Incomplete Essay Concerning Psychosomatic Brain Function

 

 In the course of trying to educate myself about psycho-somatic medicine for the further understanding of my already discussed rip-roaring case of Psoriasis, over the past few months I’ve read and in some cases re-read the following books and\or essays and looked at the following U-tube posts:  

 

Touching, the Human Significance of the Skin, Ashley Montagu, 1971,

 

The Skin Ego; Didier Anzieu, translation by Naomi Segal, Pub. 2018 by Routledge

 

The Rights of Infants, Margaret A. Ribble, M.D.  Columbia University Press, 1943

 

The Experience of the Skin in Early Object Relations, Esther Bick; read at the 25th International Congress, Copenhagen, July 1967; Pub; International Journal of Psycho-Analysis 49, 484-6

 

Melanie Klein, A Graphic Guide; published by Icon Books Ltd., Hinshelwood, Robinson, & Zarate, London, aka - www.introducingbooks.com

 

Winnicott, life and work,  by F. Robert Rodman, M.D. Perseus Publishing, Cambridge, Ma.   

 

The Nature and Nurture of Love; from imprinting to attachment in Cold War America;  Marga Vicedo;  The University of Chicago Press, Chicago and London, 1992

 

 A Framework for the Imaginary; Clinical Explorations in Primitive States of Being, (with a Foreword by Joyce McDougall, Ed.D.), Judith L. Mitrani, Psychoanalyst; published by Jason Aronson Inc. Northvale, New Jersey,  and London

 

Frances Tustin,  by Sheila Spensley, Routledge 1995

 The Interpersonal World of the Infant;  Daniel N. Stern; 2000.  

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Utube

The Claustrum: A Projective Identification View of the World; Donald Meltzer  Utube 

 

New Stuff,  

Re:  18feb24

 

Learning from Experience – Routledge Classics, London and New York, Wilfred Bion

 

Wilfred Bion: His Life and Works, 1897 – 1979 Gerard Bleandonu; other press, 2020

 

Psychoanalytic Field Theory, a Contemporary Introduction, Giuseppe Civitares; Routledge

 

W. R. Bion’s Theories of Mind, A Contemporary Introduction, Annie Reiner;  Routledge

 

The Body Keeps the Score; van der Kolk; Viking Press, 2014

 

 

 

I'm going on the assumption that knowledge and understanding can be a part of any therapeutic context. After all, did Freud not analyze himself? I'm on the 'positive thinking' side, especially when it comes to any hope of alleviating my Psoriasis.   

So after Googling the hell out of the psychosomatic theme, and then having re-read, just to warm up, the book, Touching, the Human Significance of the Skin, by Ashley Montagu, which I first read in the 1970s, I brashly waded in to an English translation of Didier Anzieu's The Skin Ego; a new translation by Naomi Segal; Routledge, London and New York.

Didier Anzieu, a Frenchman who has been successfully competing with Jacques Lacan through a theory of psychoanalysis that is “more concrete, more body centered” then are Lacan's abstract, language-centered group of theories, and gives credit where he thinks it's due to the British object relations folks, and Melanie Klein, their leader.

Anzieu makes what seems like a very good case for the human skin being what eventually evolves into the ego; with all its components and objects. 

While reading the Anzieu book, I got out my copy of Melanie Klein, A Graphic Guide; published by Icon Books, Ltd., aka www.introducingbooks.com* ..., and gave it a quick re-read.  

 

See: Object relations vs. Drive Theory

Anzieu gives plenty of credit for his theory of the skin ego to the Klein group of psychoanalysts, who were mostly all associated with Hampstead's Tavistock Center, Hampstead, London, U.K.* You might remember that I've mentioned Hampstead in previous posts as the last home of Sigmund Freud and a beehive of psychoanalytic activity since the Second World War, not to mention my own home, [it's complicated]  during the winter of 1963-'64.. (I was there under no official capacity, just an innocent bystander, a young American, (High School graduate),  waiting to be drafted into the Army and using that as an excuse to take a vacation; not engaged in anything psychoanalytical). 

The Tavistock Clinic had been in existence since the First World War as a place for poor children to get both medical and psychological help resulting from damage caused by war. The group had moved around London numerous times before ending up at Hampstead after World War ll. During that war, A small group of American philanthropies arranged for Anna Freud to open a wartime baby nursery in Hampstead, and after the war there was some sort of merger between the Clinic and the Nursery. I am slightly familiar with the Hampstead based London psychoanalytical group because of having read, when it first came out in 1973, the very popular biography of D.W. Winnicott, Winnicott, life and work,  by F. Robert Rodman, M.D., Perseus Publishing, Cambridge, Ma. And if you were to ask well "How did you get interested in Winnicott, well, then I'd just have to refer you to The Culture of Narcissism, which I also read when it first came out, because, you guessed it, I'm a self-diagnosed narcissist. 

Of course after reading that very popular book by Christopher Lasch, also when it first came out, I felt compelled, [OCD], to read one book each of Kohut and Kernberg, two American object-relations leaning analysts, without of course presuming any professional standing. (That reading occurred 40 years ago.)

 

But getting back to Hampstead:

After the War, Tavistock became part of the National Health Service. In 1945, John Bowlby, MD and psychoanalyst, was appointed head of its Department for Children and Parents at the Clinic and began restructuring that department to make training a key component. (At the same time he resumed its pre-war relationship with the London School of Economics for the training of social workers.) 

In 1946 he hired a psychoanalyst named Esther Bick to supervise the training. Bick, born in Poland in 1902, educated in Vienna, had fled the Nazis in 1938. 

Concerning Bolby; 

A couple of years ago, while on horseback, riding with a small group through a South Florida park, I had a conversation with a man who I decided needed to be distracted from his cell phone.  [By being further distracted by me, I suppose.] Turns out he was a director at one of the Alcoholism Rehabilitation centers in our area, and so, I guess I was picking his brain, while at the same time being a name dropper, …I suppose I mentioned some book I'd read like maybe the Winnicott bio, and he, as I remember, said that his preferred treatment for his patients centered around Bolby's attachment theory. …So, later that day I looked up Bolby on Wikipedia and whetted my appetite. …Surfing Amazon Books I found the following and loaded it into my Kindle; The Nature and Nurture of Love; from imprinting to attachment in Cold War America; Marga Vicedo; The University of Chicago Press, Chicago and London, 1992. .....Vicedo is a Professor of The History of Psychology, (who knew?) at Toronto University. Her book I found a bit of a grind, quite academic and probably biased along the latest 'Gender' informed thinking about which I'm, I suppose, either ignorant or skeptical; choose one. She does however give some attention to Margaret Ribble, M.D., and her book, The Rights of Infants,* Columbia University Press, New York, 1943, and allows that Ribble’s book influenced Bick, Bolby et. al.  I get the impression though, I could be wrong, forgive me; that she'd like to put a road-block up around the whole idea of motherhood, thinking that said whole idea is, well, overblown. At least that's the impression I got.  

*Ribble happened to have been my mother’s analyst during the time-frame in which I was conceived, born, and experiencing infanthood.  

 

She, [Prof. Vicedo] does do a job on Bolby though, that's for sure; [yet he seems to have survived the hit.] She points out very well how, with the help of The World Health Organization, Bolby has gotten plenty of mileage out of a relatively small amount of scientific research. What she doesn't do, though, is put Bolby and his theory in anything like the proper context.  …As for what I've found out through further reading: With the help of the object relations school of thought, and some Americans like the late but brilliant Daniel Stern*, developmental psychology has put a great deal of meat on the bones of what is becoming, potentially, the new, post Freudian psychoanalytical model of the infant mind. And that's where it gets quite interesting. 

