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  • Rather My Own Shortcomings
  • Warren S. Poland

Lord, help me find the truth. And, Lord, protect me from those who have already found it.

—Ancient Prayer

Most of them met at art school, the Académie Julian, gifted youngsters eager not only to learn from their masters but also to move beyond them. Influenced by ideas Sérusier had brought from Gauguin in Brittany, the young Vuillard, Denis, Bonnard, and others banded together. Wanting to leave the prevailing style of impressionism behind, they called themselves Nabis, prophets, and together with a few added colleagues set out to find a new approach to painting and color.

Denis became their theorist. In 1890, when only nineteen years old, he published his Définition du néo-traditionnisme. Its first paragraph famously set down the basic premise from which the other principles of the Nabis derived: “Remember that before it is a warhorse, a naked woman, or a trumpery anecdote, a painting is essentially a flat surface covered with colors assembled in a certain order” (Russell 1971, 20). As is common with any diktat of theory, implications for possible rules of technique followed.

As time passed, the individuals among the Nabis painted and experimented, some staying close to the principles set down by Denis and some moving away. Troubled by a style felt to be insufficiently true to the theory, in 1898 Denis sent Vuillard a letter of concern about Vuillard’s having wandered too far afield. In a long reply, a letter that seemed at once an effort at self-defense yet also a genuine striving toward self-definition, Vuillard wrote, “To sum up, I have a horror (or rather, an absolute terror) of general ideas that I have not arrived at by myself. It is not that I deny their validity. I’d rather own up [End Page 121] to my shortcomings than pretend to an understanding that I don’t really possess” (Russell 1971, 65).

So much is present in those three short sentences. Vuillard does not rebelliously repudiate the principles offered but respectfully values their validity. Nonetheless, he insists on his need to digest and assimilate those principles for him to make them his own rather than accept them as a formulaic recipe for technical procedure. This is no mere bit of vanity; it matters. Struggling toward authenticity, Vuillard prefers to acknowledge personal shortcomings rather than become a poseur, one who gains acceptance by assuming whatever is thought to be the preferred way of doing things. Even within the tenets he valued in a specific school of art, he would not make art that was not essentially his. Instead, he labored to translate those cherished concepts into what was true to his own experience. He knew that imitation could grow into mastery only through the difficult struggle of integrating principles, not by perverting them into external rules.

What might this say for psychoanalysis?

Clinical analysis involves one person putting his mind into the service of the mind of another. In the service of the patient’s introspection, in what Robert Gardner (1983) has spoken of as reciprocating self-inquiries, the analyst structures a special situation, one with controlled limits and regularity of routine, in order to facilitate the patient’s calling forth the hidden forces within his mind. The analyst’s discipline, the analyst’s efforts toward neutrality and abstinence, are not goals in themselves but are modulated techniques designed to move the relationship from the conventional and toward opening what is buried and hidden. It seems appropriate that an analytic session is called a séance in French.

Yet if the analyst imposes a personal view of the way the patient’s world is likely to be constructed, the validity of the search is corrupted into an effort at persuasion. True psychoanalytic efforts are struggles of inquiry, not indoctrination.

It may be psychoanalytic theory itself that most often intrudes. [End Page 122] Basic concepts, including the one that says that behind every expression lie other meanings as yet unexposed—those fundamental principles allow investigation to take place.

Higher-level theories, such as those of infantile sexuality or defense mechanisms, and so on—all of those matter mostly to...

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