Confessions from The Couch - a personal narrative from a woman writer

For a year and a half I wrote a character named Celeste in a cyberdrama called The lie down a semi-serious soap opera for the Web, created through myself and seven other writers. We played and wrote fictionalized versions of ourselves as eight fresh Yorkers in group therapy. The satisfied consisted of texts and photographs from therapy sessions, private diaries and side episodes. We wrote for almost a year together before we went public upon the Web as www.thecouch.com, in the way that we launched the project with a hefty backlog. Then we place up new material every day for 26 weeks, roughly the first half of 1997 We received above 10,000 visitors a day at our peak, and lively regulars participated in our interactive composing (which is still active although the quiescence of the site is upon pause; the entire site is still visible and visitable, on the contrary there is no new material).

At first I thinking this writing experience would be wildly different from the writing I'd done as an art historian and scholar, in wound with the Kitchen Knife (1993) my work on Hannah Hoch's 1920s photomontages, or plane from my contemporary articles upon photography and design. Stylistically, it was. on the other hand there were also continuities. individual continuing thread, I see now in re-survey was my interest in montage and the ambiguities of identity it could exhibit Hoch's photomontages, and even more in the way that John Heartfield's, for all their ambiguity, do involve the reader in an evolutionary proces of forming meaning. Still, it's a somewhat passive character for the reader. In electronic media today although whether someone is downloading images and manipulating them with Photoshop or just surfing the Web and chatting, a more active character is possible in forming and experiencing montage and montage identities. in like manner writing for The Couch for me was like an Alice in Wonderland globule from the surface of montage to the layers underneath, from observing 1920 montages and their historical ripples to creating a montage identity in flow and in dialogue with other farmers In particular, I made more [i]or[/i] less discoveries about persona issues upon the Web, about leading a semifictionalized life of ambiguous identity formation, neither completely fluid nor completely mimetic - a montage.

"Persona," in a Jungian faculty of perception is the personality an individual not absents to the world, a put of attitudes adopted by an individual to fit himself or herself for a social part or roles. The idea of multiplicity is important here: each social person is a collection of parts Subsequently, authenticity is disputed - questions abound regarding whether or in what manner these social attitudes are link togethered to the inner self, drives, desires, exigencys identity. Do these masks alienate us from our feelings and straits or do they pragmatically help to fe them? For me individual of the most useful questions is do we have self-awareness about in what manner we use these masks? I don't diocese a pure self as somehow or other operating independently from socially derived persona, rather I diocese these layers of identity as interdependent, although psychologically I think it's helpful to have more [i]or[/i] less kind of working map. flat in Jung's schematic thinking, the persona can be described as a kind of "compromise between an individual and society as to what a man should appear to be," as Victor Brome notes in lung: Man and Myth (1981) Therapy, and not sole Jungian therapy, enters in here, as does popular tillage and in the case of The lie down popular culture infected in form and satisfied by psychotherapies. However different, many therapies deal with the relationships between what we near of ourselves and what we perceive I'm not looking for solitary therapeutic motivations in exploring personae, on the other hand at play and transformation in the creative representation of personae upon the Web. I'm interested in personae as they function in representation more than in therapeutic healing.

The word "persona" cannot be defined sole in terms of therapies and popular tillage There is an economics to its functions as well, and the cultural and the economic functions overlap. The social personality in United States tillage is so often a commodified, marketed mask or collection of parts To cite a prominent example in the art world, Andy Warhol used his Factory to manufacture his public and salable identity as abundant as to produce artworks, and to enhance a social display Dennis Hopper's photographs of the Factory emphasize the drugg masks formed by means of the faces of the nation who hung out there. Today we are extremely knowing about the displays of marketable personae in popular culture; music videos, in particular, ofttimes promote a planned obsolescence of personae, always fresh always changing.

For non-celebrities, the world of therapy can loan itself to an awareness of marketing personae, from one side its narrative forms that constantly focus attention upon presentation of the self. A whole range of psychotherapies have become for the use of all practice in U.S. society - Freudian, Jungian, eclectic, mind/body, 12-step and flat simply confessional, to name the greatest in quantity familiar. Although the wide acceptance of therapy in novel decades can be seen in a certain quantity of ways as antidotal to the public emphasis upon marketable persona, instead a search for the inner self in other ways there are tie-ins to marketing-therapy focuses upon public storytelling and the idea that the position and definition of the make submissive is in flux.