…………………………

 

*Daniel N. Stern (August 16, 1934 – November 12, 2012) was a prominent American developmental psychiatrist and psychoanalyst, specializing in infant development, on which he had written a number of books — most notably The Interpersonal World of the Infant (1985).^[1]

( Stern's 1985 and 1995 research and conceptualization created a bridge between psychoanalysis and research-based developmental models.)

To the extent that it has taken hold, (and it is not as yet universally accepted), prenatal psychology is usually tied together with developmental psychology, a more mainstream area of research. The histological territory currently under investigation is the life-span of the embryo-turned-fetus up to and including birth. The future psychological development of the individual, (called an embryo for the first eight weeks after conception and fetus until birth) is the ‘common thread’ of inquiry in these studies. Of particular interest for the prenatal psychologist is the development of the brain. Whether newborns are capable of forming memories is still being debated, as well as whether it could be possible to recover [retrieve] them from the unconscious mind, and what effect these memories might have on the developing personality. In the past, the common assumption has been that the fetus is almost completely shut off from outside stimulation, so that perception and consciousness may only begin to develop after birth. Meanwhile, clinical evidence continues to grow that perception and learning ability are well formed even before birth. In fact, since the development of ultrasound technology it has become possible to make detailed studies of the motor skills of both embryo and fetus.  

Otto Rank certainly opened the door to pre-natal investigation with his Birth Trauma, and many other's have alluded to the potential for symtomology to have had it's beginnings pre-birth. (I'm familiar with Rank through having exhaustively read Henry Miller and his pal Anais Nin; and having struggled through his Art and Artist, which, though I found it difficult going, I also found enlightening.)

From Rank on, certain psychoanalysts have believed that the groundwork of the unconscious psyche starts before birth. In the last quarter of the 20^th century, dozens of researchers have observed and measured prenatal sense reactions; touch, heartbeat, eye movement, motion, proprioception, hearing and the like. Psychiatrists and psychoanalysts have used this research as justification for rethinking theory and practice. 

 

Primitive States of Being

Herewith; several difficult concepts; difficult to wrap one's mind around and also to accept as science, and which seem to gravitate around how you codify pre-verbal information. (I must fall back again on my secure status as a non-professional.) I'm going on the assumption that nothing in the post-modern world is etched in stone. 

To begin with, I'm learning a new vocabulary:   black hole, skin ego, protective shield, psychic envelope, narrative envelope, ..&...........etc.  

 

From:  NIH  History of the psychosomatic approach in France

Although somatization is accepted in all current theories, the process “differs from one theory to the other: alexithymia, operational thinking, dysfunction, incapacity to attain the symbolic level, etc.” According to Sami-Ali, all of this remains within the context of “a body-soul dualism which constitutes a major epistemological obstacle, just as [does] its opposite, monism. Relational psychosomatics strives to transcend dualism as well as monism (…)  It means finally that the organic and the  functional   belong to a   sole   theoretical model, (…)  in which the relational appears as the unifying principle par excellence.” Sami Ali fundamentally distinguishes himself from historical approaches in French psychosomatics, nearly all in the sphere of influence of Freudian theory and emphasizing the notion of deficiency. His approach could call to mind those of Swiss psychiatrist and philosopher Ludwig Binswanger, (1881-1966), German philosopher Karl Jaspers, (1883-1969) and his notion of limit situations (Leydenbach, 2013), and French philosopher Paul Ricoeur (1913-2005) with the notion of narrative identity (Leydenbach, 2013). Sami-Ali’s oeuvre is indissociable from his Egyptian roots. He has always lived at the frontier of two cultures. Trained in philosophy, while integrating Western thought, he also saw psychoanalytic theory through the lens of a different social environment and a different language. He was the first to translate Freud to Arabic and, more importantly, he translated different mystic Arab poets to French with introductory comments on their works. In these comments, he emphasizes the fundamental unity of poetry and thought, thus stressing the fundamental unity of poetry and thought, thus stressing the fundamental unity of the human being and starkly contrasting Western dualism. “Although trained in philosophy, I do not believe that rational thought can give an answer to the great questions of Mankind. In my opinion art is the only way to confront the enigma of (…) :  art does not ask questions, in art, there is no need. Art is; as light is.” (Tarantini, 2004, p95) Faced with the limitless complexity of human reality, Sami-Ali sees but one way to approach it as a therapist: to be in resonance, the very core of Relational Theory. According to Sami-Ali, Wittgenstein conveys this best: “Things are immediately there before our eyes, no veil covers them.” In the same vein, it could be similarly stated that relation is, like art and light, and thus may represent the major gateway to the imbroglio of ultimate complexity...with ultimate simplicity

Conclusion: .....In   France,   psychosomatic  conceptualization   has   been fundamentally shaped by psychoanalysis much more than by animal experimentation. Thus, psychosomatic patient care deals fundamentally with the patient’s words and existential condition rather than focusing on physical symptoms. As a result, the word “psychosomatic” came to be understood in daily language in a reduced way, qualifying a kind of linear action   from   the   psychic   to   the   organic.   Furthermore, in spite of  the monistic aspirations of a large number of  French “psychosomaticians”, this layman’s usage of the “psychosomatic” notion continues to underline the psychic/soma division, suggesting the influence of the former on the latter. Opposing this evolution, however, French medicine has maintained its interest in the psyche-body dynamic in another form, for instance by establishing   new   types   of   collaboration   between   practitioners   of disciplines   concerned   with   this   dynamic,   such   as   the   Balint   groups mentioned   above,   medical  psychology,  (Moor,   1977)   (Keller,  Senon, 2007), or

 

consultation-liaison psychiatry (Zumbrunnen, 1992), present in the   Anglo-Saxon   world.   Moreover,   in   recent   years,   the   French psychosomatic field has expanded to new research in sectors previously considered   outside   of   its   limits,   such  as   the   placebo   effect   (Keller, Giroux-Gonon,   Gonon,   2013)   or   hypnosis   and   its   derivatives   like hypnosedation (Bioy, Keller, 2009). Such research intends to better study the coexistence of simultaneous psychic and somatic phenomena, not so much   focusing   on   explicative   logic   as   on   a   more   phenomenological approach. 

 

 

STERN

Wayne - His last name remains anonymous, but he wrote this amazingly detailed review on Amazon.  

 [ The Self is born – a phenomenological perspective ] (Amazon review) The following is a reader-review of Stern’s book, The Interpersonal World of the Infant; Daniel N. Stern; 2000.  

“If we just take the position of a working hypothesis for the developing senses of the self, we find the need for higher order constructs, similar to attachment theory and psychoanalytic theory. What is different here [in the Stern book] is the organizing principle of the subjective sense of self. Subjective experiences per se, the sense of self-and-other, are the basic building blocks in this phenomenological account of the self.

A phenomenological account of the development of the sense of self that incorporates a large group of data from late 20^th c. developmental psychology.  ….in which new research incorporates new technology.   

“Have you ever wished you could ask an infant what he is really thinking, feeling or wanting? It is in seeing what the infant is capable of doing (sucking, looking, etc.), that gives [that we get] the answer, and the value of reporting and summarizing research on the development of the infant.

