by Rebecca Shapiro, Psy.D.

The San Francisco-based artist John Chiara takes photographs with a 50”-by-80” camera so large he hauls it on a flatbed, entering it like a room to set up sheets of direct-to-print photographic paper before exiting through a chute to prevent light from spoiling his exposure. A characteristic series, Treasure Island Photo Documentation Project (2022), features sepia-toned images of the Bay Bridge behind an iridescent bay so luminous as to be molten, more gold than water. The effects Chiara achieves are a testament to the physicality of his process, highlighted in the scale of his setup and use of his hands to manipulate light as it penetrates the lens during exposures that sometimes last as long as thirty minutes. Chiara makes photographs that comment on the world, but beyond representation, his process encourages us, momentarily, to peer inside the black box housing the interface between meaning and materiality. Chiara’s work generates a product but it is in the play of forces determining the product’s final form that his work’s true substance lies, that is, the ceaseless becoming-present of representation through embodiment.

Fashioning a “camera obscura…of receptivity” to dyadic (“group-of-two”) processes in analysis, Giuseppe Civitarese (2021) similarly articulates the substance of therapy as a kind of fleshly inter-corporeality uniting the group in the work of symbolization. Before understanding, words function materially as proto-representational connective tissue that shapes the coming-to-presence of the analyzing situation.

Yet psychoanalysis, by and large, is avowedly hermeneutic. Analysis orients toward understanding. Considering its modus operandi thus, one might claim that symbolization implies an end, a point at which meaning exhausts itself. A session finishes, maybe an analysis. What remains is a beyond-the-therapeutic-encounter where, in describing therapy’s product (i.e., what happened), language nonetheless shrinks: the telling is never self-identical with experience. Walter Benjamin (2006) writes: “Whereas content and language form a certain unity in the original, like a fruit and its skin, the language of the translation envelops its content like a royal robe with ample folds. For [translation] signifies a more exalted language than its own,” a “pure language” in which, we might say, proto-representational expression supersedes symbolic content. Translation reveals this “disjunction,” in doing so proving itself impossible. The issue is never so clear as with process notes, that peculiar autobiography, in which “the symbolic becomes literally immediate: essential danger for the life of the subject: to write on oneself…is…a simple idea: simple,” Barthes writes, “as the idea of suicide” (1975/1977). A conundrum, then, for case presentations, to erase/efface the presenter in the act of translation, carving a hollow in the given to reveal the messianism invoked in any act of representation.

Such is the tension: Symbolization orients toward Truth but enacts its own destruction. What remains, however, is our “exalted language,” the word as material inter-corporeality disclosing possibility.

In the final analysis, the word is flesh, and, as in Chiara’s photographs, in the alchemical gold burning along the bay’s horizon, the future recedes as we re-approach the beginning.