title: Images of trauma: pain, recognition, and disavowal in the works of Frida Kahlo and Francis Bacon.
abstract: The role of art in the encounter with trauma and destructiveness is comparatively studied in the works of Frida Kahlo and Francis Bacon as examples of a direct and a more indirect way of dealing with such experiences. A creative product may function intrapsychically as a kind of messenger between dissociated self-states and consciousness, and it may also serve as a witnessing presence in a self-supporting and self-constituting way. Artistic work may thus be used by the artist for an expressive as well as for a protective purpose, as a means of sympathetic participation in painful experience, or as a medium for a view from the outside. The act itself of finding and of making expressive forms at the time of traumatic experience is a remarkable assertion of the human capability to synthesize and to counteract fragmenting dissociative processes.
authors.affiliation: College of Physicians and Surgeons, Columbia University, USA.
authors.forename: Joerg
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Bose
mesh_terms: D001154:Art / Q000266:history*; D005197:Famous Persons; D049673:History, 20th Century; D006801:Humans; D007494:Ireland; D008800:Mexico; D010146:Pain / Q000523:psychology*; D011573:Psychoanalytic Interpretation