To understand the link between the mind and the work produced we need to be able to understand the intense complexity of the mind and the rationale behind its workings.
The term ‘frame of reference’ is defined as ‘… a complex set of assumptions and attitudes which we use to filter perceptions to create meaning. The frame can include beliefs, schemas, preferences, values, culture and other ways in which we bias our understanding and judgement’.
There is a quote by Oscar Wilde that I happen to truly believe on which is egging on my research,
‘Every portrait that is painted with feeling is a portrait of the artist, not the sitter. The sitter is merely an accident; the occasion… it is rather the painting who, on the canvas, reveals himself’
– Oscar Wilde
The painting that I will be analyzing in this paper which spurs on my research for the analysis of the link between the mind and the ‘art’ produced is one by one of our own Iqbal Hussain who is called the ‘Rembrandt’ of Pakistan. His work is famous internationally not just because of the quality of his work but more importantly the content. He was born in an old haveli which is right opposite to the Badshahi Mosque, in the notorious Shahi Mohalla. The haveli that used to run as a brothel is now currently functioning as one of the top restaurants in Lahore called Coo Coo’s Den. This is the place which was the infamous Heera Mandi (Diamond Market) was situated. The the place became run down after partition and the people living in Heera Mandi were dying of starvation. They turned to prostitution to make a living and feed their families. Iqbal Hussain’s own mother was a sex worker and after Iqbal started earning as a painter he took care not just of his own family but the entire neighborhood. Iqbal never knew who his father was. So ever since he was a kid whenever he used to fill out forms for school or official purposes he always used to get frustrated when it came down to details about his father. He had a very tough childhood because he was a very sickly child and more importantly he was a boy. When a boy is born into the family of a prostitute the family usually is very sad because the boy cannot continue their line of work. If a girl is born, the family rejoices. His mother only recently passed away on April 2009. The painting is titled ‘The Mother’. Iqbal’s own mother was a very strong
woman. She supported him in everything he endeavored and even when he got into
National School of Arts. Probably because it was the arts which he got into, Iqbal’s own
mother used to practice singing every morning from four onwards. He usually paints the women around him sex workers; he views himself as their only voice in the world. His paintings are not defiant or unrealistic. He doesn’t make them thinner or prettier or more glamorous. He paints what he sees and what he experienced- life in the red light district. The painting contains a woman and four children; she looks like the strong willed type because of her shoulders. You cannot see her face. The children’s faces are also much unfocused and you cannot make out their sexes. He is emphasizing on the weightage of the outcome of the children’s genders when they are born. To understand the painting we need to understand Iqbal the child first. In his life the central parental figure was his mother sowe understand how heavily he feels about having a mother figure in his life. The painting looks like a dream, the strokes are not defiant and they aren’t aggressive either. The painter looks like he took his own sweet time to make it, his strokes are leisurely strokes. The four children, the two on the right are looking right at you and the two on the let are looking at opposite directions. But the children look kind of woebegone, like lost souls. The title of Marjorie Hussain’s book on Iqbal Hussain seems befitting at this point ‘The Painter of Imprisoned Souls’
His painting style resembles Rembrandt. The painting was a gift to Mr Afzaal Ahmed Sheikh and there was an inscription left for him at the back by Mr Hussain. It said,
‘A powerful mother in gold, red on black chair. Loyal to her kids and courageous to tackle the children, safe from the double standards of society’
Personally,I find the inscription to be very true. Children need strong protective parents that are loyal and true to their children. But parents are a key word in that sentence. Why has he not shown a father in the painting? Does he not hold any importance to fathers or father figures? Or is it because of the fact that he never knew a father and feels like not having a father contributed to him becoming the man and painter that he is today. Mothers that nurture their children and protects them from the dangers’ the double standards of society’.
And this statement and the painting show us just exactly how much love and importance had for his mother. But if I view this psychologically I wonder if Iqbal had an Oedipuscomplex all signs seem to be leading to it being the case. In the book by Marjorie Hussain he tells us exactly how protective he was of his mother and sister ( from a psychological standpoint his sister being the youthful version of his mother). He was very frustrated and ‘lost’ so to say, his painting clearly speak out and also he recalls himself as a ‘gangster’ figure till the time he was in university. Always carrying a knife with himself in his early days and then moving onto carrying a gun to in university until his professor who in time came to be a father figure stopped him from doing so. The background and the color of the mother’s clothes both are red; the shade of red of the background is a much darker color than the woman’s clothes. And looking at the children and then the background gives a sort of sinister feeling. Maybe the artist has something that he’s hiding from his past, an event that he saw played out right in front of him. He might or might not be aware of viewing the incident. He might be in denial and his subconscious takes it out into his paintings without him even realizing it. Birthing also comes to mind when I’m looking at the painting.I would think Freud would be very interested in psycho analyzing Mr Hussain. He proves himself to be quite a character in that way. But another point comes to mind when looking at the mother and the children. The Mother’s clothes are not sheer and one can barely
make out her figure. He left that part vague, again. He is maybe trying to uphold the sanctity of the mother figure? He clearly shows feeling that he does not want the mother or his mother to be viewed as a sexual object by other people there are so many questions that can asked with the painting.
