artist trying to convey? Oh so frustrating. The
desire to interpret, to make sense, to analyze what we have
heard or seen. Then we relax. Okay, I loved the movements,
the sounds, the acting. Oh so amazing. The appreciation of the
visual spectacle and the genius of the artistry. And then we
begin again. Now what can I say about this? How can I put into
the words the images, sensations, perceptions? And here is the
language produced to speak about the production, the actual
words and phrases that are conjured up by the artwork in a
kind Rorschach analysis.
If we allow someone the opportunity to speak about a
performance, as in dream analysis, then we can anticipate
that we will hear something about the person who is speaking.
In his speech, unbeknownst to him, he will begin to give away
something of himself. He will say more than he realizes. This
is because of the distinction between the said (le dit) and the
saying (le dire), the utterance (enonciation) and the statement
(enonce). By defying a literal reading, the art encourages,
or perhaps even demands, that the person speak in an
unabashed way thereby revealing something of himself in his
verbal elaboration. Interpretation is always gathered from the
analysand’s discourse. But it requires an analyst or someone
who knows how to listen and hear what is being said for this
analysis to occur.
Now consider an even further level of subjective
engagement when we ask someone to produce a work of art
by some favoured medium of theirs. Off you go; go and create
something with these materials. Here we have a spontaneous
production that clearly emerges from the person himself.
But what is important is that the created piece itself is not
necessarily what requires analysis but what the person offers
in his speaking about the work. It is easy for questions posed
by a therapist to lead a person into a preconceived theoretical
position of the analyst, but as Lacan reminds us: the analyst
never directs the patient, s/he can only direct the cure. The
open-ended question, the equivocation, the interrogation, the
unattended detail, the unconscious sedimentation. Knowledge
must always remain a half-saying (un mi-dire).
32 Canadian Art Therapy Association Journal Volume 26, Number 1, 2013
A patient dreams about King Lear. It is easy to lapse into
a Shakespearean analysis about the dynamics of the father-
daughter relationship. Only my patient is obsessed with her
eyes, the leering stare of others who she imagines follow
her every movement. Signifiers float, detached from their
referents, dislodged from a meaning-making process.
Another patient dreams about a naked woman: she was
wearing a dildo and I saw her vagina at the same time. A richly
sexual dream, you think. Perhaps he is fantasizing about being
a woman, a man, a bisexual, a transsexual. He wants to be
fucked by a woman with a penis or a man in a woman’s body.
The associations of the analyst run wild! In his associations to
the dream fragment, my patient says: it was a fake penis but
the vagina was hairy, it was a natural vagina. What is fake and
what is natural? What is he speaking about here? I ask him
about this. My patient returns to the theme of the past few
sessions - his desire to become analyst and what it means
for him to become an analyst. I don’t want to be a fake, I want
to be the real thing. Maybe later we will arrive at the sexual
fantasies and the other associations that emerge later. My
mother took the place of my father, shoveling coal in the basement.
And I think she enjoyed it! My mother definitely wore the pants
in the family. There is much material but it is the words of the
patient himself, his own particular words, that open onto the
work of analysis, not the hermeneutic discovery sought in the
symbolism of the dream.
The power of art as a healing tool and form of sublimation
is well-known to mental health professionals. It is not
uncommon for patients to journal, doodle, or draw as they
struggle through the psychological impact of real traumatic
experiences (the tragedy of 9/11, a tsunami, war trauma,
etc.). At a cancer centre in which I consult, there are a
variety of programs offering coping skills and support, such
as, drumming, art therapy, journaling, visualization and
meditation. The opportunity to incorporate or integrate the
traumatic Real and to ‘represent it in a translation’ into the
Symbolic order provides and opportunity where it can be
divested of its power to strangulate and immobilize. If the
Real escapes representation by the Symbolic, then non-verbal
means introduce access to this realm. When the traumatic
Real takes ascendance, then it can be lassoed by the Symbolic.
Symptoms are resistant to change; they spiral around
a cycle of never-ending repetition. Symptoms serve us well
by keeping ancestral knowledge knotted up with a certain
jouissance. The identification with our symptoms, with
our rigidified patterns of functioning become codified, but
more importantly, they begin to animate us, in spite of their
interference. They fuel our desire to remain locked into a
soothing familiarity in spite of our complaints or stated desires
to the contrary. The thirst for meaning keeps us well-attuned
to answers and interpretations. This search for knowledge
also has a dialectical relationship with jouissance. Jouissance
motivates the function of knowledge and knowledge always
leads to a certain jouis-sens, or a ‘playing with meaning.’
