i-xxii Front matter.qxd - Brandeis Institutional Repository

Shifting Constellations / 169origin of art was “the human longing for enigma, for the miraculous,” which isaccessed by the unconscious mind: “Our unconscious mind contains therecord of all our past experiences—individual and racial, from the ƒrst cellgermination to the present day...Artoffers an almost unlimited access to one’sunconscious . . . Thus art is the best medium for humanity to get in touch withthe sources of its power.” 16 This is the Jungian collective unconscious.The in„uence of Graham’s painting and by extension his philosophy is evidentin Neel’s portraits of women artists during the late 1930s and 1940s. InDorothy Koppleman (c. 1940) and Bessie Boris (1947, ƒg. 15), the harsh, nocturnalchiaroscuro that obliterates half of the sitter’s face creates a Jungian connectionbetween woman-night-moon similar to that found in Graham’s paintingsfrom the 1920s (Head of Woman, 1926, ƒg. 173). Perhaps Neel saw inGraham’s work the Jungian concept of the two aspects of the mother-image:fertile, protective, and benign, or devouring, seductive, and poisonous, “theloving and the terrible mother.” 17 Seen in the context of the theory and imagesavailable to her in 1942, Neel’s Subconscious presents an interpretation of theMother Archetype, with the two halves of the face, the son/sun and mother/crescent-moon, pointing to the intimate psychological relation betweenmother and son, female and male.Subconscious is exceptional in critiquing via surrealism modern society’sideological investment in the role of the mother. In the 1940s, the origin fromwhich psychoanalysis set out was the mother, a ƒgure who was never visiblebut was present only as the cause, the source of the neuroses of her offspring.As Barbara Ehrenreich points out in For Her Own Good, Freudian theory hadspawned the concept of the “libidinal” mother dominant in these years; “Notonly would she naturally fulƒll her child’s needs, but she would ƒnd her ownfulƒllment only in meeting the needs of the child.” 18 In a radical reversal ofthe causal relationships established in the “science” of psychoanalysis, Neelmakes the subject of her painting not the effect of the mother on the child, butthe effect of the child on the mother. The exclusiveness of the child’s demands,and the woman’s consequent lack of autonomy, are imaged in terms ofa monstrous Siamese twin. The juxtaposition of her crescent proƒle and hiscircular face, beyond its evocation of the Jungian female to male relation, initiatesthe process of separation. That such a fall into individuated selfhood is aprecarious one is suggested by the jutting club of Sam’s chin, which hoversabove the child’s head, waiting to strike. Isolated and trapped on all sides bytotemic male ƒgures that ring the perimeter like jagged coral reefs, the motherchilddiad is in a visibly vulnerable position. Neel’s hallucinatory vision bringsto the surface the fear and exhaustion, as well as the potential for psychic collapse,that can result when a mother is a primary caretaker.In its depiction of the appalling burden of motherhood, Subconscious again