Images of Trauma: Pain, Recognition, and Disavowal in the Works of Frida Kahlo and Francis Bacon

Abstract

The role of art in the encounter with trauma and destructiveness is comparatively studied in the works of Frida Kahlo and Francis Bacon as examples of a direct and a more indirect way of dealing with such experiences. A creative product may function intrapsychically as a kind of messenger between dissociated self-states and consciousness, and it may also serve as a witnessing presence in a self-supporting and self-constituting way. Artistic work may thus be used by the artist for an expressive as well as for a protective purpose, as a means of sympathetic participation in painful experience, or as a medium for a view from the outside. The act itself of finding and of making expressive forms at the time of traumatic experience is a remarkable assertion of the human capability to synthesize and to counteract fragmenting dissociative processes.