Stern makes over 400 references to research findings to report consensus in the field and offers new possibilities, separate from any preconceived theoretical construct such as psychoanalytic theory. While it could be considered that Stern is only providing a report on developmental psychology, he is rather presenting an originary approach to psychology in general from an observational, phenomenological, no- theoretical framework with implications for psychotherapy.

[ my first exposure to this word, originary, courtesy Wayne, and which I assume means having to do with ‘origins’.  ]

“Stern shows that from birth (or prior), infants experience becoming; the process (and result) of emerging organization:

 

(1) Emergent Sense of Self. Infants experience an alive (felt) self while engaging the world. They experience the result (product) of forming relations between isolated experiences (invariances, or patterns) as well as the process itself. Emergent processes:

“a.) Amodal Perception: Stern reports how infants have an innate learning ability of Amodal (multimodal) Perception, to take information from one sensory modality and translate it into another sensory modality. There is an encoding multimodality which can be recognized in any of the sensory modes, from the sensory specific to the sensory generalizable. Amodal Perception may be the sensory form of analogy similar to the later ability of cognitive symbolization, and appears to allow assessment of the internal state of others. (See pp. 154 ff.)

b.) Affects (the overarching mode of all modes): Werner (1948) proposed that amodal qualities that are directly experienced by the infant are Darwinian categorical affects (happy, sad, angry) mixed with other modes of color, sound, shape, etc.

c.) Vitality Affects (in the presence of categorical and noncategorical): related to vital processes of life such as breathing, hunger, elimination, sleeping, coming and going of feeling, thoughts, sensations.

d.) Mirror Neurons are known to contribute to primary intersubjectivity, affective resonance and imitation; if not empathy as well.

“Infants do construct relationship as well as perceive, directly due to perception, invariant qualities (e.g., face, voice) related to mother, etc. The infant experiences organization through amodal perception and constructionistic efforts as well.

 

“(2) Sense of a Core Self: (2-7 mos.) which includes…,

a.) Self agency (volition)

 

b.) Self-coherence: 1.) Unity of locus; 2.) Coherence of motion; 3.) Coherence of temporal structure; 4.) Coherence of intenwsity structure; 5.) Coherence of form.

c.) Self-continuity”

"The matching of caregiver behavioral variations and infant predelictions gives the infant the optimal opportunity to perceive those behavior invariants (adaptive oscillators) that identify self or other." (p. 73) Invariance (repeatability, p. 80) is the crucial experiential condition under which the infant becomes able to encode a predictable self, and a predictable other. Invariance yields a self, and an other. Memory itself becomes the invariant due to encoding that permits recognition (re-"cognition," nonvariance).

One of the foundations of Stern's approach to self is "There are never emotions without a perceptual context. There are never cognitions without some affect fluctuations . . . . An episode [episodic memory, island of consistency] appears to enter into memory [encoding] as an indivisable unit." (p. 95). What gets encoded episodically are not specific memories, but generalized: 1)experience, 2) intuition schema, and 3) imagining capacity--a Sense of a Core Self.

 

(3) Sense of a Core Self with Other (9 mos. and up)

a.) Self-regulating of the infant for attachment, security, arousal, activation, pleasure, physical gratification, self-esteem, (atunement, p. 138 ff.)

b.) Self-resonating

c.) Being with: self in presence of other, physical and psychological proximity and individuation (evoked companion. p. 111)

d.) Family triad

(4) Verbal self (1 year and up)

 

The use of words not only gives the child increased ability of cognition, generalization and identification, but also responsibility to the parent and society's demands. When children begin using words, adults usually become less personal, more abstract, more demanding and more alienating (p. 163). Children use words as an adjunct while adults believe in words, and the imbedded demands…

Becoming verbal leads to 1) The objective view of self; 2) Capacity for symbolic play; 3) Use of language and new ways of being with and of being divided between the verbal and nonverbal.

 

(5) Narrative self (3 years and up)

Our autobiographical history told to ourself and to others, constructional autobiography as told to us by family. There are cultural enactments and filters affecting our self from subgroups of society, kin-groups and our family per se.

The final part of the book is devoted to implications for psychotherapy, which are profoundly affected by research presented so far, and by Stern's own research which focused on process, the now, what he called the "microanalytic interview," assessing a client's instant-by-instant lived experience at any given time. He asserted that phenomenologically we only live in the present moment, and he applied that to his psychotherapy systematically. His work integrates no less than psychotherapy, developmental psychology, anthropology and psychoanalysis.

Postlogue: Stern's findings have been updated and corroborated this year in  The Birth of Intersubjectivity: Psychodynamics, Neurobiology, and the Self (The Norton Series on Interpersonal Neurobiology)  by Ammaniti and Gallese. However these authors still cling to psychodynamic theory which misses the seminal and phenomenological work of Stern.”

 ……………………………..

WILFRED BION       

 [ I'm going to make another attempt at saying something about Wilfred...will get back to 'ya.......circa 3/30/24]   

 ..................................

METRANI

 Metrani’s theoretical construct relys heavily on Bion’s thinking concerning the ‘containing’ function of the mother or mother-figure.

Metrani:  “Owing to Bion’s work, we now understand that in order for the normal processes of projective and introjective identification to proceed in a healthful manner, without mutating into pathological autistic maneuvers or hyperbolic disintegration of the self, the holding mother of infancy, (Winnicott 1941) must also exhibit containing properties. The metabolic processing of the baby’s raw sensory experience (which is intitially devoid of meaning),  through the mother’s mental function leads to increasing development of the mother’s mental function leads [which leads]  to increasing development of symbol formation and a decrease in mindless action and somatization in reaction to intense affective states. Normal projective identification and subsequent introjective identification with a containing object leads to a decrease in the tendency to concretize emotional experience and an increase in the development of abstract and creative thinking, replacing action symptons related to painfully unbearable emotional states with increasing tolerance of psychic pain and mental transformations. 

“The overanxious mother may be impaired in her capacity for reverie. If she cannot receive her baby’s communications, she may be internalized as an obstructive object unwilling or unable to contain. If she cannot digest what she receives, but is instead felt to add her own anxieties to those already overwhelming the infant (using the infant as a container for her own unthinkable dreads), then what she hurriedly gives back to the baby will be suitable only for some hyperbolic form of discharge. Consequently, the baby will develop a precocious mind as an instrument for evacuating or encapsulating experience rather than as an instrument for thinking thoughts. 

“….Federn’s work (1952) preceded Bion’s thinking when……..  tktktk 

 

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Psychoanalysis and Art: Kleinian Perspectives

 

Editor : Sandra Gosso, Author(s) : Donald Meltzer

This essential edition brings together a collection of classic papers from key figures in Kleinian and post-Kleinian thought that explore the relationship between psychoanalysis and art.

Sandra Gosso begins with a comprehensive and fascinating guide to the history of this relationship which began with Freud and was developed further by Melanie Klein at a time when most analysts were moving away from links with art. Melanie Klein's pivotal paper, "Infantile Anxiety Situations Reflected in a Work of Art and in the Creative Impulse", follows the Introduction. The other papers featured are mainly from British analysts who expanded on Melanie Klein's ideas, inspired by the influence of the creative Bloomsbury and Imago Groups. Members of the Imago Group, founded by Adrian Stokes, include Donald Meltzer, Wilfred Bion, Roger Money-Kyrle and Marion Milner; all of whom underwent analysis with Melanie Klein. Their interests range throughout the arts and this allows them to explore the relationship between art and psychoanalysis from varied and thought-provoking angles. The book also includes four chapters by Meg Harris Williams. The papers featured here investigate such core themes as the creative impulse, aesthetics, literature and symbol formation.

