The arts of looking

D.W. Winnicott and Michael Haneke

Bibliographic Data

ID7430516
AuthorsV Lebeau (corresponding author)
Year2009
Volume50
Issue1
Pages35-44
Publication date2009-03-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueScreen (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0036-9543 • E-ISSN: 1460-2474
PublisherOxford University Press (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1093/screen/hjn083
OpenAlexW2085628261
LanguageEN
Citations received12

Wouldn't it be awful’, confides one of D.W. Winnicott's patients in the course of her psychoanalysis with him, ‘if the child looked into the mirror and saw nothing!’ It is a stark and unsettling vision: a child, a mirror, a reflection that, because it is not there, becomes awful. Introducing his patient's words as an illustration of one of the fundamental insights of his work, Winnicott turns her sense of awe back onto the mother. ‘In individual emotional development’, he writes at the very beginning of ‘Mirror-role of mother and family in child development’, first published in 1967, ‘the precursor of the mirror is the mother's face. I wish to refer to the normal aspect of this and also to its psychopathology.’1 The idea of the mirror has been central to the encounter between psychoanalysis and studies in visual culture. ‘Thus film is like the mirror’: in 1975, Christian Metz's groundbreaking description of the cinema screen helped to generate the new psychoanalytic theory of film (to which Screen made its essential contribution).2 But Winnicott's patient is also giving voice to one of the most productive insights in writing about images in the past three decades – namely, as T.J. Clark succinctly put it in 1973: ‘It takes more than seeing to make things visible.’3 The limits of perception – what Freud, in another context, calls the ‘blindness of the seeing eye’ – become tangible in the imaginary scenario in which a child, standing before the mirror, sees nothing.4 We are some way here from Jacques Lacan's fascination with the baby, captivated by the image of his reflection, craning towards the mirror.5 This is not the domain of misrecognition, the lure of the image, that psychoanalysis has done so much to explain. Instead there is nothing, seeing nothing. The phrase may strain our capacity to visualize, but the patient's sense of its terror draws on an experience of the visual field by no means reducible to the visible, to the perceptible image, as such

Nothing · The Imaginary · Art, Politics, and Modernism · Cinema and Media Studies · Photography and Visual Culture

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