›Die Büchse der Pandora‹

11. Druck der Gutenberg Presse, Pressendruck, durchgehend mit ganzseitigen Original-Farbholzschnitten des Künstlers Frank Eißner auf Japanpapier. Von Hand gebunden, erschienen in einer Kleinstauflage von 45 Exemplaren. und geborgen in einem illustrierten Schuber. Im Impressum von Frank Eißner signiert und nummeriert. - Die Ausgabe erschien aus Anlaß des Freud-Jahres 2006

Frank Eißner reflektiert und interpretiert in seinem 32 Original-Holzschnitte umfassenden Künstlerbuch den Mythos ´Büchse der Pandora`, wobei sich der belesene Künstler auf einen Gedichtzyklus des hierzulande kaum bekannten französischen Schriftstellers Pierre Jean Jouve (1887–1976) bezieht, welcher aus dem Freundeskreis rund um Romain Rolland stammt und der französischen  Resistance während der Besetzung Frankreichs durch die Deutschen engagiert war. Seinen literarischen Arbeiten sind beeinflußt durch die Ideen und Konzepte Sigmund Freuds über Schuldgefühle, Scham und sexuelle Energie.

Psychoanalyse, Sigmund Freud und der Mythos ´Büchse der Pandora`

"(....) In the following case, Pandora’s box referred to both a dangerous secret and a mother’s conflicts regarding her sexual and reproductive functions. Ms. Y originally wanted psychoanalytic help concerning her delinquent adolescent son. He was in very serious trouble for theft and truancy from school. Evasive and frequently lying, he showed little remorse when caught by the authorities. The immediate precipitating event leading to Mrs. Y’s entering psychoanalytic treatment was her son’s facing possible imprisonment. She spoke tearfully about the crisis in her family, tremendous tension between her husband and their son. Her husband was "fed up" with him, felt that the lad was ungrateful and undeserving. She then announced she had to brace herself and warn me about an issue that had dire consequences. What she was about to say was a "bombshell." With tremendous anxiety and grief, she then revealed that her son was not the biological son of her husband. She had been infertile in the first years of her marriage. Neither partner wanted to adopt, so they decided on artificial insemination with donor sperm. Her husband insisted that this should be an absolute secret, kept even from his own parents as well as all relatives and friends. With the onset of her son’s problems, this deeply troubled rather devout Christian woman blamed herself and thought that she had committed adultery. Furthermore, she felt that her husband harbored a deep-seated grudge against her and their son. Keeping her pledge to her husband, the boy had never been told that his father was not his biological father. He sensed that his father resented him, and a hostile argumentative alienation between father and son developed early. To compensate for her husband’s rejection and animosity toward "her son", she tried to be evermore supportive, affectionate and indulgent. The father tended to be excessively restrictive and punitive, while the mother overlooked infractions of the family rules and was unable to set consistent limits. If the son had a clash with his father, he could turn to his mother, who would overlook or minimize any real or imagined wrongdoing.

The patient was guilt ridden and filled with self-reproach about her contribution to her son’s juvenile delinquency. When later she spontaneously and surprisingly proved to be fertile, her husband treated these subsequent children far more benignly than he did their first child. Filled with regret and self-reproach, she lamented what she had done and questioned why had she done it? Her son’s punishment was her punishment for infidelity, deception, and lack of discipline. His imprisonment would be her punishment; she felt that she deserved to be punished more than did her son. Not recognizing such complicating issues as the boy’s identification with the father’s aggression and deception, nor his gratification in manipulating his parents, she sometimes saw her son as the innocent victim of his parents. She also harbored the belief, that her son might have a genetic abnormality. Perhaps the donor semen was defective and he was the "bad seed." If the son’s criminality was biologically genetic, then her family might be absolved and exonerated.

Ms. Y then pondered about another secret. Who was the sperm donor? She wondered if her husband were jealous of the donor who had been able to impregnate her. The infertility had initially been considered a joint problem, and she had had the thought that perhaps her husband had kept a low sperm count a secret from her. The sperm donor had probably been paid, and she wondered if she had thoughtlessly participated in an act of prostitution. The sperm donation had then led to an illegitimate pregnancy.