This definitive volume is essential reading for students and professionals in the fields of psychoanalysis, art and cultural studies.

About the Editor

Sandra Gosso is a researcher in dynamic psychology at the University of Pisa, Italy where she also teaches Psychology of Art in the Cinema, Music and Theatre course (CMT). She has contributed to various books in the field of psychoanalysis and she is the author of Paesaggi delle mente: una psicoanalisi per l'estetica (Franco Angeli, Milan 1997).

Donald Meltzer (1923-2004) is widely known as a psychoanalyst and teacher throughout Europe and South America. He is the author of many works on psychoanalytic theory and practice, including The Psychoanalytical Process, Sexual States of Mind, Explorations in Autism, The Kleinian Development, Dream Life, Studies in Extended Metapsychology, and The Claustrum, all published by the Harris Meltzer Trust.

 

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By Colwyn Trevarthen

Colwyn Trevarthen is Professor Emeritus of Child Psychology and Psychobiology at the University of Edinburgh, UK, and a close colleague of Daniel Stern for over forty years. He is co-editor of Communicative Musicality: Exploring the basis of human companionship published by Oxford University Press.

-

Daniel N. Stern, a New Yorker, died in November 2012 after a long illness. A distinguished child psychiatrist and psychoanalyst and a world-famous developmental psychologist, he transformed ideas of human nature in infancy and he made important contributions to his last days. He gave us a theory of how we create and share imaginative stories by rhythmic movements, which he called ‘forms of vitality,’ a domain that draws satisfaction and regulation from all sensory modalities in a consciousness of movement, and which, “distinct from the domains of emotion, sensation, or cognition,” gives life to all our ventures.

 

 

Daniel Stern

Courtesy of the Stern family.

 As a child Dan was, by his own account, observant of people. When he was seven years old, he saw that non-verbal expressions of a baby that were clear to him could be invisible to a talkative parent. He conceived the idea of two languages, one of which, awareness of embodied movement, may become dismissed with age. After studies at Harvard of the 1950s, he graduated from Einstein Medical College with MD in 1960. He turned to psychiatry, and then psychoanalytic training at Columbia University, hoping to gain knowledge of how the mind works. Dissatisfied with the theory of instinctive drives and their complexes, which he could not relate to everyday experience or clinical work, he was drawn to research in child psychology, then a very active field. Inspired by the discoveries of ethologists who demonstrated how signals among animals guided their social lives, he tried a different approach. He became part of a group at Columbia who adapted micro-analysis of natural communication by gesture and expression when words are inadequate or misleading, and this led to curiosity about how infants share ideas without language.

 Dan wrote seven books, each a step in a journey of discovery of the human ‘self in relations’. In 1977 The First Relationship: Infant and Mother summarized work at Columbia on the fine timing of expressive movements by which a mother and baby share a game. His first scientific paper, ‘A micro-analysis of mother-infant interaction: Behaviors regulating social contact between a mother and her three-and-a-half-month-old twins’ in the Journal of American Academy of Child Psychiatry, appeared in 1971. It was followed by others on how gaze, facial expressions, and vocalizations controlled the ‘stimulus world’ of playful interaction between an entertaining baby and a loving mother. As Professor of Psychiatry at Cornell University Medical Centre and Chief of the Laboratory of Developmental Processes, Stern did not see the infant as a mindless organism dependent on maternal care for bodily pleasure or comfort, and needing to learn a separation between a Self and any Object. From an approach assuming personal powers for the baby grew a new conception of the mother’s role and her experience of being with her baby, which in time became a model for a different way of conceiving psychotherapy for adult patients.

In his famous 1985 book The Interpersonal World of the Infant: A View from Psychoanalysis and Development Psychology, translated into many languages, Stern presented the infant as a human being from the start, especially gifted for attracting communication from a mother. He portrayed the emergence of awareness of self and other as a layered model like a building, in which initial talents remain a foundation for later advances. Dan’s book excited critical responses from followers of the modern authorities on the infant mind, Freud and Piaget, but the new vision was welcomed and strongly supported by psychologists who had been collecting evidence for 20 years about young infants’ clever powers of communication, and instincts for cultural learning. In his book Dan introduced new terms: ‘affect appraisals’, ‘core relatedness’, ‘intermodal fluency’, ‘intersubjective relatedness’, ‘relational affects’, ‘selective attunement’, and so on, to capture what was expressed in the infant-mother relationship from the start. Stern’s new terms became the language of a different developmental science for the baby in their interpersonal world.

 In 1990 Stern, retaining the post of Adjunct Professor of Psychiatry at Cornell University Medical Centre, New York Hospital, had moved to the University of Geneva as Professor of Psychology and gained a new group of collaborators who shared a particular interest in the mother’s contribution. Her experience of pregnancy, birth, and new motherhood became a topic for in-depth research, and three books: a fanciful Diary of a Baby (1990) expressing a richer view of growing self-awareness; The Motherhood Constellation: A Unified View of Parent-infant Psychotherapy (1995); and in collaboration with his wife Nadia Bruschweiler-Stern, a developmental pediatrician and child psychiatrist, and with a professional journalist Alison Freeland, The Birth of a Mother: How the Motherhood Experience Changes You Forever (1998). This last is a guide for expectant and new mothers to give support for their extraordinary experience. Dan also joined work on the relationships of the infant to with mother and father together, and with other persons. The sociability of the young human person assumed a much wider purpose, to become a conscious actor in a collaborative community.

 In 2000 Dan presented a new paper-book edition of The Interpersonal World of the Infant. He made no changes to the 15-year-old text, instead adding a 26 page Introduction, which is an important addition to his writings. He reviews advances to his thinking, and gives thoughtful response to criticisms received, mainly by psychotherapists defending the classical psychoanalytic model of neuroses and therapy for patients who are able to speak, denying relevance of the research on infancy. He says:

“One consequence of the book’s application of a narrative perspective to the non-verbal has been the discovery of a language useful to many psychotherapies that rely on the non verbal. I am thinking particularly of dance, music, body, and movement therapies, as well as existential psychotherapies. This observation came as a pleasant surprise to me since I did not originally have such therapists in mind; my thinking has been enriched by coming to know them better” (p. xv)

 

In the last decade of Dan’s life he felt committed to a dynamic and generative view of the conscious self-as-agent with an experience of time in movement, in the ‘present moment’ of vivid awareness, and in ‘narratives’ of personal ambitions and affective engagements. New terms in the theory include ‘dynamic emotional states’, ‘forms of feeling’, ‘forms of vitality’, ‘present moments of meeting’, ‘proto-narrative envelopes’. Two books present these ideas. The Present Moment: In Psychotherapy and Everyday Life (2004) opens the way to a more sensitive and collaborative way of exploring a patient’s distress and its manifestation in all expressive actions, and in responses to an open reception by a person trained to sense the feelings behind their dynamics. The Boston Change Process Study Group, adopting Stern’s layered model of developmental change in relationships, promoted of this in practice and produced Change in Psychotherapy: A Unifying Paradigm (2010). The same year brought Dan’s final masterpiece, Forms of Vitality: Exploring Dynamic Experience in Psychology, the Arts, Psychotherapy and Development, published by Oxford University Press. Here we have an eloquent presentation of a theory of all human creativity, which depends on the creativity and sympathy for the poetic motives of body and mind which seek to discover two worlds, the physical aesthetic one of objects with beautiful properties that may be profitably used, or horrors that must be avoided, and the animated human one that senses one’s hopes and fears for relationships and may offer sympathetic moral companionship and collaboration.

