From “Lure” to “Cure”. From Critical Spectatorship to a Relational Space of Reverie

In this essay, I proffer a critical therapeutics in which the image is both beneficent and toxic at the same time, not because of its ontology, but because images are social, and the social is always a site of contestation between and/or within individuals and groups. Images enable their audiences to engage with ideas that would otherwise be disavowed or felt as too overwhelming. I engage with one moving image case study, Jeamin Cha’s Sound Garden (2019), a 29-minute experimental documentary artists’ film that addresses such overwhelming themes as the psychological stress of immaterial labor and the ethos of overproduction in globalized capitalist economies. In my analysis of the critical therapeutics of this film, I adapt relational psychoanalyst Jessica Benjamin’s concept of “thirdness,” which is an analytic modality that attempts to bypass the either/or of complementary subject positions. Rather than the latter, whereby one subject may feel overwhelmed by another’s demands, or feels helpless in relation to another’s power over them, including the power to do harm, Benjamin’s model of “thirdness” conceives of the analytic encounter as an expanded space of reverie that flows between bodies which, while being in an asymmetrical relationship with one another, are mutually vulnerable and co-creative.

As a preamble to my analysis, I explicate a historical case study in which a photographic installation by the British-American artist Mary Kelly is discussed by Parveen Adams’ in “The Art of Analysis: Mary Kelly's Interim and the Discourse of the Analyst” (1991) in terms of how an artwork can act like a psychoanalytic site – the artist/artwork duo being like an analyst, while the spectator is like an analysand. I argue that analysis without an analyst can be enacted in the intermediate space between viewer and image.