Bracha L. Ettinger facts for kids
Quick facts for kids
Bracha Lichtenberg Ettinger
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| Born | 23 March 1948 |
| Alma mater | Hebrew University of Jerusalem |
| Era | Contemporary philosophy |
| Region | Western philosophy |
| School | New European Painting, Continental philosophy Psychoanalysis |
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Main interests
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Psychoanalysis, art, feminist theory, aesthetics, human rights, ethics |
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Notable ideas
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Matrixial gaze, matrixial (matricial) space, copoiesis, wit(h)nessing, Carriance, ...-into-life, Being towards birthing-with-birth, coemergence, matrixial trans-subjectivity |
Bracha Lichtenberg Ettinger (born March 23, 1948) is an Israeli artist, writer, psychoanalyst and philosopher, living and working in Paris and Tel Aviv. She is a feminist theorist and artist in contemporary New European Painting who invented the concept of the Matrixial Gaze and related concepts. Ettinger is a professor at European Graduate School in Saas-Fee, Switzerland and at GCAS, Dublin. In 2023, she was part of the Finding Committee for the Artistic Director of Documenta’s 2027 edition. She later resigned from the committee after requesting a pause due to the Israel-Hamas War.
Contents
Life and work
Bracha L. Ettinger was born to Jewish-Polish Holocaust survivors in Tel Aviv on 23 March 1948. She received the high medal for war heroism, as she led the biggest rescue operation in the history of the Middle East in 1967. She received her M.A. in Clinical Psychology from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem where she worked as research assistant then personal assistant of Amos Tversky (1969/70, 1973/74, 1974/75) and Danny Kahneman (1970/71). She moved to London where she studied, trained and worked between 1975 and 1979 at the London Centre for Psychotherapy (with Elsa Seglow), the Tavistock Clinic and the Philadelphia Association (with R. D. Laing) and became a British citizen. She married Loni Ettinger in 1975 and divorced him in 1981; her daughter, the actress Lana Ettinger, was born in London. She returned to Israel in 1979 and worked at Shalvata Hospital. Ettinger, who has painted and drawn since early childhood, is self-taught. In her early days she avoided the art scene. In 1981 she divorced her first husband, decided to become a professional artist and moved to Paris where she lived and worked from 1981 onward. Her son Itai Toker was born in 1988. She returned to Tel Aviv in 2003. As well as painting, drawing and photography, she began writing, and received a D.E.A. in Psychoanalysis from the University Paris VII Diderot in 1987, and a Ph.D. in Aesthetics of Art from the University of Paris VIII in 1996.
Ettinger had a solo project at the Pompidou Centre in 1987, and a solo exhibition at the Museum of Calais in 1988. In 1995 she had a solo exhibition at the Israel Museum in Jerusalem, and in 1996 she participated in the Contemporary art section of Face à l'Histoire. 1933–1996 exhibition in the Pompidou Centre. In 2000 she had a mid-life retrospective at the Centre for Fine Arts (The Palais des Beaux Arts) in Brussels, and in 2001 a solo exhibition at the Drawing Center in New York. As well as working as an artist, Ettinger continued to train as psychoanalyst with Françoise Dolto, Piera Auglanier, Pierre Fedida, and Jacques-Alain Miller, and has become an influential contemporary French feminist. Around 1988 Ettinger began her Conversation and Photography project. Her personal art notebooks have become source for theoretical articulations, and her art has inspired art historians (among them the distinguished art historian Griselda Pollock and international curator Catherine de Zegher) and philosophers (like Jean-François Lyotard, Christine Buci-Glucksmann and Brian Massumi) who dedicated a number of essays to her painting.
Based mainly in Paris, Ettinger was visiting professor (1997–1998) and then research professor (1999–2004) in psychoanalysis and aesthetics at the School of Fine Art, History of Art and Cultural Studies at the University of Leeds. Since 2001 she has also been visiting professor in Psychoanalysis and Aesthetics at the AHRC Centre for Cultural Analysis, Theory and History (now CentreCATH). Ettinger had partly returned to Tel Aviv in 2003 when she separated from her partner, and was a lecturer at the Bezalel Academy of Art and Design in Jerusalem until 2006. From 2006 on she became Chair and Professor at the EGS. Inventor of the matrixial theory in psychoanalysis, some of her specific academic fields of endeavor are feminist psychoanalysis, art, aesthetics, ethics, the gaze, sexual difference and gender studies, Jacques Lacan, the feminine, early (including pre-birth) psychic impressions, pre-maternal and maternal subjectivity.
