John Wisniewski is a writer who resides in New York. He has written for LA Review of Books, AMFM Magazine, Toronto Review of Books, and other publications.
What interests you about the unconscious and psychoanalysis?
Well, I have been interested in the unconscious and the human mind since I was a teenager. I’ve always been a vivid dreamer and recall fragments of dreams upon waking most days. At some points of my life my dreams have felt just as vivid as my waking life. So I decided early on that I wanted to devote my work to the understanding of human consciousness. I used to say that I couldn’t imagine anything more interesting to study than the human mind, as we are all living with consciousness as our interface to the outer world as well as to our inner subconscious.
When I set out to formally study psychology, I assumed that psychoanalysis and psychology were ubiquitous. I knew there were theories such as behaviorism and CBT, but I had falsely assumed that everyone understood these theories all described different aspects of working with human consciousness. I hadn’t realized that the field was so divided and that people who subscribed to one way of thinking so wholeheartedly disregarded the rest. So graduate school was necessary, but it was frustrating to see how impoverished the discourse has become and how all of the training is really geared towards working within the medicalized mental health care system so prominent in the USA, and not so much interested in understanding the inner workings of the human mind. So after earning my doctorate, I sought out further training in psychoanalysis. I have undergone three analyses myself and have studied Freudian and Lacanian methodology and theory. I have since branched out and begun developing my own ideas and ways of working, as professionals should. There should come a point where we cease regurgitating what our masters have taught us and begin thinking for ourselves.
At this point, I pull from Freudian, Jungian, and Lacanian theories, as well as from other thinkers both within and outside of the field of psychoanalysis. I love Jung’s conception of synchronicities and the Lacanian use of the cut. Freud and Jung both have wonderful understandings of dreamwork. Then there’s Winnicott’s theories of transitional spaces and the importance of play, creation and imagination, Sabina Spielrein’s ideas about destruction as a part of coming into being, and Jean Laplanche’s theories of gender and sexuality. I also love the work of contemporary Lacanians like Tim Dean, Patricia Gherovici, Darian Leader, and Renata Salecl. I really appreciate Paul Verhaeghe’s rethinking of the Oedipus complex as a process of normalization, and Avgi Saketopoulou’s recent books.
I see psychoanalysis as a creative process, as well as a science, and I appreciate its ritual aspects, so I conceptualize the psychoanalytic process from creative and magical lenses as well as the more academic.
I aim to bring psychoanalytic thinking to a broader public audience, as I truly feel that if more people were psychoanalytically-minded, we would all benefit. The world would be a better place if everyone had an analyst! Setting aside the time for ourselves to turn inward and really focus on ourselves and reflect on our lives for an hour once, twice, or three times a week (traditional analysts meet with analysands 4-5 times a week) really makes a huge difference in our lives. Pausing to take time out for ourselves in that way creates a cut, a space that allows for possibilities and the potential to invent something new or to move through the world in a new way.
Could you tell us about your podcast?
I started my podcast Rendering Unconscious in January of 2018. I was in the process of relocating from the US to Sweden and migration was taking longer than anticipated, so there was a period of over a year where I had left New York but hadn’t fully moved to Stockholm yet. I was staying in my hometown Miami for months at a time and basically needed something to occupy myself, as I had been used to running a full-time private practice in New York City and hosting events at various museums, colleges, and other venues almost weekly. The idea came to me to start a podcast. I know a lot of wonderful thinkers, great psychoanalysts, artists, writers, poets, philosophers, and other creatives and intellectuals, so I decided to start interviewing people I know. I also post lectures from various events I’ve organized.
Now the podcast has been going for more than 5 years, and is nearing 250 episodes. I post one almost weekly. I think it’s important to talk to psychoanalysts from a wide range of theoretical orientations, as well as clinicians from a variety of perspectives and worldviews. I’ve interviewed other mental health practitioners, including social workers, creative arts therapists, psychologists, psychiatrists, and mental health counselors. I also think it’s important to talk to people outside of the field, as different disciplines can shed light on the human condition in a multitude of ways, and can all be beneficial. That’s why I speak to various folk magic practitioners, from Vodou to Santeria to Quimbanda to Hoodoo, tarot readers, astrologers, indigenous persons, and independent researchers. The pantheons of deities I’ve encountered through various magical traditions are often so rich with insights and understanding of human psychology, often much more so than anything taught in psychology classes.
Could you tell us about writing your book “Scansion“? How is the understanding the unconscious important to understanding and studying works of art?
My book Scansion in Psychoanalysis and Art: The Cut in Creation (2021) was a long time in the making. I wrote the first inklings of it back in 2011. I had been asked to write a review of a book celebrating 100 years of the International Psychoanalytic Association. The psychoanalytic institute I was part of at the time was also celebrating its centennial. While I was researching, I began to understand that psychoanalysis really began to take root at the same time that the Dada movement launched, and that this was all taking place in the same cities around Europe and North America: Zurich, Vienna, Hannover, Cologne, New York. I began to see the concepts and methods of psychoanalysis are reflected in methodologies utilized by Dada artists, who harnessed the creative potential of chance, cacophony, the cut-up method, improvisation, and performance.