To try and understand the workings of the mind from a psychological standpoint we need to look at the theories of two men Carl Jung and Sigmund Freud who were considered pioneers in psychology.
Sigmund Freud (6 May 1856 – 23 September 1939) is famously considered to be the father of psychoanalysis. An Austrian neurologist, he attended the University of Vienna in 1881 where he studied medicine.
Carl Jung (26 July 1875 – 6 June 1961) was a psychologist and psychotherapist who was born in Kesswil, Thurgau, Switzerland and is known for being the founder of analytical psychology and coming up with the idea of the ‘collective unconscious’, Jung claims that he has ‘chosen the term “collective’ because this part of the unconscious is not individual but universal..’.
Psychotherapy is a counseling therapy in which the patient receives aid by talking about their lives, ( this includes their past till the current present), clinical methods however are more medical in nature e.g. medicines and surgery.
Jung was Freud’s student but he disagreed with Freud’s theories and some of his ideas. He gave Freud credit on the identifying of one archetype which was the mother archetype. According to Jung, archetypes are highly developed elements of the collective unconscious and these elements manifest in people’s decision making, life choices and work produced. Specifically, artists, I believe and my research is going trying to come to a basic understanding of how it happens. The reason that I will not be counting all of Freud’s theories is because after reading both Jung and Freud, some of Freud’s theories seem a bit far fetched. Because of the collection of data. Though he did ‘identify’ the Mother Archetype, the boy that he based his entire theory on, Little Hans, was a boy who Freud had never met. The case of little Hans was narrated by the father to Freud, upon whose advice the father would act upon. The boy ‘Little Hans’ discussed in Freud’s 1909 case study ‘Analysis of a Phobia in a Five Year old Boy’ is said to be Herbert Graf (1903-1973), an Austrian- American opera producer, the son of Max Graf (1873-1958) Austrian author, critic musicologist and a member of Freud’s inner circle. The fact that Max Graf acted as the analyst to the boy via Freud rumored to have caused tension between the father and son. There is the other fact that because Freud himself had no contact with the boy himself, it goes completely against the entire concept of psychoanalysis. In E. A. Bennet in his book airs Jung’s opinion very clearly stating,
‘ ..Yesterday C. G. Jung spoke of the Oedipus complex, that Freud had misunderstood it. Oedipus did not know who it was when he killed his father; he was just a man he met. This whole dogma was built on a misunderstanding’
Carl Jung however gave Freud the credit however for identifying an archetype which was the mother archetype but he still felt that his views on the matter were too sexualized.
‘Freud was bound up in his theory, it was protective; everything must be reduced to something derogatory, then you were in a superior position. So with spirituality- to Freud it was nothing but sexuality. For him everything could be explained.
He asked Jung to promise; “Promise me that you will support the dogma of sexuality. If we have no dogma, then the black flood of occultism will sweep in and swallow us”.
On the point of C. G. Jung shoots down Freud on his inability to grasp the true meaning of the unconscious on the basis of,
‘ ..Even with Freud, who makes the unconscious- at least metaphorically- take the stage as the acting subject, it is really nothing but the gathering place of forgotten and repressed contents, and has a functional significance thanks only to these. For Freud, accordingly the unconscious is of an exclusively personal nature, although he was aware of its archaic and mythological thought-forms’
If we focused on the theories of Freud that are not discounted we can look at divisioning of the mind which is the driving force of every man’s frame of reference.
According to Freud, the driving forces of a person include the id, the ego and the superego.
‘The Id is the only component of the personality that is present right from birth. It works at the unconsciousness level and drive’s people’s pleasures and urges. The id demands immediate fulfillment of wants or needs regardless of what the situation is. Think of it as the selfish component’.
‘The ego develops from the id and works at all levels of consciousness. It works with the reality principle and acts according to situations. The ego controls the impulses created by the id and considers whether the situation is appropriate for the demand to meet or not’.
‘The superego, also present at all levels of consciousness, is the third component of a personality, and starts to develop by age 5. Superego holds the aspects of morality and conscience. It keeps check on the right and wrong as governed by the society or parents’.
This suggests that our superego is our metaphorical conscience, the id is the reason for our hedonistic tendencies and our ego is the one that is aware and fully functioning with our consciousness.
