Empty Hearts and Jacques Lacan

EMPTY HEARTS AND JACQUES LACAN

                     

This painting called Lady in Pink was a direct reaction to the quote 'Baby says she's killing herself...because she doesn't feel like Baby'. I liked the contrast between life and death and you might notice than the lady in pink has a cigarette burn hole through her heart - a stab at the 'Mirror Phase' a theory by Jacques Lacan. 

Jacques Lacan was a French psychoanalyst and psychiatrist. His ‘Mirror Stage’ is the point in an infants life when they first look into a mirror and recognise their ‘other self’ traumatising to them because they are forced to recognise that they are not the most important nor the only person in the world. They are alone in these thoughts restricted by language and the symbolic order; and even if the rest of the world feels the same loneliness and detachment the infant will never know for sure. This recognition of ‘other’ makes the infant feel as if they have lost a feeling best described as ignorant contentment in the arms of the mother who cares for their every need.“If we could  communicate with the mosquito, we would learn that it floats through the air with the same self importance and feels itself also to be floating centre of the universe” (Nietzsche 2007, pg 48). Lacan goes on to explain that the infant grows up to always unconsciously desire to find this wholeness or ‘thing’ they feel they have lost or are lacking.

"Lacan predicted the mirror stage face-off of the alter Ego of the subject and its secular Ego upon the asymmetrical encounter of the speechless infant with the unfathomable mystery of the gaze of the Thing. It was this primordial stage of encounter with the other that invested art with a fundamental theatricality and made the manufacture of every work into a battle where victory could not be guaranteed" (Levine 2007 pg 90).

Lacan believed we could find this ‘Thing’ in art and other people - ultimately in communication. Arthur Miller would agree. “I regard the theatre as a serious business, one that makes or should make man more human, which is to say, less alone - Arthur Miller” (Driver, 1960). 

Baby was innocent

Baby was cute

Baby was in love

And baby cut her throat

Her mummy and daddy cried

And her family were all sad

She was loved by many

And more lives were harmed

Toddler was innocent too

And toddler was beautiful

Toddler fell in love also

And she knew what to do

Toddler knew something from the start

And Baby kept quiet

Because it was toddler who cut his throat first

And Baby stopped being quiet

By Millie Crow 

The image below was a gift to my Scottish Auntie living in America.  I adapted the painting and took images from a Scottish fairytale book and used them as a background to enforce the childhood theme behind the woman. I made sure it was Scottish fairy tales so as to make it personal to my auntie.

Levine, Z. Steven. 2008. Lacan Reframed. London: I.B Tauris and Co.

Nietzsche, Frederich. Trans Fritzche, Peter. 2007. Nietzsche and the Death of God. USA: Bedford

Tom F. Driver, 1960. Strength and Weakness in Arthur Miller. Vol. 4, No. 4. New York: MIT Press:

“‘Oh why can’t you remain like this forever!’…You always know

 after you are two. Two is the beginning of the end” (J.M. Barrie's

 Peter Pan, 1967 pg1).

“’I don’t want to be a man’ he said with passion. ‘I want always to

 be a little boy and to have fun’”(J.M.Barrie's Peter Pan, 1967 p44).

‘I’m youth, I'm joy,’ Peter answered at a venture, ‘I'm the little bird 

that has broken out of the egg.’ This, of course was nonsense; but it 

was proof to the unhappy Hook that Peter did not know in the least 

who or what he was, which is the very pinnacle of good form”(J.M.

 Barrie's Peter Pan  1967 p188).