This is a psychology to build not only practices to strengthen care for those in distress, but also encouragement for education of the young, and the development of laws and social industries and institutions of government that will benefit more people and reduce injustices. Dan Stern’s thoughts are with us, and will last.

 

Routledge

An extraordinary depiction of one analysts efforts to receive and respond to the vivid impressions of her patients’ raw and sometimes even unmentalized experiences as they are highlighted in the transference-countertransference connection. Mitrani attempts to feel, suffer, mentally transform, and, finally, verbally construct for and with the patient possible meanings for those immediate versions of life’s earliest experiences as they are re-enacted in the therapeutic relationship. She uses insights from this therapeutic work to contribute to the metapsychology of British and American object relations as well as to the psychoanalytic theory of technique. In these eleven essays, Dr Mitrani masterfully integrates the work of Klein, Winnicott, Bion and Tustin as she leads us on an expedition through primitive emotional territories. She clears the way toward detecting and understanding the survival function of certain pathological manoeuvres deployed by patients when confronted by unthinkable anxieties. In her vivid accounts of numerous clinical cases, she provides and demonstrates the tools needed to effect a transformation of unmentalized experiences within the context of the therapeutic relationship.

Foreword , Introduction , Introduction to the Karnac Edition 2008 , Unintegration, Adhesive Identification, and the Psychic Skin: * Variations on Some Themes by Esther Bick , On the Survival Function of Autistic Maneuvers in Adult Patients 1 , Notes on an Embryonic State of Mind , On the Survival Function of Pathological Organizations 1 , To Err Is Human: One Patient’s Emergence from within a Pathological Organization , The Role of Unmentalized Experience in the Etiology and Treatment of Psychosomatic Asthma 1 , Examining a Fragment of a Fragment: Freud’s “Dora” Case Revisited , On Adhesive Pseudo-Object Relations: A Theory 1 , On Adhesive Pseudo-Object Relations: An Illustration 1 , Toward an Understanding of Unmentalized Experience 1 , Deficiency and Envy: Some Factors Impacting the Analytic Mind from Listening to Interpretation 1 , Credits 

 

Why You Can't Find This Blog!

If you Google tonyprohaska@blogspot.com  you will find my blog. (Prohaska and Me) ...I guess you're supposed to know to do this?  Now; will I quit whining? 

 

 

Mina Loy; Part 1, an introduction

 

My interest in Mina Loy coincided with the Covid epidemic which coincided with my bout of terrible, horrible, I mean I was suicidal for Crissakes, Psoriasis. About which I have complained plenty, but, I still feel it’s necessary to bring it up here because, well, by the time I finished reading the Burke book, I was into probably at least a year of hardly any reading, or thinking of anything other than controlling my itching. Before I reached that point though, I wrote the following, which is a distillation of my reading about Loy, mostly from Burke, and which is meant to serve as an introduction to her, for no-one other than you and me. If a discussion of her work does not soon follow, a curse on both our houses.    

Thanks.  

 

 

 

I began my foray into early Modernism with the Russian Formalists and futurists. Mina Loy’s name came up then because of her relationship with Italian Futurist Marinetti, and possibly because she had been, while still in her teens, an art student in Munich, where a group of Russians were experimenting. I was surprised to see that there was a substantial biography of her and that it was available on Kindle: Burke, Carolyn, Becoming Modern: The Life of Mina Loy, New York; Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1996.  ..I downloaded it right away and took my time reading it. I was cloistered; it was during the Pandemic. This is what Google had to say about the Burke book:   

“The poet and visual artist Mina Loy has long had an underground reputation as an exemplary avant-gardist. Born in London of mixed Jewish and English parentage, and a much photographed beauty, she moved in the pivotal circles of international modernism in Florence as Gertrude Stein’s friend and Marinetti’s lover; in New York as Marcel Duchamp’s co-conspirator and Djuna Barnes’s confidante; in Mexico with her greatest love, the notorious boxer-poet Arthur Cravan; in Paris with the Surrealists and Man Ray. Carolyn Burke’s riveting, authoritative biography, Becoming Modern, brings this highly original and representative figure wonderfully alive, in the process giving us a new picture of modernism and one woman’s important contribution to it.” 

 

The above is so concise and true to my reading that I’m almost intimidated into not going on. But it is quite a big book, covering a lot, with quite a bit of analysis, and I read it with intense and careful interest. So I will go on. 

Sometimes you run into someone you think you don’t know from Adam and then you find out that you and that person in fact met years ago at a party. That’s the way it was with me and Mina Loy.  Didn’t  it count that I’d run into her before, in a book I read some years ago? The book was Duchamp – A Biography, by Calvin Tomkins. I enjoyed that book; it was packed full of information, and well written.

I still have a copy. So I looked in the index just now and there are several, in fact five different places where Loy is mentioned. She was part of the gang.

 

One could of course confuse the name with Myrna Loy, movie star of ancient times; which no doubt has happened. I was flipping the dial a few nights ago and there was Myrna Loy with William Powell and their trusty dog Asta, in one of the Thin Man movies that made them so famous that they were still famous and the movies were still being shown in theaters when I was growing up in the 1950s. (Myrna played a fast talking dame, a genre that was well drawn out in a book I loved, Fast-Talking Dames, by Maria DiBattista, which portrays Hepburn, Dunne, Stanwyck, Myrna Loy and the others with their snappy repartee, something the younger generation only thinks it has invented.)

 

Mina Loy was born in London in 1882. Her father, a Hungarian Jew, Sigmund Felix Lowy, (She would later change her name), was a tailor who had worked  his way up to being a purveyor of men’s clothing. Her mother, Julia Bryan, was a British Evangelical Christian of a somewhat lower class, who had gotten pregnant by the Jewish tailor to her lifetime regret, (she was seven months pregnant when Mina was born), married him and then had two more daughters beside the oldest, Mina. Mina, who became her mother's scapegoat, wouldn’t know for years the aggravating circumstances of her own birth. Her mother, Julia, though she had three children by Sigmund, was an anti-Semite and resented her husband’s refusal to separate himself from his Jewish community and his religion. She found fault in everything her oldest daughter did, calling Mina a sinner, and all manner of forms of brazen hussy. 

Mina’s first memories are of living in Hampstead, where the family’s first home, a rental, was in a new and less expensive ‘arriviste’ section. One memory, which she later felt had seeded her creative impulses, was of being carried down the front stairs by her mother’s doctor amidst refracted sunlight beaming through colored glass bottles arranged on a shelf below the rectangular window over the front door. The doctor was taking her home after she had been cared for by his wife while Mina’s mother gave birth to her second of three little girls.

