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In his psychoanalytic interpretation of these extraordinary works, Blum addresses the motives of the Paleolithic artists, the meanings of their art, and the relationship of the art and the artists to the cave. From a psychoanalytic perspective, the cave is symbolic representation of the womb, the birth canal, and the primal cavity of self-object relationship . Art was created in identification with pregnancy and birth; art endured as reassurance against permanent darkness and death. Entering and leaving the cave could also represent coitus but, and on a deeper level, attachment and separation. The cave had magical and developmental significance of a transitional space between internal and external, fantasy and reality, death and rebirth. The painted cave might also have represented a cephalic container with illuminated imagery suggestive of dreaming sleep. Opposing the Darwinian view of human ‘art instinct’ (Dutton 2009), Blum credits the intrinsic human capacity for imagination, fantasy, pretend play, and flexible adaptation to varying life situations, considerably extending animal instinct or drive. Functional pleasure in being able to represent external and internal images, to manipulate symbols, to express ideas and emotions, to create novelty, and to recreate what is absent or has had only a mental existence may well have been an underlying contribution to the origin of art. Human concern with birth and death, attachment, separation and object loss, transitional space, affectionate and aggressive relationships, intrapsychic conflict, and mastery of trauma all seem to be powerful determinants of, and represented in, art. VIII. Bb. Birth of the Subject in Literary Arts Following and expanding on Richard D. Chessick (2001)’s designation of Dante Alighieri’s Divine Comedy as ‘psychoanalysis of the middle ages’, Eva Papiasvili (2020) offers a psychoanalytic view of the Comedy’s broad representational range. Among others, she credits Dante Alighieri’s ‘terzine’ a means of poetically representing the drive : “In a terzine, the first and third lines rhyme while the second line rhymes with the first and third lines of the next terzine (ABA, BCB, CDC ...), creating a sense of endless advance, each stanza being connected to the next by a new unexpected element. Dante’s discovery consists of having created a means of representing the impulse or drive of incredible vivacity, which sets in motion and drives the plot without ever falling into monotony” (Papiasvili 2020, p. 41). In the unprecedented unity of form and content, the means of representation change throughout the poem. An example is the language of raw corporeality of Dante’s Inferno, which exists as if autonomously, as if not created by the poet’s imagination, possibly the representation of the internally alien aspect of the deepest layers of the not repressed structural unconscious, the id. Additionally, in two places of the Inferno, at the edge of psychic disintegration, Dante uniquely represents a breakdown of symbolic function through untranslatable babble, walking to the edge of the fragmentation of the representational apparatus (words becoming things), without descending into the asymbolic world of psychosis. Papiasvili notes that in such situations, as in many situations throughout the Inferno, it is the firm yet calming and unobtrusive presence of Virgil, who names the affect and interprets its meaning, that makes the difference. Over 650 years later, this point, undertheorized by Freud,
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