Artistic
Ettinger's art engages in the subject of trauma, mothers and women during war (the Holocaust - the Shoah) as well as the feminine in mythology Eurydice, Medusa, Demeter, Persephone and matrixial Eros. Her abstract research in painting concerns light and space, and in this it follows from Monet and Rothko. Her subjects concern the human condition and the tragedy of war, and her work in this aspect joins artists such as Käthe Kollwitz and Francisco Goya. The painting process engages a space of passage between figures and abstraction, and her attitude to abstraction resonates with the spiritual concerns of Agnes Martin, Emma Kunz and Hilma af Klint. Another major subject in her work is the unconscious and in particular the feminine and the maternal. Her notebooks accompany the painting process but are equally art works.
From 1981 until 1992, Ettinger's principal artwork consisted of drawing and mixed media on paper as well as notebooks and artist's books, where alongside theoretical work and conversations she made ink and wash painting and drawing. Since 1992, apart from her notebooks, most of her artwork consists of mixed media and oil paintings, with few parallel series that spread over time like: "Matrix — Family Album", "Autistwork" and "Eurydice", with themes of transgenerational transmission of personal and historical trauma, traces of memory and remnants of oblivion, the Shoah and the World Wars, the gaze, light, color and the space, female body, womanhood and maternality, inspired by classical painting and creating an abstract space where the questions of beauty and sublime are renewed for our time. Between 1984-2008, images that she obtains first by collage and xerox processing are abstracted in a long process of oil painting that takes a few years. From 2008 until now Ettinger works her oil paintings directly on canvas and is doing video art films that contains her drawings and photographs.
According to Griselda Pollock, Catherine de Zegher and Chris Dercon, director of the Tate Modern who had chosen her work for the contemporary art section of the Pompidou Center's major exhibition of 20th Century art Face à l'Histoire, Bracha L. Ettinger has become one of the major artists of the New European Painting. Along with painting she has worked on installations, theoretical research, lectures, video works, and "encounter events". Her paintings, photos, drawings, and notebooks have been exhibited at the Pompidou Centre, and the Stedelijk Museum in 1997. In the last decade, Ettinger's oil on canvas paintings involve figures like Medusa, Demeter and Persephone, and Eurydice and the subject matter of Pieta, Kadish, Eros and Chronos. Though from 2010 onward her work still consists mainly of oil paintings, Notebooks (artist's books) and drawings, she is also doing new media animated video-films where the images are multi-layered like her painting. In 2015, Ettinger participated with a solo show in the 14th Istanbul Biennial drafted and curated by Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev. In 2018-2019 she participated with a solo show at the Kochi-Muziris Biennale 2018 in India.
Psychoanalyst
Ettinger is a theoretician who invented and developed a language for a feminine-maternal-'matrixial' (matricial) dimension in artistic creativity and in ethics of care and responsibility. She coined the concept of matrixial (matricial) space and matrixial gaze first in her artistic Notebooks from 1985 onward, and in academic publications from 1992 onwards. ..... This dimension, as symbolic, contributes to ethical thinking about human responsibility to one another and to the world. The French philosopher Jean-Francois Lyotard related to Ettinger's writing and painting in two famous articles written in 1993 and 1995, Anima Minima (Diffracted Traces) andL'anamnese (anamnesis). She is a senior clinical psychologist, and a supervising and training psychoanalyst. Her artistic practice and her articulation, since 1985, of what has become known as the matrixial theory of trans-subjectivity have transformed contemporary debates in contemporary art, psychoanalysis, women's studies, and cultural studies. Ettinger was an analysand of Ronald Laing in London and of Piera Aulagnier in Paris. She is member of the Tel Aviv Institute for Contemporary Psychoanalysis (TAICP), the New Lacanian School (NLS) and the World Association of Psychoanalysis (AMP / WAP). For Ettinger, the Freudian attitude to psychoanalysis is crucial as it emphasizes the phantasmatic value of materials that arise during regression. To Freud and Lacan she adds, however, a feminine-maternal space-time with its particular structures, functions, Eros, Aesthetic, Ethics and ethical potentiality (sh names matrixial proto-ethics) and dynamics in the unconscious. ..... A matrixial ethical countertransference can be worked-through only in 'empathy within compassion' in where therapist avoids parent-blaming. The analyst develops her psychic womb-space to be able to work with the matrixial sphere for the directin of healing. Therapists must likewise realize that during regression phantasmatic maternal "not-enoughness" appears and must also be recognized as the result of the process itself, and be worked-through without the mother-hating that Ettinger considers contributes to a "psychotization" of the subject, which blocks the passage from rage to sorrow and from there to compassion. To be able to recognize the phantasmatic status of the psychic material arising during therapy, the Lacanian concepts of Symbolic, Imaginary and Real are useful to her. Ettinger works between the combined field of psychoanalysis and philosophy to change Ethics according to the feminine-maternal-matrixial source after Levinas and Lacan.