The Surrealists are often most associated with psychoanalysis, as they consciously and intentionally read Freud and utilized his theories and methods in their work. Salvador Dalí, for example, was an avid reader of Freud, and even went to meet him towards the end of his life when he was evacuated to London during WW2. The Freud Museum, London, has a sketch of Freud that Dalí created during that meeting.
Lacan was friends with some surrealists and was in medical school while he was hanging out in those circles. He even used some of Dalí’s ideas and writings in his dissertation, but did not credit the artist as a source for fear of what his professors would think. I find this to be a real shame and is why I am open about my creative and magical practices. I think the time for posturing and pretending we are otherwise needs to come to an end. Humans are weird. Life is weird. Life is magical and creative, and our lives can even be viewed as our own works of performance art. These things need not be separated.
I wrote Scansion in an accessible way, putting my own spin on the theories of Freud, Lacan, Laplanche and others, without using any of the jargon often associated with them. Of course, I put a jargon term in the title, which I’ve heard has intimidated some people. Scansion is a Lacanian term for the cut. The cut can be seen as a disruption, often a disruption in the narratives we’ve been given, handed down to us from generations past, imbedded in us by our parents, families, societies. I feel the work of the psychoanalyst at this point in time is to provide a space where these narratives can be interrogated and challenged, parsed apart and investigated, to help people cut the chains that bind them so to speak, so they can better understand themselves and learn to work with themselves, in order move forward in a better way.
I think psychoanalysis, the arts, and magical practices all harbor this similar element. Through these processes, one works through unconscious dynamics to better understand them and themselves. If a work of art is truly a work of art, and not just conceptual art or what Brion Gysin called deceptual art, then it is the end product of a process of transformation that the artist has undergone. The final product is often not even what is really important. It’s all about the process. The first works of art were often created in a ritual context. Museums are full of artifacts created for ritual use: masks, statues, ornaments, spears, and wands. I think it’s important for us all to remember that context and bring it back to the forefront.
So in Scansion I trace a line of artists, beginning in Freud’s day and moving all the way through to contemporary times, who utilize the cut in some way, whether in painting, music, poetry, collage, photography, film, performance art, technology and/or body modification. And along the way, I use these artists to illustrate various psychoanalytic concepts that I think people will find useful in their own lives. I wrote the book more for people who like these artists, rather than for my fellow psychoanalysts. Though I hope some of them will read the book as well and learn more about some of these artists, because at most psychoanalytic conferences you hear about the same artists over and over again, and this is generally because these are the artists and writers Freud and Lacan wrote about, you know, Michelangelo, da Vinci, Joyce, Beckett, etc. Let’s talk about something new!
Scansion includes Luigi Russolo, Francis Bacon, Conrad Rooks, Peter Beard, Genesis Breyer P-Orridge, Crass, Aphex Twin, Nurse With Wound, Coil, Throbbing Gristle, People Like Us, TOPY, Tom Benson, William Burroughs, Brion Gysin, Jack Kerouac, Andy Warhol, Robert Mapplethorpe, Pierre Molinier, Carl Abrahamsson, Gustaf Broms, Elijah Burgher, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Weegee, John Zorn, Vincent van Gogh, Edvard Munch, Yoko Ono, Marina Abramovic, Val Denham, David Bowie, Derek Jarman, Tristan Tzara, Suzanne Duchamp, Marcel Duchamp, Harry Smith, Jonas Mekas, Robert Frank, Allen Ginsberg, Peter Orlovsky, Katelan Foisy, Max Ernst, Leonora Carrington, Kenneth Anger, and Joel-Peter Witkin, among others.
Could you tell us about Das Unbehagen, your center for psychoanalytic study?
Das Unbehagen is a free association for psychoanalysis. Anyone with an interest in psychoanalysis may join, you don’t have to be a clinician. There are plenty of people there who are students, philosophers, people with a focus on the humanities. Anyone interested in psychoanalysis is welcome. It was founded in 2012 by a group of about 20 people. Jamieson Webster, Michael Garfinkle, and I all left the psychoanalytic institute we were at around the same time. Jamieson sent an email out to about 20 people saying that we were all great thinkers in our own way and she wanted to see what would happen if we were all in the same room together. This is how Das Unbehagen was born. The name Das Unbehagen loosely means “the discontent.” It is pulled from Sigmund Freud’s seminal work Das Unbehagen in Der Kultur (Civilization and its Discontents). We were discontent with the structure of psychoanalytic training, as it’s basically become a Ponzi scheme to keep certain people in (and wealthy) and others out. This is of course mainly in the USA. Psychoanalysis is not so rigid internationally, which is one reason it’s refreshing to be based outside of the US.
