Bracha L. Ettinger


Bracha Lichtenberg Ettinger is an Israeli-born French artist, visual analyst, psychoanalyst, philosopher, and writer.
Ettinger's work consists mostly of oil painting and writing. Ettinger is now considered to be a prominent figure among both the French painters' and the Israeli art's scenes. Ettinger's art was recently analysed at length in the book Women Artists at the Millennium, in Griselda Pollock's Encounters in the Virtual Feminist Museum and in Catherine de Zegher's anthology Women's Work is Never Done. Her ideas in cultural theory, psychoanalysis, and French feminism achieved recognition after the publication of Matrix and Metramorphosis, fragments from her notebooks and The Matrixial Gaze. Over the last two decades her work has been influential in art history, film theory, psychoanalysis, aesthetics and gender studies.
Ettinger is a professor at European Graduate School in Saas-Fee, Switzerland.

Life and work

Bracha Ettinger was born in Tel Aviv on 23 March 1948. 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 and Danny Kahneman. She married Loni Ettinger in June 1975 and moved to London where she studied, trained and worked between 1975 and 1979 at the London Centre for Psychotherapy, the Tavistock Clinic and the Philadelphia Association. 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 to 2003 with her partner Joav Toker. Her son Itai Toker was born in 1988. 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 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 and philosophers who dedicated a number of essays to her painting.
Based mainly in Paris, Ettinger was visiting professor and then research professor 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. Ettinger had partly returned to Tel Aviv in 2003, 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.
Some of her specific academic fields of endeavour are feminist psychoanalysis, art, aesthetics, ethics, the gaze, sexual difference and gender studies, Jacques Lacan, the feminine, early psychic impressions, pre-maternal and maternal subjectivity.

Artist

Ettinger's research 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 follows on after 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 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 generational transmission of memory, personal and historical trauma, the Shoah and the World Wars, the gaze, light, color and the space, womanhood and maternality, inspired by classical painting and creating an abstract space where the questions of beauty and sublime become relevant 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 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, 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. Though from 2010 onward her work still consists mainly of oil paintings 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.

Group exhibitions

Among the venues Ettinger presented in:
Ettinger's Solo exhibitions :
Ettinger is a theoretician who proposed an ontology of string-like subject-subject and subject-object transmissivity for a rethinking of the human subject. Working at the intersections of human subjectivity, feminine sexuality, maternal subjectivity, psychoanalysis, art and aesthetics, she contributed to psychoanalysis the idea of a feminine-maternal sphere, function, and structure with its symbolic and imaginary dimensions based on femaleness in the real. This dimension, as symbolic, contributes to ethical thinking about human responsibility to one another and to the world. She is a senior clinical psychologist, and a practising 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 Piera Aulagnier in Paris. She is member of the Tel Aviv Institute for Contemporary Psychoanalysis, the New Lacanian School and the World Association of Psychoanalysis. 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, and dynamics in the unconscious. She claims that, in a similar way, when seduction is assigned to the paternal figure during regression, it is recognized in most cases as a result of the therapeutic process itself. It is worked-through accordingly without therapist's father-blaming, and without a resulting father-hate. 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, and a block to the passage from rage to sorrow and 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.
The idea of a corpo-Real is a part of her symbolization of a new feminine psychic zone, 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" 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 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", compassion and awe directed from the beginning to the Other and the outside, not to the self.

Psychoanalytic theory

Major concepts

Ettinger invented the Matrixial Trans-subjectivity theory, or simply "The Matrixial", with concepts like border linking, borderspacing, martial borderspace, copoiesis, witmessing and co/in-habitation. 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 articulated a feminine-maternal and feminine-prematernal dimension, space, function, Eros and dynamics in the human Unconscious. 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. Trans-subjective mental and affective unconscious "strings", connecting the prenatal emerging subject to the archaic m/Other, open unconscious routes that enable subjectivizing processes all throughout life whenever a new matrixial encounter-event takes place. The matrixial encounter-event forms specific aesthetical and ethical accesses to the Other. Ettinger articulated the 'matrixial gaze' and the process of 'co-poiesis'. This allows new understanding of trans-generational transmission, trauma and artistic processes. Ettinger formulates the woman-to-woman difference as the first sexual difference for females to be viewed first of all according to the matrixial parameters. The feminie-maternal Eros informs also the father/son and mother/son relations. According to Ettinger, in parallel but also before expressions of abjection or rejection of the other, primary compassion, awe and fascinance 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 compassionate hospitality. Here, one witnesses in jointness: The I witness while borderlinking to the non-I and borderspacing 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 the archaic the m/Other 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" 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 and woman, 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 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, 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 tissue. Contributing to Self psychoanalysis after Heinz Kohut, Ettinger articulated the difference between com-passionate borderlinking, compassion 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 without compassion, 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 and a "bad" mother figure. 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 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 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

In 1967 Bracha Lichtenberg Ettinger is a disabled veteran heroine who was wounded while she led the biggest rescue, saving and evacuation operation of drowning people in the Middle East: the Eilat shipwreck. She was injured during the operation and later on suffered shell-shock Ettinger is a supporter of the Palestinian rights, and since 2005 Ettinger is an activist member in "Physicians for Human Rights-Israel". Dr. Ettinger contributes to the organization as a clinical psychologist, attending Palestinian patients in needed areas in the Palestinian occupied territories.
Ettinger is also famous for her portrait photography, taken in the context of conversation projects. Some of her portraits, like those of 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:
Ettinger is author of several books and more than eighty psychoanalytical essays elaborating different aesthetical, ethical, psychoanalytical and artistic aspects of the matrixial. She is co-author of volumes of conversation with Emmanuel Levinas, Edmond Jabès, Craigie Horsfield, Félix Guattari and Christian Boltanski. Her book Regard et Espace-de-Bord Matrixiels appeared in French in 1999, and has been published in English as The Matrixial Borderspace. Ettinger is one of the leading intellectuals associated with contemporary French feminism and feminist psychoanalytical thought alongside Julia Kristeva and Luce Irigaray. The journal Theory Culture & Society dedicated an issue to her work in 2004.

Recent selected publications