Not only do the various non-verbal media of expressive
art (the visual, the movement, the sound) provide an
 opportunities for an unknotting or disentangling of signifier
from meaning, but they also provide access to the register of
the Real and the possibility for something to be expressed that
evades symbolization.
It is in the production of an art piece that we can create
a potential forum to generate something new that can unknot
while at the same time resist a return to the old. It is possible
that traces of the old (symptom) can be,
“transformed into a work that will make its sense for
the first time and that, rather than being interpreted
by the Symbolic, will transform the Symbolic by that
which was never, up to that point, known by the Other
or known by the I.” 26
In other words, the vestiges of jouissance treasured by
its traces, thereby sustaining its power in the symptom,
can be expressed in and through the artwork itself. What
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is significant is the act of producing, the making present
without signification, the becoming-sense of something that
was impossible to signify. The creation of a certain sinthome,
a ‘knowing what to do with’ (savoir y faire) can introduce a
new knotting into the structure. The ‘understanding’ of what
is produced may be less significant than the simple act of
producing. An act has no need of thought – it first must be
committed – and the production of a new signifier always
involves an act. The new signifier is a particularly unique way
of handling a particular dilemma or conflict. What is significant
is not the result of the creation but the fact that creation is
highly singular and particular.
For a couple of years, I had been working with a woman
in her early sixties whose mother had died when she was
four years old. As a result of a minor neurological episode
prior to our meeting, she had seen a therapist for individual
therapy and, at the recommendation of this therapist, she also
attended group therapy for ‘traumatized patients’ suffering
PTSD. Due to the institutional constraints on the number of
sessions permitted, she contacted me through a referral from
her family doctor.
In our meetings, my patient continued to speak at length
about her childhood, grieving the loss of her mother and the
idealized family life she imagined (the Imaginary) might have
ensued had her mother continued to live. In what she would
describe as a “twisted turn of fate,” her father remarried
the young au pair girl looking after the family and who she
described as “the wicked stepmother.” From the first few
weeks of her father’s re-marriage, she claimed that a veil of
silence surrounded any reference to her mother; she and her
older sister were forced to carry on and their lives continued.
My patient’s life took the form of a traditional family, having
married with two children both attending university. However,
she complained about her feelings of inadequacy as a mother
26
Ettinger, B.L. Weaving a Trans-subjective Tress or the
Matrixial Sinthome. In Thurston, L. ReInventing the
Symptom, p 107
Canadian Art Therapy Association Journal
in light of her having had ‘no role model.’ Most sessions
proceeded with references to her mother, to death, to her
inadequacies and to the pain of her childhood. An insistence
on my need to ‘appreciate’ and ‘understand’ the extent of
her pain was a recurrent refrain. I began to sense how much
the suffering had taken on the insistence of a symptom of a
suffering that she continued to play out in her daily life.
My patient had a keen interest in art history and had been
attending classes for a year following the beginning of our work
together. The ‘history’ of dead painters had fascinated her and
she found herself reading about the lives of artists whose
works she enjoyed, in particular the abstract expressionists.
One day, she informed me that she was thinking of enrolling
in some painting classes. She said, that she always knew she
had an appreciation for aesthetics.
Within a few months, my patient was painting abstract
work; she had no interest in representational artwork. She had
been complimented by her instructor and after another year,
she began showing her work to the public. Her depression
lifted and only on our last session did she tell me that she just
remembered that she heard from her sister that her mother
had had a talent for painting.
The sinthome is a singular mode of inscription, a unique
writing of one’s history in a singular mode of production. For
this woman, the emergence of her interest in art created a
path for her to disentangle the entrenched knot of depression.
In conclusion, I would add, as a reminder, that the force
or impact of any intervention can only be known apres-coup,
or after the fact. It is only by its effect on a subject that
it is possible to see whether there has been a shift in one’s
subjective position in relation to a symptom or plaint. The
unknotting and re-knotting of a symptom is a ‘timely affair’
which eludes our planned or rehearsed interpretations and
moves beyond our conscious knowledge. If the analyst cannot
be surprised, then there can be no analysis worth pursuing.
The expressive arts therapies, while non-verbal or even
seemingly preverbal, provide a unique opportunity for being
‘stunned’ surprised.
Volume 26, Number 1, 2013 33