Was her son trying to punish his parents or had they arranged to make themselves miserable through their influence on their child. This mother began to understand her unconscious fantasies of crime and punishment. Her son may well have acted out his mother’s unconscious fantasy (Johnson, 1952), significantly contributing to his delinquency. In this case, the bad seed was the husband’s originally infertile sperm, the donor sperm, and the embryo of deceit and delinquency in the mother’s womb. The gestation culminated in the fraudulent fatherhood. As is so often the case, the web of deception encompassed layers of secrets.

This mother regarded herself as a Pandora with an evil spirit springing from her genital box. Her son’s misdeeds and misdemeanors could spread harm within the family, school, and community. The guilt that she felt over son’s serious adolescent delinquency, was an intensification and addition to the guilt she harbored from the time of her pregnancy. The artificial insemination was an artifice, a false pregnancy, a form of imposture. She had sadly tried to appease her husband and conceal his infertility and with conscious good intentions. Alongside her love of her family, she had to face her tremendous disappointment and anger at herself, her husband and her son. His birth should have been a gift from God, but as in the Pandora myth, the gift engendered an antisocial illness. The mother’s fears of revelation were tantamount to the opening of her own Pandora’s box.

Family secrets become an anxiety and guilt-ridden burden for those who share them, as well as engendering inevitable conflicts of power and control. Family secrets, associated with shame and guilt, affect the developing child. There is always concern that the secret will emerge from "under wraps" with the possibility of reprisal, recrimination and narcissistic mortification. There may be power associated with the threat of revealing the secret. Conflicts associated with Pandora’s box coalesce with the expectable fantasies and challenges of a patient’s phase of development and life situation. Although manifestly female, Pandora may be unconsciously bi-sexual and bi-parental.

In the myth Pandora is blamed for all the ills of humanity. Pandora here represents the split off virtually all-bad mother, and women have been demonized as sexual and aggressive witches. In modern times, mothers have been blamed for conditions ranging from autism to schizophrenia. In the other pole of splitting, motherhood was glorified and idealized. Pandora carries hope in her box-womb. Hope, like faith and charity evolves in the object relationship encompassing good enough mothering of an adequately responsive infant. Hope lies in the mother’s capacity to set limits upon enactment of her own infantile impulses, and to control regression in the service of the infant’s development. Finally, for some deeply disturbed patients, supportive, suppressive psychotherapy may be indicated, helping to close Pandora’s box and safeguard sanity. (...)"

Harold P. Blum, "A Psychoanalytic Inquiry into Pandora's Box". A Psychoanalytic Inquiry into Pandoea`s Box; in: Language, Symbolization, and Psychosis, 2018, pp 18-30

Der Künstler

Frank Eißner, 1959 in Leipzig geboren, bereitete sich durch eine Lithografen-Ausbildung und ausgedehnte Praktika in Druckereien akribisch auf sein Studium an der Hochschule für Grafik und Buchkunst in Leipzig (1984 bis 1989) und eine Existenz als Pressendrucker vor. Binnen kurzem gelang es ihm, dem schon jahrhundertealten Genre des Holzschnitts mit seiner eigenen „Handschrift“ eine neue Dimension hinzuzufügen: Seine pastelligen, transparenten Farbtöne, die oft die Maserung des Druckstocks durchscheinen lassen, seine an den Jugendstil erinnernden, fast ätherischen Figuren sichern dem Künstler schon heute einen festen Platz in der Kunstgeschichte der Druckgrafik. Seit 2019 lebt und arbeitet Eißner in Aschaffenburg am Main.

Lieferbarkeit / Erhaltungszustand

Die Kunstabteilung der SFB verfügt von dieser begehrten Ausgabe über ein annähernd druckfrisches Exemplar, welches aus dem Archiv des langjährigen Direktors des Offenbacher Klingspor Museums Christian Scheffler (Editionsnummer 18/45) stammt, welchem der Künstler eine handschriftliche Widmung für eben diesen Museumsleiter beigegeben hat (s. Abb.). - Ein tadelloses Exemplar dieser bibliophilen Ausgabe.