                                                 

When she was three, Mina's Nanny began reading to her from a common religious children’s book, Peep of Day. She felt the magical nature of reading and wanted a book of her own, and her parents gave her an alphabet book. Before long she was a precocious reader. When she came across a book that she particularly liked, one of the few non-religious books allowed into the nursery, it was a cultural book written for a child’s mind as envisioned in the Victorian era, entitled Chaucer for Children To quote Carolyn Burke; 

“This new door opened not onto eternity but onto British history and culture. Its author, a Mrs. H. R. Haweis, had dedicated her book to her four-year-old son. More than Mrs. Haweis’s bowdlerized versions of Chaucer’s tales and flat, Pre-Raphaelite-style illustrations, it was the author’s estimate of, and respect for, her own child's mind that impressed Mina. She envied the young boy in the dedicatory portrait and wondered at his cleverness as he sat reading the stories that his mother had provided for him.”

 

Mina had a much better relationship with her father, who loved her and understood her enthusiasm for art. An amateur painter, he sometimes took Mina to museums and art galleries; and he tried to protect her from her mother’s hostility, though he too was intimidated by Julia, and also was inclined by Jewish tradition to think the mother should be in charge of the children. In 1892 when Mina was ten, he bought a house in West Hampstead. Many houses in the neighborhood were, and still are given names; so they named the house Clinton. No idea why.

Just after they moved they hired a new nanny who would attempt to put the fear of God into the girls. Her name was Mrs. Nickson, and she was a homely, glum woman who’s religiosity paralleled the mother of the three girls, perhaps minus the status anxiety. For two years the governess-teacher had a calming effect on Julia, who hoped that her ally would be able to purge her eldest daughter of her sinful nature, which she felt had no doubt come from the Jewish side of the family; and when Mrs. Nickson left service, Mina was in dread that she would be left with yet another governess until she turned eighteen, and then allowed to moulder under her mother’s thumb until they could get her married off. 

 

But at the end of that two year period, when Mrs. Nickson decided to leave service, Sigmund, asserting himself, declared his plan to send Mina and Dora to school. They were to go to a progressive school in Hampstead, though which one it was I can’t say. I searched far and wide online, in vain. Mina called the school the ‘Chaucer’ School, after Mrs. Haweies book, which was still a favorite of hers. …As she began attending ‘Chaucer’, she often thought about her mother’s obsessive mode of abusive verbal attacks, which she called ‘The Voice’.

From Mina’s descriptions of Julia, I’ve wondered if she was all that similar to every Evangelical Victorian mother or was she perhaps a bit deranged; in excess of her societal programming. Personally, I think she was a bit nuts. Burke quotes Julia as saying things like, “How can I fit you? You nasty girl. Do you think at your age it is decent to have a figure?” And, even more extreme, “Your vile flesh, you’ll get no good out of it. Curse you. Curse your father.” She did make friends at Chaucer, though, and found out that not all mothers were verbally violent, and that most other mothers, most but not all, took great care in seeing that their daughters were clean and well dressed and their hair neatly brushed and arranged.

 

During the whole of the 19^th century the education system in England grew phenomenally. By the end of the Victorian era, 1819 to 1901, laws had been passed with great frequency that allotted Government money and resources to opening up schools throughout England, Scotland and Wales. Privately funded schools were subject to most of the same laws as the government funded ones, and what could be taught was legislated carefully, down to the number and letter. Mostly it was reading, writing and arithmetic.

Mina and her sister were at ‘Chaucer’, for almost three years, during which they learned the ‘three Rs’, and Mina became known for her drawing facility and Dora for her playing the piano. I wish I knew more about the school but it seems like even if I were to undertake a study of the entire history of the educational system of England, I would probably not learn a thing about ‘Chaucer’. …There is no history of her experiences at that elementary school. She must have felt it was too boring to report on. I regret that, as I  also regret not knowing the history of Mina’s own personal reading, particularly early on, but also in her later life. I wish she had written a “Books of my life”, as some writers do. Though she continued to draw while at Chaucer, I don’t know under what conditions that was. Did she draw at school?  Or only at home?

 

I believe her mother was consistently critical of her work, while her father was supportive. I wonder if her father wasn’t more attentive and even perhaps more loving than it would appear from what Mina has said in her biographical work? The family scenario certainly lent itself to melodramatic expression.

 

At any rate, by the end of those three years she was fifteen and in full blown adolescence. She was no longer so cowed by her mother that she couldn’t argue back. As far as he mother was concerned, Mina could now decorate the house, sew or embroider, and simply wait, like any ‘normal’ middle-class girl, till a suitable husband was found.

Then, when she began to be vocal about wanting to go to Art School, the recent trial of Oscar Wilde supported her mother’s contention that the art world was nothing but a nest of perverts. Her father though, this time, really came through. He asserted himself and decided that, in fact, she should go to art school. …He reasoned that it would add to her value in the marriage game. (And he might have been right about that.) After a personal survey of the available art schools in London, mostly a moral survey, and mostly based on outward appearances, and with his wife’s participation, it was decided she would go to St. John’s Wood; the one closest to home.     

Chapter 2 in the Burke book is titled ‘The Worst Art School in London’. The title is meant, I’m quite sure, to show Mina’s feeling that the school at “The Wood”, was not satisfactory. Mina dismisses her time there as not important. Wikipedia quotes her as saying that she thought the school was “A haven of disappointment.” In this she was probably displaying some retrospective snobbery, combined with the fact that she was as yet still continuing to live at home. She had to this point never lived outside of the oppressive environment of her mother’s hostile personality.   

It was probably not the worst art school in London. In fact, in 1897 art schools from Moscow to San Francisco used surprisingly similar approaches to teaching; learning to draw the figure from plaster casts of sculptured figures; then learning color by mixing color, and anatomy by visiting dead bodies at the morgue. The full exposure of nude models was something a student had to graduate to.  

 

The neighborhood of St. John’s Wood is adjacent to Hampstead; just a few blocks west of Hampstead Heath and Hampstead High Street. The School, on Elm Tree Road, had been founded in 1878 by two art teachers, Eliseo Abelardo Alvarez Calderon, and Bernard Evans Ward. Numerous artists well known to the art world of turn-of-the-century London studied there, though I recognize almost none of their names. Beside Mina Loy there was Enid Bell, Frank Beresford, Herbert James Draper; and the first African to study art in England, Aina Onabolu, who became famous in his own country of Nigeria. Teachers included John Piper, Leonard Walker and Vanessa Bell*. The school was qualified to train students for entrance into the Royal Academy Schools, in fact more “Wood” students made it to the R.A. than those of any other London art school.  Between 1880 and 1903 over 300 of its students succeeded in gaining admission to the Academy Schools.   

*From:  Artist Biographies; a website

 

On Grove End Road in St. John’s Wood, several wealthy artists, including Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema and James Tissot had homes which were architectural showplaces. There was also a group known as the St. John’s Wood Clique; Royal Academy artists who painted illustrative scenes from Shakespeare and from English history.*    

*Burke

 

Mina was liked at the school.  She began to adjust to the idea that people thought of her as pretty. She also began to learn a new vernacular, that of the artist and in particular that of the painter. She was led to various books and articles of art criticism and began to develop her own opinions. She became interested in the work of Dante Gabiel Rossetti and Christina Rossetti, and convinced her father to buy her a book of reproductions; the complete works of Dante Rossetti; and a leather-bound version of Christina Rossetti’s poems. Soon she added other Pre-Raphaelites, as well as William Morris, and Edward Burne-Jones to her collection of art books. From these she made drawings, but those she brought home came up against resistance from her mother who considered most of her drawings sinful, even if what they portrayed was little more than a simple aura of contentment.      

