L’effet Josephine Baker. Récit d’une contribution méconnue mais décisive aux théories psychanalytiques de la sublimation

Abstract

We report a strange and very real story that contributed in a decisive way to the construction of the notion of sublimation. Resuming this notion as worked by Sigmund Freud, Edward Glover and others, Lacan comes to a halt on an article by Melanie Klein where she reports an almost miraculous therapeutic effect felt by a Danish woman – Ruth Weber Leigh-Kjær. Indeed, in the middle of a depressive period, this woman who had never studied painting became a painter by creating a particularly successful female nude, that of Josephine Baker. The triggering event was the sale of a painting that, in the series of paintings hung on the wall, gave off an “empty space” all of a sudden; this event brutally precipitated a characterized depressive episode, then, in response, a creative mechanism that provoked the surprise of the circle of acquaintances and initiated a career as a painter. This miracle provoked at the time the stupefaction of her incredulous entourage. Miracle of tomme plads (empty place, in Danish), it is published by a friend, the writer and journalist Karen Michaelis, then in its wake commented by Melanie Klein. Reading Karen Michaelis, the very year of her publication, was a source of inspiration for Melanie Klein, who writes Infantile Anxiety-Situations Reflected in a Work of Art and Creative Impulse (also published in 1929). The question, says Klein, is to grasp what is the “empty space” in Ruth Kjär, “or more precisely, what is the sense of that feeling that something is missing in her body?”. For Klein, the answer, already described in the previous psychoanalysis Congress (1927), is the feminine equivalent of anxiety of castration in boys. Melanie Klein notes that the first painting by Ruth Weber Kjär was a “Negress”. After reading the article by E. Glover (1931) on sublimation, Lacan reads the article by Melanie Klein and believes that Michaelis is a psychoanalyst. Although Lacan did not see the painting in question, he suspects that it is about Josephine Baker but above all he makes of this painting the paradigm of his theory of the vase incarnating das Ding which is precisely what represents the picture! Our article gives a place to the fantasies induced by Josephine Baker's world-famous spectacles at that time: figures of the absence of limits, figures of the distant, of exoticism, of our animality and daring sensuality. Did these figures favor the process of sublimation? Indeed, in Ruth Weber Kjaer's painting, the “Negress” Josephine Baker sits, her left thigh bent so as to show her sex; she looks to her left, and contemplates precisely a vase, placed in full light. In reference to Freud's Sketch, Lacan evokes the function of the vase: “It is indeed the void that it creates, the something that introduces the notion, the very prospect of filling it. The void and the full, in the vase, by the vase, are introduced into a world, which, of itself, knows nothing of such”. “The repair of sadistic impulses against the body of the mother”, (Klein) the royal road to sublimation, is possible only through the interposition of a vase, a vacuum structure Creator, placed in some way in equivalence with Josephine Baker. The latter is used as an “operator” against her depressive experience by K. Weber Kjaer in so far as she makes it, that she creates it equivalent of a vase. So neither Michaelis nor Melanie Klein saw the vase. On the other hand, Lacan, who takes Michaelis for an analyst, reconstructs the function of the vase without having seen it! Jean Walton, American, in an article entitled “Race and psychoanalysis” (1995), makes a fine point that with this event, as in the masquerade of Joan Riviere, the figure of the “Other race” plays an eminent role, even if it is generally ignored in psychoanalytic research on sexuation. For J. Walton, it is repeatedly observed that feminine fantasy is occupied not only by figures of emptiness, in response to the rivalry between the sexes and the prevalence of the power of the “white male”, but especially by a degrading instrumentalization of the black figures. These black figures are repeatedly used as global instruments, never recognized in their individuality. Using finely Frantz Fanon's work, she notes the “unconsciously racialized” character of these two famous cases, on the one hand Joan Riviere and the fantasy that she describes being raped by a black she would have sniffed, to denounce him and have him executed, so as to call into question a paternal imago, on the other hand the use that she knows degrading, of a “negress” by Ruth Weber, term taken again, she said, without further comment by Melanie Klein and whose “negativity” would be used by Weber's sublimation process so that she finally has access to a masculine universe, that of painting.