In addition to this divisioning that seeks to explain our personality and the driving forces behind it we can also take inspiration from the neurological aspect of the divisioning of our brain.
Each part of the brain controls different functioning and it is divided into two hemispheres, the right hemisphere and the left hemisphere.
The right side of the brain has particular functions such as design copy and shape recognition (such as finding a hidden object in a picture).
The right side of the brain and the left side of the brain both work in partnership with each other. They send signals to each other as a kind of inter-neural communication and help us make decisions accordingly.
‘The left side is detail oriented, seeing the smallest articles and pieces of the puzzle first, then assembling them into a bigger picture’.
According to Martin Engel in his paper titled ‘Art and the Mind’,
‘The common notion that the arts grow out of the soul or the heart, while mathematics is the business of the mind is a fallacious duality’
I agree with his opinion because the left and the right hemisphere work in conjunction with each other, however some people have a more developed right side as compared to the left side and vice versa. Martin Engel also makes the point on how artistic works are in fact works and products of the mind and personally, I feel that it is true and that they are the visual manifestations of our id, superego and ego all merged into one.
‘It is the process of cognition and then recognition, presentation and then representation that affords the artist the channels from inner mental state to external symbolic, the making of meaningful compositions’.
According to Carl Jung there are different types of universal archetypes that every person follows and those archetypes have archaic and primordial backgrounds attached to it, that come under the fairytale and myth category. For this I suppose he was catering to the idea that behind every myth, story and folklore there is an aspects of strong and innate human emotion that is attached to the lore, which is why he came to that conclusion in the first place. According to Jung,
‘A more or less superficial layer of the unconscious is undoubtedly personal. I call it the personal unconscious. But this personal unconscious rests upon a deeper layer which does not derive from personal experience but is inborn’
Basing the idea of the fact that these archetypes are most certainly inborn and innate somehow. The list of archetypes that people fall under according to Jung are as follows, The Innocent, The Warrior, The Seeker, The Caregiver, The Lover, The Destroyer, The Creator, The Ruler, The Magician, The Magician, The Sage and The Fool or Jester. Given the information at hand and from personal experience I have the idea that some things are most definitely innate, according to Jung that thought it is for sure because why else would they repetitively spring up in the minds of thousands of others over the course of human evolution. But then again certain factors in decision making and their artistic work produced are due to the kind of frame of reference they have dealt with which evolves and ages with more time they go through with.
The Innocent:
Within each of us, the Innocent is the spontaneous, trusting child that, while a bit dependent, has the optimism to take the journey. The Innocent, fearing abandonment, seeks safety. Their greatest strength is the trust and optimism that endears them to others and so gain help and support on their quest.Their main danger is that they may be blind to their obvious weaknesses or perhaps deny them. They can also become dependent on others to fulfill their heroic tasks.
The Orphan:
The Orphan understands that everyone matters, just as they are. Down-home and unpretentious, it reveals a deep structure influenced by the wounded or orphaned child that expects very little from life, but that teaches us with empathy, realism, and street smarts. The Orphan, fearing exploitation, seeks to regain the comfort of the womb and neonatal safety in the arms of loving parents. To fulfill their quest they must go through the agonies of the developmental stages they have missed. Their strength is the interdependence and pragmatic realism that they had to learn at an early age. A hazard is that they will fall into the victim mentality and so never achieve a heroic position.
The Warrior:
When everything seems lost the Warrior rides over the hill and saves the day. Tough and courageous, this archetype helps us set and achieve goals, overcome obstacles, and persist in difficult times, although it also tends to see others as enemies and to think in either/or terms. The Warrior is relatively simple in their thought patterns, seeking simply to win whatever confronts them, including the dragons that live inside the mind and their underlying fear of weakness.Their challenge is to bring meaning to what they do, perhaps choosing their battles wisely, which they do using courage and the warrior's discipline.
The Caregiver is an altruist, moved by compassion, generosity, and selflessness to help others. Although prone to martyrdom and enabling behaviors, the inner Caregiver helps us raise our children, aid those in need, and build structures to sustain life and health. Caregivers first seek to help others, which they do with compassion and generosity. A risk they take is that in their pursuit to help others they may end up being harmed themselves. They dislike selfishness, especially in themselves, and fear what it might make them.
The Seeker:
The Seeker leaves the known to discover and explore the unknown. This inner rugged individual braves loneliness and isolation to seek out new paths. Often oppositional, this iconoclastic archetype helps us discover our uniqueness,our perspectives, and our callings. Seekers are looking for something that will improve their life in some way, but in doing so may not realize that they have much already inside themselves. They embrace learning and are ambitious in their quest and often avoid the encumbrance of support from others. Needing to 'do it themselves', they keep moving until they find their goal (and usually their true self too.