The idea of a corpo-Real is a part of her symbolization of a new feminine psychic zone (the matrixial, the womb as time space of psychic encounter-event), in both male and female subjects, and of the feminine-matrixial sexual difference. Thus, even if Ettinger critiques the Freudian and Lacanian analysis of the feminine, she considers herself as a "post" or "neo" Freudian and Lacanian, who elaborates the feminine in continuity to these psychoanalysts, but claims a supplementary feminine-maternal Eros. Ettinger criticises Winnicott and Bollas for offering patients a "ready-made mother-monster" as a cause for each psychic pain. She considers any practice of archaic-motherhood blaming as an obstacle, as "hystericizing" and even momentarily "psychoticizing" (in the sense of leading to internal splits rather than recognition of differences,) when such "cause" is brought as "explanation" by the analyst, a "cause" attributed to the unremembered early period of life where I and non-I are transconnected. Ettinger agrees with Lacan that the "ultimate" cause is in principle lacking: objet a. She calls for a delicate process of differentiation, coemergence, and cofading between the generations, especially in analysing the same-sex (daughter-mother, son-father) relationships, with emphasize on transmission, not split. Thus, the process itself helps to negotiate and articulate delicately sexual difference, in the present. To the idea that the self is structured via mirror-like reflection she adds that of primal apperception of the other, through "fascinance" (aesthetic openness to the other and the cosmos), compassion and awe (affective accesses to the other) directed from the beginning to the (m)Other and the outside, not to the self.
Psychoanalytic theory
Major concepts
Bracha Lichtenberg Ettinger revolutionized the field of psychoanalysis and cultural studies when she coined in artist's books (Notebooks) she exposed publicly starting from 1985 and in a long series of articles published since 1991 the concept of the matrixial (matricial) space and proposed the feminine matrixial time-space of feminine/prenatal encounter-event as source of human aesthetics and proto-ethics, and femininity as the deep core of ethics, which enters the human subjectivity via the maternal. Ettinger invented and developed the Matrixial Trans-subjectivity theory, or simply "The Matrixial", with original concepts like matrixial gaze, borderlinking, borderspacing, matrixial time-space, copoiesis, wit(h)nessing, co/in-habit(u)ation. ..... Ettinger is a Freudian and Lacanian scholar and follows the late Jacques Lacan, Emmanuel Levinas, object relations theory and Gilles Deleuze/Félix Guattari. .....
The early theory: from 1985 through the 1990s
Ettinger invented the concept 'matrixial space' ('matricial space' from etymology of 'womb'), matrixial gaze, matrixial sphere, a feminine-maternal and feminine-prematernal dimension, space, function, Eros and dynamics in the human Unconscious that as the source of humanized ethics and aesthetics, and developed the theoretical concept in her artist's books and notebooks starting 1985, and in books and journals printed in academic journals from 1991 onwards. She had suggested that pre-natal impressions, connected to the phantasmatic and traumatic real of the pregnant becoming-mother, are trans-inscribed in the emerging subject and form the primary phase and position of the human psyche. "I" and "non-I", without rejection and without symbiotic fusion, conjointly inscribe memory traces that are dispersed asymmetrically but in a trans-subjective mode. ..... The matrixial encounter-event forms specific aesthetical and ethical accesses to the Other. Ettinger articulated the 'matrixial gaze' and the process of 'metramorphosis' and 'co-poiesis'. This allows new understanding of trans-generational transmission, trauma and artistic processes. Ettinger formulates the woman(girl)-to-woman(mother) difference as the first sexual difference for females to be viewed first of all according to the matrixial parameters. The feminine-maternal Eros informs also the father/son and mother/son relations. According to Ettinger, in parallel but also before expressions of abjection (Julia Kristeva) or rejection (Freud on Narcissism) of the other, primary compassion, awe and fascinance (which are unconscious psychic affective accesses to the other, and which join reattunement and differentiating-in-jointness by borderlinking) occur. The combination of fascinance and primary compassion does not enter the economy of social exchange, attraction and rejection; it has particular forms of Eros and of resistance that can inspire the political sphere and reach action and speech that is ethical-political without entering any political institutional organization. The infant's primary compassion is a proto-ethical psychological means that joins the aesthetical fascinance and creates a feel-knowing that functions at best within maternal (and also parental) compassionate hospitality. ..... Here, one witnesses in jointness: The I wit(h)ness while borderlinking (bordureliance) to the non-I and borderspacing (bordurespacement) from the other. Ettinger calls for the recognition of the matrixial transference as a dimension in the transferential relationships in psychoanalysis. They must entails besideness to (and not a split from) the archaic the m/Other (Autremere) and parental figures; jointness-in-differentiation rather than their exclusion. She sees in the trans-subjectivity a distinct dimension of human specific linkage and shareability, different from, and supplementary to "inter-subjectivity" and "self" psychology. Her most prominent and comprehensive book regarding this theory is "The Matrixial Borderspace" (reprint of essays from 1994–1999) published in French in 1999 and in English in 2006, but her most recent concepts are mainly elaborated in the different essays printed in 2005–2006.