There was a certain element of tedium to the instruction, most notable in the technique of stippling and in the frustration of working with loin clothed nudes. But there was a joyful communion of the like-minded at tea time. 

 

A turning point occurred when she was given a book which was going around; her first exposure to a piece of serious art criticism; a translation of a book by a German medical doctor and  “self-styled” sociologist named Max Nordau, an important European intellectual of the time and one of the founders of Zionism. The book, Degeneration, published in 1893, lumped Wagner, the Symbolists, mystics, Pre-Praphaelites, Aestheticism, and Decadentism, under the heading of Modern, all of whom he classified as degenerate due to “nervous exhaustion” caused by the diseased state of contemporary life. Huysman and Zola also were targeted as ‘enemies of society.’According to Burke, “Nordau applied the vocabulary developed by Krafft-Ebing and Lombroso in their studies of the criminally insane to the works of representative modern artists, with Oscar Wilde as exhibit A.

Because she loved Rossetti she would accept no negation of her own feelings. She took a contrarian approach to Nordau’s 1893 book, taking his criticism of artists she liked as personal. She had begun to build her own ego-ideal.

 

She probably understood this more clearly later on, and added that clarity to her autobiographical reminiscences. By then she understood something about intuition and its function as a tool of the hero. If she made the aesthetic content of Rosetti’s paintings and poetry into a parental introject it served her well. It became part of a  structure to build on, as did the work of Burn-Jones [sp.]  and William Morris. She now had the beginnings of an aesthetic taste to compare favorably with the environment she still shared with her parents. 

In her second year at St. John’s wood Mina became friends with a girl named Eva, who had a similar dysfunctional relationship with her own mother. With Eva’s help she was able to conclude that there might be a way out of her familial trap; she decided to find herself a husband; or rather, first, a fiancé.  Her first pick was a young man who smoked a curved pipe, had a nice profile, and was nicely dressed. She seemed to go after him in a rather assertive manner. After several walks in the park, she managed to confront him with what for him was a paralyzing fear of ‘doing”, well, anything. Although her parents seemed to find the young man, who’s name was Lucas, “an acceptable suitor” especially after learning that he came from a wealthy family, for Mina, the biological clock was simply time bearing down on her concerning her growing desire for real life experience and freedom from the specter of ‘Voice’, that was her mother.

 

Lucas was her first attempt at choosing a man. He was timid…he seemed more virginal and frightened then she, if in fact she was even at all nervous, about which there is no available clue .  They spent official, and chaperoned time together, but he couldn’t transcend his fear, and besides, she soon had her eye on someone else. She broke off the engagement. 

It might have been her discovery of the Pre-Raphaelites, or it might have been conversations with her father, but probably it was in the air; that she began to identify with that class of people called geniuses. For certain artists, first the Royal Academy ones and then as time went on, others, the classification of ‘genius’, was the rough equivalent of being appointed into the aristocracy, or at least the upper-middle class; becoming in a certain special way socially acceptable. (I hesitate to add that there is still some of that going around.)

A more mature Mina, writing about it years later, would say that she had risen to a higher level.  She was beginning to feel her instincts, something stirring below the conscious level.  But it was also, I think, an honest assessment of what turned out to be her own genius, one attracted to beauty, grace, charm and intellectual activity, all of which turned out to be personified in one man. …In retrospect she felt she had been subconsciously drawn to this new man. She “felt”, the poetic in him. He was a perfect fit for that newly forming ego-ideal. …She had first seen him on the tennis court!  “…a pale stranger broad-shouldered narrow hipped, lifting his arms in a white shirt.”  In her autobiographical writing she referred to him as Holyoak, which to me smacks of gothic romance but I’m not up to speed on that genre.   

 

He seems to have been a bit older and more worldly-wise than the other students at the Wood. He’d already had some success as an actor and was doing well enough in his new career as an “art photographer” to have photographed at least a few celebrities. And Mina, when she was able to watch him at work, had sufficient self-confidence to see herself as potentially a worthy photographic subject.

With Holyoak she shared a general attachment to earlier movements such as aestheticism, symbolism, and romanticism, along with the more contemporary Pre-Raphaelite genre, which had yet to arrive at its untimely death. (No-doubt caused by the quickening forward momentum of modernism.). 

They went to a Royal Academy ball, accompanied by her father Sigmund and sister Dora. They danced together. Holyoak was able to watch her relating to her sister and father…

 

One day after a romantic walk, when they entered the privacy of his studio, he smothered her with kisses, on her both cheeks and forehead, and then played something on the piano which added to the spell that they were both in, though she had no idea who or what music it was. …She experienced being in love and sharing a heightened awareness that is there forever; in amber; a prolonged courtship that manages to gracefully maintain its virginity. After days, or perhaps even weeks of blissful walking among the wild flowers and rose covered gardens, a problem developed. Holyoak’s brother broke the news that his handsome sibling had gotten mixed up in a seamy, complicated affair. He was sharing his lovely little house with a married couple; and the wife, Mrs. Peck, while nursing the poor Holyoak through what might have been a bad cold, managed to fall in love with him, which love had been reciprocated by Holyoak in a way that must have been pleasing to the wife, with the husband’s stoic Victorian acceptance. From what appeared to be a heady brew of good feelings with the addition of a love triangle things went south rather quickly, in a crescendo of misunderstanding and unpredictability.

The next time she saw him she became tongue tied and it wasn’t the new, but a regressed Mina, or what today we might call a parental introject;  “The Voice”, her mother Julia, who spoke. Holyoak was telling her he’d broken off with the married woman, and Mina became tongue tied. She wanted to make it clear that she loved him but there was to be no next time. While the wife distracted Holyoak, Julia, Mina’s mother, caused an even more successful interference.

 

Julia had developed the habit of passing out, often as a response to Mina’s ‘evil’ pursuits. Her last what was then called swoon, during which she fell onto the hard floor, brought on a miscarriage which further developed into peritonitis. A twenty four hour nursing staff were hired and the girls were ordered to stay in the house, a Victorian custom when a mother was ill. I love the following tid-bit, in the Burke biography; “Mina distracted herself with the novels of Oida*, a popular writer who’s sensational tales of peasants and aristocrats offered an escape from middle-class morality.  (Now, how am I supposed to bypass Oida?)

-         Pretend we all know about Oida?  Google, please come to the rescue …wouldn’t it possibly, even probably, have something to do with the development, the stage settings, for Mina’s idealism? But this would have to wait, for me, until some as yet still later date, due in my case to the one-two punch of Psoriasis and Covid Fear.  (“Oida, you’ll have to wait.”)   

 

However.  As soon as Julia heard about this Oida person she had all those contraband books “put under lock and key.” On top of this, a full time ladies companion, a Mrs. Rayburn, was hired to make sure the two girls never left the house. (And I suppose also make sure they continue their education in how to become a lady.) 

Thinking toward the future, Sigmund, while his wife was in a weakened condition, decided that what Mina needed, if she must study art, was an all-Woman’s Art School. Having been brought up in a heavily German Jewish environment in Hungary,  (he spoke fluent German), he did some research and decided, without seeking Julia’s approval, that Mina should spend a year at the Munich Kunstlerinnenverien Society of Female Artist’s School, part of Munich University. …Through the British Consulate he found an aristocratic family who took boarders. Mina would be associated with good society. And Mrs. Rayburn would accompany her on the trip to Germany as chaperone. Holyoak was never to be seen again. 

