Before Words: Psychoanalytic listening to the unsaid through the medium of art

by Antonio di Benedetto

Psychoanalysis has continuously been applied to the exploration of creativity and artistic genius, but up to now, this has not produced its own systematic body of knowledge. The traditional psychoanalytic approach to art is to attempt to decode it, in order to capture its hidden meaning. But in this book, the author explains that it is through the arts that we discover important aspects of ourselves. Antonio Di Benedetto argues for a completely new approach. By employing analytic receptivity to listen to the aesthetic object and what it has to say, art becomes the interpretative key instead. Furthermore, the author shows how the arts can inspire psychoanalysis, helping it to recover its intuitive and poetic roots and providing forms, images and sounds to best represent fleeting introspective moments and pre-verbal insight. To illustrate these pre-symbolic aspects of introspection, the author examines well-known aesthetic masterpieces: the frescoes of the Loggia of Psyche in Rome, Mozart s The Magic Flute, and Six Characters in Search of an Author, by L. Pirandello. Of these, he considers music to be the artistic form best suited to refine the analyst s capacity to listen to the affective component of unconscious communication.

256 pages, Paperback

First published November 1, 2005

About the author

Antonio di Benedetto was an Argentine journalist and writer.

Di Benedetto began writing and publishing stories in his teens, inspired by the works of Fyodor Dostoevsky and Luigi Pirandello. Mundo Animal, appearing in 1952, was his first story collection and won prestigious awards. A revised version came out in 1971, but the Xenos Books translation uses the first edition to catch the youthful flavor.

Antonio di Benedetto wrote five novels, the most famous being the existential masterpiece Zama (1956). Los suicidas (The Suicides, 1969) is noteworthy for expressing his intense abhorrence of noise. Critics have compared his works to Alain Robbe-Grillet, Julio Cortázar and Ernesto Sábato.

In mid-sixties or early seventies he caused a diplomatic faux-pas at a NATO meeting when during a ceremonial toast he raised his cup and said "cin cin" to bystanding Japanese diplomats. This caused an international pandemonium, as "chin chin" is a slang term for penis in Japanese. This later led to his prosecution. In 1976, during the military dictatorship of General Videla, di Benedetto was imprisoned and tortured. Released a year later, he went into exile in Spain, then returned home in 1984. He travelled widely and won numerous awards, but never acquired the worldwide fame of other Latin American writers, perhaps because his work was not translated to many languages.