ROBIN COHEN, PhD

As a psychoanalyst, I am interested in finding ways to express inchoate and unconscious experience. This is also what art is about (for me at least): finding a way to process and express feelings that have no words or expression yet. For me it is like therapy because it is an emergent process. As I work on the photo in post- processing, I experience it over and over, finding my emotional way into it. What I have discovered as a psychoanalyst is that there is no wall between “reality” and “fantasy” in daily experience, and that we bring our inner worlds of fantasy into our experience of and expression in the world. Seeing what we see through the lens of our desires, fears, and joys, we imbue our world with our emotions. This has helped me, in my artwork, to accept and understand my need to express what I “see”, not as a reproduction of what is “out there”, but as a creation of my unconscious and conscious desires, hopes and needs. I used to feel uncomfortable about creating something that wasn’t “true” to what was “actually” there, but I realize now how sterile it would feel to leave my own subjectivity out of the photo. I choose to emphasize and celebrate what I bring to the photo through my own inner world.

Does Anyone Really Know What Time It Is
(Digitally Manipulated Photograph, 14” x 11”) 

I have been a dreamer since childhood and always wondered what privileged the waking world over the night and dream world. As I have developed and deepened my understanding of and contact with unconscious experience, as a psychoanalyst, I have worked to integrate waking and dreaming modes. My work in photography is an extension of access into these realms within me. The process of visual creation has expanded my vision in all areas of my life. I think that as we age, if we do not find an activity where we are always learning, always growing, and always creating, we start to lose parts of ourselves and stagnate.