The Lover:
The Lover archetype governs all kinds of love from parental love, to friendship, to spiritual love but we know it best in romance. Although it can bring all sorts of heartache and drama, it helps us experience pleasure, achieve intimacy,make commitments, and follow our bliss. The Lover seeks the bliss of true love and the syzygy of the divine couple. They often show the passion that they seek in a relationship in their energy and commitment to gaining the reciprocal love of another. They fear both being alone and losing the love that they have gained, driving them to constantly sustain their love relationships.
The Destroyer:
The Destroyer embodies repressed rage about structures that no longer serve life even when these structures stillare supported by society or by our conscious choices. Although this archetype can be ruthless, it weeds the garden in ways that allow for new growth. The Destroyer is a paradoxical character whose destructiveness reflects the death drive and an inner fear of annihilation. As a fighter, they are thus careless of their own safety and may put others in danger too. Their quest is to change, to let go of their anger or whatever force drives them and return to balance, finding the life drive that will sustain them. Living on the cusp of life and death, they are often surprisingly humble.
The Creator:
The Creator archetype fosters all imaginative endeavors, from the highest art to the smallest innovation in lifestyle or work. Adverse to stasis, it can cause us to overload our lives with constant new projects; yet, properly channeled,it helps us express ourselves in beautiful ways. Creators, fearing that all is an illusion, seek to prove reality outside of their minds. A critical part of their quest is in finding and accepting themselves, discovering their true identity in relation to the external world.
The Ruler:
The Ruler archetype inspires us to take responsibility for our own lives, in our fields of endeavor, and in the society at large. If he/she overcomes the temptation to dominate others, the developed Ruler creates environments that invite in the gifts and perspectives of all concerned. The Ruler's quest is to create order and structure and hence an effective society in which the subjects of the Ruler can live productive and relatively happy lives. This is not necessarily an easy task, as order and chaos are not far apart, and the Ruler has to commit him or herself fully to the task. The buck stops with them and they must thus be wholly responsible — for which they need ultimate authority.
The Magician:
The Magician archetype searches out the fundamental laws of science and/or metaphysics to understand how to transform situations, influence people, and make visions into realities. If the Magician can overcome the temptation to use power manipulatively, it galvanizes energies for good. The Magician's quest is not to 'do magic' but to transform or change something or someone in some way. The Magician has significant power and as such may be feared. They may also fear themselves and their potential to do harm. Perhaps their ultimate goal is to transform themselves, achieving a higher plane of existence.
The Sage:
The Sage archetype seeks the truths that will set us free. Especially if the Sage overcomes the temptation of dogma, it can help us become wise, to see the world and ourselves objectively, and to course-correct based on objective analyses of the results of our actions and choices. The Sage is a seeker after truth and enlightenment and journeys far in search of the next golden nugget of knowledge. The danger for the sage and their deep fear is that their hard-won wisdom is built on the sand of falsehood. Their best hope is that they play from a position of objective honesty and learn to see with a clarity that knows truth and untruth.
The Fool/Jester:
The Fool/Jester archetype urges us to enjoy the process of our lives. Although the Fool/Jester can be prone to laziness and dissipation, the positive Fool/Jester invites us all out to play–showing us how to turn our work, our interactions with others, and even the most mundane tasks into FUN. The goal of the Fool/Jester is perhaps the wisest goal of all, which is just to enjoy life as it is, with all its paradoxes and dilemmas. What causes most dread in the Fool/Jester is a lack of stimulation and being 'not alive'. They must seek to 'be', perhaps as the Sage, but may not understand this.
‘On the whole modern psychology has not viewed Jung’s theory of archetypes kindly. Ernest Jones (Freud’s
biographer) tells that Jung “descended into a pseudo-philosophy out of which he never emerged” and to many his ideas look more like New Age mystical speculation than a scientific contribution to psychology’.
He also came up with the term ‘collective unconscious’ he explain in his essay titled "The Significance of Constitution and Heredity in Psychology" (November 1929),
‘..And the essential thing, psychologically, is that in dreams, fantasies, and other exceptional states of mind the most far-fetched mythological motifs and symbols can appear autochthonously at any time, often, apparently, as the result of particular influences, traditions, and excitations working on the individual, but more often without any sign of them. These "primordial images" or "archetypes," as I have called them, belong to the basic stock of the unconscious psyche and cannot be explained as personal acquisitions. Together they make up that psychic stratum which has been called the collective unconscious’.
I won’t be too quick to throw out Freud’s personality divisioning, but because of the fact that Jung is making sense and certain archetypes do naturally keep cropping up throughout history they will have some level of truth in them.
‘The archetype is essentially an unconscious content that is altered by becoming conscious and by being perceived, and it takes its color from the individual consciousness in which it happens to appear’.