In his biography of the English child psychoanalyst D.W. Winnicott, Brett Kahr writes of a similar incident, in this case illustrating symbolic destructiveness and “repair” of a doll in a degree that eluded D. H. Lawrence. Winnicott, an analyst of genius who was something of an artist, championed the child’s developmental use of a “transitional object”, a blanket or a soft toy, and he invented the therapeutic “Squiggle Game”. Winnicott theorized that, subsequent to the mother’s breast, the use of such objects prepared for later creativity. Kahr writes: “Young Winnicott had a transitional object—a special possession of childhood: a doll called “Lily”, which had belonged previously to Kathleen, the younger of his two sisters. Violet and Kathleen also owned another doll, named “Rosie”, and at the age of three years Donald smashed Rosie’s nose with a croquet mallet, possibly in a symbolically rivalrous attack on one or both of his sisters. Frederick Winnicott [their father] used a number of lighted matches to warm up the doll’s wax nose, and he succeeded in remodeling the face. This episode seems to have left a profound impression on Donald providing him with an experience of being aggressive without ultimately being destructive..” 41 Winnicott is said to have learned deeply from this episode about the inevitability of aggression and the value of surviving it safely, with the possibility of “repair” of damage to symbolic objects always at hand. The perpetrator of such aggression needed to understand its origin, seeing sacrifice, such as that of the doll, as a function of misaligned relationships and not as a simple misdemeanor. Winnicott came to the idea of “play” as creative, and indeed “reparative” through this and other episodes from his own childhood.
Such insight appears never to have come to Bellmer, who was too narcis-sistically locked in to his created objects to see their origin in his own compromised childhood. As far as is known, Bellmer never had a personal analysis (though, like many Surrealists, he was aware of Freudian concepts and terminology). Nor, as noted, did Bellmer think of himself as a writer driven by the power of narrative into explorations of sexual attraction, avoidance and punitive reprisals against women. Bellmer never fictionalized his romantic hopes and misfortunes, typically regressing to pornography when the stresses of life threatened to overwhelm him. When he wrote the short autobiographical essays, it was almost as much to obscure and mystify his feelings than to bring them out clearly for examination to decide what they meant.
Bellmer left a bizarre legacy of distorted and dismembered female imagery that needs to be referred to its psychological origin to be understood. He regarded the dolls as “the remedy, the compensation for a certain impossibility of living”, in other words as potentially reparative objects; but this they could not be.42 By themselves the dolls, and subsequent erotic images, are disturbingly symptomatic and confusing, if not repellant, to many viewers. Art historians accurately place Bellmer’s erotic and misogynistic imagery in its context of influences, citing artists from Matthias Grunewald to Gustav Klimt and Oskar Kokoschka, along with Offenbach, Freud, the Surrealists and others.43 The horrific social history of Nazi Germany is rightly given as the larger context for Bellmer’s art, but without a convincing personal psychology his imagery makes little sense.
While admittedly early developmental information for Bellmer is less than we would wish, it is enough to sketch a psychopathology of abuse-caused trauma that indicates reasons for the limits of his creativity. By studying his first attachments, the constraints of his parenting by an absent, then threateningly dominant father and a passive, feminizing mother, the urgency and direction of his creativity begins to emerge. (Had Bellmer not had a brother with whom to scheme against the father, things would surely have been worse for him.) That Bellmer’s rebel self often functioned at the limits of adaptive capacity should be clear. With urgent over-stimulated sexuality, he was left with little latitude for using the liberating discoveries of earlier European and other art—nature, landscape and spirituality from world religions. The capacity of earlier art and literature to free imagination was lost on Bellmer who, among the first acolytes of technology, implemented his obsessions as an engineer might design a structure. It is no accident that much of his writing effort went into the technicalities of the “ball joint”, thus deflecting from the more demanding psychological conflict from which he suffered. Had he been an actual patient of Freud’s, he might have become another celebrated “Little Hans” or “Wolfman”. His imagery would have been converted into a coherent “story”, leaving fewer disturbing artifacts of the unconscious.
Bellmer’s dolls end up static, not dynamic in an emergent discovery of feelings and wishes. The eroticism, leading to pornography, of his later astonishingly accomplished drawings and paintings is also static. There are no evident stages in a pilgrimage of self-understanding. Obsessional fetishism, ringing the changes on a single theme, stifles itself in obsessive repetition, ending in futility and despair. Bellmer’s art which had set out to “triumph over trauma” triumphed over nothing, albeit showing remarkable variations on the theme of exhibiting avoidant anxiety about women. If his production improved mood control, helping to avert depression, it was through pride in technical mastery of which Bellmer could be confident. He never met a technical challenge that could not be surmounted. Yet, his art does not lead in a productive new direction in understanding relationships, and his followers have been few. Bellmer remains a creative artist manque, whose urge to repair psychological deficits should be honored while regretting the fatal stoppages of creative imagination. It may be unkind to call his art a dead end, a pathological cul-de-sac, but that seems justified when the promise of insight from doll-play was so great.
To speculate, what might Bellmer have done to escape his imaginative impasse, to free up imagination for other possibilities? Of course every artist benefits from exposure to the historical art in his own tradition and in that of other cultures, along with their religions and literatures. But specifically Bellmer’s own German culture offered examples of creative “play” (in the sense that Winnicott later spoke of it) freeing up, and enriching fantasy, so that it did not become entrapped in solipsism. A key example is Hermann Hesse’s novel Steppenwolf (1927) in which the protagonist Harry Haller is, at least partially, freed from entrapment to punitiveness towards women by undergoing a series of releasing fantasy exercises in a magic theatre. Following the teachings of C. G. Jung, Hesse accepted art as therapy, using “active imagination”, which he successfully pursued in highly acclaimed fictions and essays.