The theory in the 2000s
Her more recent artistic and theoretical work centers around the spiritual in art and ethics. In the domain of psychoanalysis, around the question of same-sex differences, the primary feminine difference is the difference opened between woman (girl) and woman (m/Other), maternal subjectivity, maternal/pregnance Eros of com-passion, the effects of compassion and awe and the passion for borderlinking and borderspacing and the idea that three kinds of fantasy (that she names Mother-fantasies) should be recognized, when they appear in a state of regression aroused by therapy itself, as primal: Mother-fantasies of Not-enoughness, Devouring and Abandonment. Their mis-recognition in psychoanalysis (and analytical therapy), together with the ignorance of maternal Eros of com-passion leads to catastrophic blows to the matrixial daughter-mother tissue and hurts the maternal potentiality of the daughter herself, in the sense that attacking the "non-I" is always also attacking the "I" that dwells inside an "I"-and-"non-I" trans-subjective matrixial (feminine-maternal) tissue. Contributing to Self psychoanalysis after Heinz Kohut, Ettinger articulated the difference between com-passionate borderlinking, compassion (as affect) and empathy, and between "empathy without compassion" and "empathy within compassion", claiming that the analyst's empathy without compassion harms the matrixial psychic tissue of the analysand, while empathy within compassion leads to creativity and to the broadening of the ethical horizon. Ettinger explains how by empathy (toward the patient's complaints) without compassion (toward the patient's surrounding past and present family figures, no less than toward the patient itself), the therapist "produces" the patient's real mother as a "ready-made monster-mother" figure, that serves to absorb complaints of all kinds, and thus, a dangerous splitting is induced between the "good" mother figure (the therapist) and a "bad" mother figure (the real mother). This splitting is destructive in both internal and external terms, and mainly for the daughter-mother relations, since the I and non-I are in any case always trans-connected, and therefore any split and projected hate (toward such figures) will turn into a self-hate in the woman/daughter web. Such a concept of subjectivity, where "non-I" is trans-connected to the "I", has deep ethical implications as well as far-reaching sociological and political implications that have been further developed by Griselda Pollock in order to rethink modern and postmodern art and History. Ettinger's recent theoretical proposals starting around 2008 include the three Shocks of maternality and the paternal infnticide impulses (Laius Complex) Carriance and the Demeter–Persephone Complex, working around Greek Mythology and the Hebrew Bible, the woman artists Eva Hesse, Hilma af Klint and Emma Kunz and the poets and writers Sylvia Plath, Marguerite Duras and Alejandra Pizarnik.
Other activities
Artist Bracha Lichtenberg Ettinger led the biggest rescue, evacuation and saving operation in the history of the Middle East: saving the drowning young men of the Eilat shipwreck (in 1967), when she was 19 years old. She was wounded during the operation and suffered shell-shock after it. Only recently, 50 years later, this event was released from secrecy, and she was given the highest Air-Force medal for her Heroism. Ettinger is a supporter of Palestinian human rights and stands for peaceful coexistence of two states, Israel and Palestine, side by side. She is an activist member in "Physicians for Human Rights" ("PHR-Israel"). Dr. Ettinger contributes to the organization as senior clinical psychologist, attending Palestinian patients in needed areas in the Palestinian territories.
Ettinger is also famous for her portrait photography, taken in the context of conversation projects. Some of her portraits, like those of Christian Boltanski, Jean-François Lyotard, Joyce McDougall, Edmond Jabès, Emmanuel Lévinas, Robert Doisneau and Yeshayahu Leibowitz appear in several official publications and collections.
Fascinance: Forum for Ettinger Studies
Fascinance is forum started by Srishti Madurai in South India on 24 December 2013 which offers Introductory Course in Ettingerian Psychoanalysis
The aims of this group:
- To Read, Study and Discuss the works of Bracha L. Ettinger.
- To apply the matrixial theory in arts, philosophy, psychoanalysis and art criticism.
- To Find the possible implications of the concept of "non-life" of Bracha Ettinger in conjunction with the knowledge from various branches of biology such as clinical embryology, nenonatal immunology and developmental biology etc.
- To elaborate on the works on Matrixial Thanatos and Matrixial Eros and how Ettinger's approach differs from the traditional views on death drive.
- To identify how the Ettingerian theory differs from other psychoanalytic tradition and to discuss the philosophical aspects of matrixial borderspace.
- To identify the possible connections of Ettinger's works with natural sciences and social sciences.
See also
In Spanish: Bracha Ettinger para niños
- New European Painting
- Feminist Psychoanalysis
- French Feminism
- The Sublime (Jean-François Lyotard)
- 20th century Women Artists
- Écriture féminine
- Gender studies
- Feminist film theory
