Abstract
For artists and spiritualists alike, a scribble might be defined as ‘a line let loose’ and for them, bypass the usual inhibitors and allow for automatic writing, improvised, spontaneous invention. This chapter explores the psychoanalytic (post Freudian) perspective of D. W. Winnicott, who developed a ‘squiggle’ technique for his work with children. I engage with how scribble acts as a window into the unconscious, in relation to how we might represent those ‘inner things’ or inarticulate structures’ that lie beneath the surface, refracting with artists, teachers and thinkers’ spiritual and metacognitive practices, the automatic drawing of the Surrealists, and how scribble speaks through unconscious action. These are the oblique, liquid states of psychic content expressed in scribble for this chapter. By ‘psyche’, I mean the practices of fantasy and mind, unconscious, subconscious or conscious, and by ‘spiritual scribble’ I mean to explore scribbles operating on a mystical, metaphysical level, as a certain channelling of unconscious thought.
I am the change that I wanna see
Cos I’m a spiritual revolutionary
Spiritual Revolutionary . Tallis, Karim, Jose & Jomei, Badasht album Vol. III
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Notes
- 1.
Over the 1940s, British psychoanalysis was divided into three groups: Freudians, Kleinians and Independents (e.g. Winnicott, Michael Balint, John Bowlby, Masud Khan, Marion Milner and Margaret Little, who stressed the creative role of the patient during therapy for making their own ‘independent discovery’).
- 2.
British classic children’s writer Joyce Lankaster Brisley’s book Bunchy and the Scribble Family (1937) pictures a little girl—Bunchy, who has lost her own parents- pretending to write (you might have called it scribbling” the author tells the child reader), then draw a house and parents, who come to life but then begin to worry about whether their (imaginary) children are lost. As Kathryn M. Walls’ study points out, Brisley recognises that playthings materialise but cannot satisfy the child’s emotional needs and often ‘take a disturbing turn, thus pre-empting Winnicott’s Squiggle technique’ (Wall, 2022).
- 3.
A therapist offers emotional ‘holding’ by being present, offering a protective, enabling space.
- 4.
Therapy can offer a ‘second present’ by returning a patient to a (past) trauma whilst undergoing therapy, re-examining it with the help of the therapist and establishing a present understanding.
- 5.
Following Winnicott’s Squiggle practice, the therapist Michael Günter (2007) stresses that showing the scribbles to parents or persons other than the therapist requires enormous trust, plus an environment of adult/parental maturity and support that the child may not presently be enjoying.
- 6.
Transference is the act of subconsciously associating a present person (or moment in the present) with a past one (typically, the therapist, who then metaphorically, ‘stands for’ the memory).
- 7.
Syncretic thought eclectically and inclusively combines many different beliefs and approaches, often into one underlying unity.
- 8.
Born in Austria, Ehrenzweig (1908–1966) fled to Britain immediately after the Anschluss with Germany in 1938, but was interned by the British authorities as an “enemy alien” and transported to Australia in 1940. He (along with all the other Jewish internees) was released in 1942, when (somewhat amazingly) he returned to London, and devoted the rest of his life there to teaching and writing about art.
- 9.
Blavatsky’s Theosophy (a ‘system’, rather than religion) argues that creation is a geometrical progression beginning with a single absolute point, tied to planetary and wider cosmic evolution.
- 10.
Steiner’s Anthroposophy, embracing Christianity and natural science, argues for the existence of an objective, understandable spiritual world, accessible to human experience.
- 11.
Neue Künstlervereinigung München (N.K.V.M.) [Munich New Association of Artists] or the Munich Group formed in 1909 around Kandinsky, and is considered a forerunner for modernist art.
- 12.
Wiping an ink-engraved plate with a cloth to soften line definition.
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de Rijke, V. (2023). Spiritual Scribble. In: The Untimely Art of Scribble. Landscapes: the Arts, Aesthetics, and Education, vol 34. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-99-2146-1_4
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