Paper short abstract:

In his book "A Memoir of the Future", psychoanalyst Wilfred Bion, speaks to his ghost whom he left on the battlefields of WWI. To reach his patient's areas of death, the analyst has to confront the surviving images of unclaimed experiences, in his story and in History, transmitted by his relatives.

Paper long abstract:

"A silent language is then established, one that is based on images that are shown rather than said, showing what cannot be said."1 - this passage of a book I wrote together with Jean-Max Gaudilliére a few years ago seems to put in words what for some visual artists is not possible to articulate but through the materialization of images. Images that perhaps immerge from their practices as a resurge of past events that arguably impacted 'them' generations before they were born. Perhaps the dialogue between psychoanalysis and art can shed more light on how the past can be claimed through an artistic practice, thus becoming present, through the material constructs of the artist. Can the 'ghost' become presence through the materialization of an image that artists see emerging from their own hands and with 'whom' they engage in a conversation? I will draw comparisons with the work of psychoanalyst Wilfred Bion, who in his last book "A Memoir of the Future", speaks to his ghost, whom he left on the battlefields of WWI together with his dead companions. Evoking Bion's experience, considering that the discussion will encompass the work of visual artists and philosophers, I will content that to reach his patient's areas of death, the analyst has to confront the surviving images of unclaimed experiences, in his story and in History. I will provide clinical examples.

1 Françoise Davoine and Jean-Max Gaudilliére. History Beyond Trauma (New York: Other Press, 2004), 78-79.