From 2012-2017, we basically held weekly events, usually organized by Jamieson Webster and myself, though many others organized events as well and all were welcome to. Since I left NYC in 2017, I have heard there haven’t been as many events. Now they are more one-off events organized here and there rather than consistently, weekly. But of course since the pandemic, many events have been organized online. The great thing about Das Unbehagen is that you don’t have to be in NYC to participate. It’s great that we have an international community, and everyone is welcome to host their event through DU. When you’re in one of these more formal psychoanalytic institutes, you have to get permission for everything. If you want to bring a specific speaker to present, it has to get approval from the board. If you want to study a specific theorist or book or topic, it has to get approval from the board. And of course the board is made up of the older generation, of wealthy, white psychoanalysts, who basically have no interest in anything that we’re interested in. They’re not interested in anything new, they’re not interested in anything changing. In fact, they have a vested interest in keeping everything the same because they’re the ones on top and they are the ones benefitting from the status quo. They do not want to shake things up. Which was amazing for me to realize because of course we know the people on top in society more generally want to maintain the status quo because they’re the ones who are benefitting, but to see these dynamics playing out in psychoanalytic spaces is just mesmerizing because it is so antithetical to what the practice of psychoanalysis is all about. Psychoanalysis is supposed to help people see these kinds of oppressive dynamics playing out in their own lives and minds and to help them understand how they are playing out so they can begin to shift and change them. We basically internalize oppressive societal dynamics and internally oppress ourselves in our own psyches. And psychoanalysis is a way to begin to see this playing out so we can change it and free ourselves. At the core it’s all about liberation. So to see psychoanalysts acting in this way was really eye-opening for me. The psychoanalytic institute was not the safe-haven I had hoped it would be.
So at some point we realized that we could do this ourselves. Why should we have to ask a board if we can hear a certain psychoanalyst speak? We can just email them ourselves. We can just reach out ourselves. So that’s what we began to do. Our first speaker was Otto Kernberg, who is a quite well-known old-school analyst, who has written about these kinds of problems in psychoanalytic institutes. In fact he’s written a few papers about it, one of which is called “30 ways to kill the creativity of a psychoanalytic candidate.” So we invited him and held this wonderful, generative event on our own, and then continued to do so. We’d write to various analysts whose work we admired and told them we were this group of early career psychoanalysts, who were disgruntled with the current structures of psychoanalytic training institutes and asked if they would come speak with us. And everyone agreed! Everyone we reached out to was happy to speak with us. Many people in DU also teach at various universities in NYC, so someone would book a room at their university or someone would open up their office to host an event. Keep in mind at this point we were all already practicing clinicians. I was already a licensed psychologist with a private practice in Manhattan. Same with Jamieson and Michael. And this was post-doctoral study that we were all undergoing. We already had doctorate degrees. That’s one of the many problems I have with the psychoanalytic institutes. The institute I was at was only open for people with doctorate degrees (MDs, PsyDs, PhDs), and there we all were taking evening classes after working full days in hospitals and private practices, and yet they still treated us like children. It was so infantilizing. And I just thought to myself, “At what point does one get to think for oneself?” And not have to constantly be under the thumb of someone else’s “authority”? This is one of the reasons Jacques Lacan is great. He broke out from the psychoanalytic system and famously stated, “The psychoanalyst can only authorize himself,” which is absolutely true.
Could we talk about your latest book concerning the films of Ingmar Bergman. In Bergman’s films is there a discovery, as far as discovery for the main character, who is examining the self?
I decided to edit a collection of psychoanalytic perspectives on the films of Ingmar Bergman when I moved to Sweden because I moved in 2018, the same year as his centennial. It was Carl’s idea actually. With the move and the pandemic and everything, it took a few years to collect all the papers together, and I’m happy that it’s finally published. Bergman’s films are second to none. I think he may just be the greatest director of all time. He is definitely an auteur. He captures the psychological depth of his characters like no other. And while other directors use psychoanalysis wonderfully, like Alfred Hitchcock for example, Bergman really captures the depth of the unconscious in general, and of neurotic suffering in particular. He was a true artist. You can tell by watching his films that he was really working through something in himself with each film he created. Reading his diaries confirms this. They are wonderful to read, if you haven’t already!
When did you discover the films of Ingmar Bergman? What was the first Bergman film you saw?
My mother is an artist, and she always took me to museums and art films, which I appreciate now. As a kid I was always kind of annoyed, even though I did really enjoy it sometimes. I loved going to the MoMA in NYC, for example, as a child. But she would also drag us to a museum when we’d drive up to Tampa to go to Busch Gardens, for example, and I just really wanted to ride the rollercoasters. (I’m originally from Miami). But I do appreciate it now, and her doing that has definitely contributed to who I am today. I remember she took me to see David Cronenberg’s Naked Lunch, when it came out, which was my introduction to William Burroughs. And she told me about Dancer in the Dark because she knew I liked Björk, which was my introduction to Lars von Trier. There was an underground cinema in Coconut Grove when I was growing up that played The Rocky Horror Picture Show, which we used to go see when I was little. And she definitely took me to some Bergman films, as I remember going to this old art house cinemas and watching these weird, stark black and white films, but I couldn’t tell you which ones they were. Bergman is Bergman.
In a film like Hour of the Wolf, how did Bergman use the psychology of the occult?
Carl wrote about Hour of the Wolf for the collection I edited, so I’d recommend talking to him about it!
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