Tell me / 2007

series of 6 photos 73 x 85 cm (c-prints in frame)

An impulse for making this series came from Lacan’s notion that communication is a failure – if people understood each other perfectly they wouldn’t need any words. On the other hand, verbalization has been one of the fundamental issues of psychoanalysis. As put by the Joseph Breuer’s patient Anna O. – the talking cure.

In his theory of four discourses Lacan introduces communication schemas from which in my opinion the most interesting appears to be the Hysterics discourse. In this case, Hysteric is not necessarily a pathological subject but someone who’ s challenging the Knowledge (Lacan himself could be understood as a hysteric as well). Knowledge, language and symbolic order therefore is represented by the Master. The relationship between Hysterics and Master can just as well be interpreted as a relationship between child and parent, student and professor, citizen and police etc. Hysteric turns to the Master asking: “Tell me who I am, tell me what I desire.”

This work is a small study of my childhood relationship through the perspective of Hysterics – Master schema. There are portraits of my mother and both grandmothers as well as images that comment on different key concepts of psychoanalysis.