Observations on the autobiographical body in psychosis. The leap in The Diary of Vaslav Nijinsky
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16
The autobiographical approach in psychosis presupposes the confrontation with a paradoxical history, throwing the text into a body-to-body combat which is always on the cusp of revealing the ruins of a shattered memory. The text assumes the role of an imaginary body, a reshaping that asserts itself in a sometimes delirious way in the ultimate ambition of containing the risk of a dissociated body. In 1919, aged 29, the choreographer-dancer Vaslav Nijinsky wrote a series of notebooks in which he testified to the gradual de-compensation of his psychosis. Between two periods of his life, these notebooks mark the break with his artistic career, leading to him being committed to a mental asylum with an extreme case of schizophrenia. They attempt to express sometimes explicitly the reasons for an excruciating psychological pain. His bereavements were numerous and sometimes unspeakable. We emphasize the importance of two of them: the death of his brother in 1918, which echoed that of his father in 1912; and his separation from Sergei Diaghilev and from the Ballets Russes following his marriage to the dancer Romola de Pulszky. Beyond the bereavements mentioned lies a more radical impression, leading us to surmise the importance of an anti-conflict proneness in psychosis prior to any mourning work and leading us to contemplate the status of the body as the incarnation of this impossibility. Hence, we hypothesize that, for Nijinsky, the leap reveals the radically corporal dimension of the impression, which the autobiography tries to express and sometimes to justify. In this perspective, we stress the need to consider a gesture as recognizing an unspeakable impression leading to the hypothesis of a symbolization of this impossibility, thus giving way—through the desire of the therapist and, in the present case, of the reader—for the election of a corporal figure as a symptom. This process conditions the implementation of what we have called an image of the gesture, allowing psychotic patients to curb potential acting out.
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