 

The Society of Female Artist’s school, with its ties to the Munich Academy of Fine Arts, was similar in its social acceptability  to London’s royal Academy. Staying with a baronial family and studying at a royally approved art school would enable Mina to move upward in the social hierarchy, a major concern to her parents. 

Before Mrs. Rayburn returned to London, the Baron took the two women on a tour of the city during which he and his wife pumped then for information on Mr. Lowy’s social status. Satisfied that he was a dealer in wholesale cloth, presumably to the upper-classes, Mina settled in; she would be there for a year. Mrs. Rayburn headed home.

 

Walking around the city was a major activity for the baronial family and Mina was always encouraged to come along. The avenues were wide; the buildings were white; the city was full of light. Schwabing, the artist’s quarter, was, (and still is) in the center of the city. (Imagine Gracie Mansion and The Plaza Hotel if they were both in Greenwich Village.) The Baron pointed out the royal residences, the Baroque churches, and the important monuments. 

 

Kandinsky’s 1908 painting: Munich-Schwabing with the Church of St. Ursula.

 

Just as she had at ‘The Wood’, In her classes at Kunstlerinnenverien Mina progressed quickly and became a favorite of the teachers. At home the Baroness encouraged her into down-to-earth conversations that were free from the moral pedagogy of Julia.  Mamalie, as she was encouraged to be called, was maternal in a casual way that must have been a relaxing change for Mina. They talked. Mamalie delivered to Mina an unglamorous take on adult love, and threw some cold water on Mina’s attempt to romanticize her version of the Holyoak courtship. 

Her classmates pointed out the ‘notorious’ Grafen Franziska zu Reventlow, someone who’s social position Mina had been taught to see as that of “the fallen woman”,  In a new light, though, Mina saw her position differently, possibly as improved as; along the lines of “not that bad!” The opinion that the students seemed to share of ‘The Grafen’, was favorable. She was a recognized writer in the popular magazines, a translator, and an arbiter of taste. She was attractive, a glamourous figure in Shwabing, always accompanied by an adoring clique; …thought of as a “Bohemian Princess.”  (A reaction to her mother’s pathological projections no doubt helped lead Mina to sympathize with this and other “fallen women”,  but the Grafen also had certain idiosyncratic feminist opinions which were similar to those that Mina would use to great effect in her future writing.)    

 

After one of the paying house guests, a young man named Alexander, told Mina that he found the Baron’s place through a newspaper ad, in which it was allowed that he could dine with interesting guests including a lovely English “Miss”; she began to smell a rat. ...Then, before the weather turned cold, the Baron took the whole family, and Mina too, on a grand vacation, one which Mina wondered how they could afford.  They would travel by train to a famous lake, the Sternburger See, in the Bavarian Alps. 

They stayed in a grand hunting Lodge, from which home base the Baron took everyone through daily strenuous hikes through mountains and fields of clover with occasional beer-hall rest stops. (She did find a little time to sketch the scenery.)

One early morning, the whole family was to climb a mountain, but the Baron decided the family should stay behind, and sent Mina on up with three single men. All three men as well as Mina found that situation more than slightly peculiar, and thought, perhaps, that it was some sort of set-up. The three were perfect gentlemen, enjoyed the view, but all including Mina were suspicious of the Baron’s intentions. Meanwhile, the brisk level of activity continued. She began to see, though, that her hosts, in spite of noble bloodlines, were short on funds.

... And this is where I’ve left Mina Loy, as I come out of my unhealthy doldrums; having also by this time reached the ripe old age of 80. And my plan now is to re-start my Mina fascination by re-reading the Burke Book, Becoming Modern; the Life of Mina Loy, by Carolyn Burke, which I still have on my Kindle.

 

Some Notes; 

 

A man named Georg Hirth was the publisher of a popular magazine 'Jugen' that was a great help in Mina’s effort to learn German, and at the same time to learn what was going on in the art world of Munich and Germany. In fact, a new design trend, Jugenstil, was attributed mainly to the magazine.The magazine itself was possibly the greatest avenue of influence in the cultural innovation coming out of Shwabing. Art objects of various kinds were called Jugenstil, after the magazine.

 Its “curvilinear aesthetic” was everywhere in Shwabing; in paintings, pottery, glass, storefront and interior design; it was a close relative of Art Nouveau. The Arts and Crafts movement, somewhat differentiated from Jugenstile, was also booming, and was promoted by the magazine. 

 

Founded in Munich by Hirth, Jugend* was edited by him until his death in 1916. Originally intended to showcase only German Arts and Crafts, instead it wound  up showcasing the German version of Art Nouveau. The magazine was famous for its highly original and eye- catching covers which made many of their illustrators famous and in general advanced the position of illustrators throughout the world.

*Wikipedia;   “The magazine, along with several others that launched more or less concurrently, including Pan, Simplicissimus, Dekorative Kunst ("Decorative Art") and Deutsche Kunst und Dekoration ("German Art and Decoration")  collectively roused interest among wealthy industrialists and the artistocracy, which further spread interest in Jugendstil from 2D art (graphic design) to 3D art (architecture), as well as more applied art.^[2] Germany's gesamtkunstwerk ("synthesized artwork") tradition eventually merged and evolved those interests into the Bauhaus movement.” 

 

The genre of Art Nouveau swept the Western World. Its popularity seemed to grow almost overnight, similar to certain later styles; Abstraction Impressionism; Pop Art.  Many things laid the groundwork for it, but two events that fascinate me are the invention of the Burmester Curve, (along with technical and design interest in curves, associated with the machine age, in general..) and the publication of several series of biological engravings,* Kunstformen der Natur (known in English as Art Forms in Nature) is a book of lithographic and halftone prints by German biologist Ernst Haeckel.*  

*Wikipedia;  “Originally published in sets of ten between 1899 and 1904 and collectively in two volumes in 1904,^[2] it consists of 100 prints of various organisms, many of which were first described by Haeckel himself. Over the course of his career, over 1000 engravings were produced based on Haeckel's sketches and watercolors; many of the best of these were chosen for Kunstformen der Natur, translated from sketch to print by lithographer Adolf Giltsch.^[3]  …A second edition of Kunstformen, containing only 30 prints, was produced in 1924.”

Another topic discussed frequently by the students was that of the Secession of 1892. In that year a group of artists broke away from the Munich Artists Association to promote their own art, “..in the face of what they considered official paternalism and its conservative policies.”*  They would split again in 1901 when some members formed the group ‘Phalanx’, and again in 1913 when the ‘New Munich Secession’ was formed.  Publisher Georg Hirth used the term “Secession” to represent;   “…the spirit of the various modern and reactionary movements of the era.”*             

*Wikipedia

 

Since I haven't yet discussed her work, but have read much of the available poetry, I'd like to say that I love what I'll refer to as her Bowery poem, which I found online - 

  Hot Cross Bum; Poem, Mina Loy;

Can I find a way to ‘Link’, the following?  Until then I'll just say it's in.....  

 Yale University Library, Digital Collection......

.....I would bet no editor currently alive would allow this poem to be published without changing the title, but I’m fine with it. I’m asking you to read this poem to sample what I personally think is a great example of her mature work.  It will be of some help, I grant you, if you, like me, have some personal familiarity with the place in NYC called the Bowery, or, in other towns, usually referred to as ‘Skid Row’.