This week's personality: Jackson Pollock and the psychoanalytic meaning of dogs in his life and work.

Jackson Pollock at the age of ten with his dog Gyp, 1922

PAUL JACKSON POLLOCK was born in Cody, Wyoming in 1912, the fifth and youngest son of a family of Irish-Scotch extraction. Pollock was only ten months old when the family moved to San Diego. His father's work as a surveyor would force them to move repeatedly around the Southwest in subsequent years, until, when Pollock was aged nine, his father abandoned the family, only to return when Jackson himself had left home. The West of Pollock's childhood provided a tough upbringing, but he grew to love nature - animals and the expanse of the land - and while living in Phoenix in 1923 he discovered Native American art.

Pollock considered all his images to have psychological content, their precise definition or identification - given how little we know of the artist's intimate life and thought - is a chancy if not impossible (and most likely wrong-headed) task, even if we do not misread the forms. Symbols of this order are difficult to interpret even for the psychoanalyst who, in extended direct contact with the analysand, has infinitely more to go on than we. He develops a matrix of personal associations far more dense than any context we can reconstitute from the combination of Pollock's painted images and limited "logos". Pollock spoke very little about his pictures. So far, he interpreted the psychological symbolism of an early image only once, when pressed by his wife to identify the animal at the bottom of "Guardians of the Secret", 1943. Pollock described it as a dog, and added that it was "obviously a father figure".

The Guardians of the Secret, 1943

Now the dog of Guardians has a long history in the literature. O'Hara - probably quite independently of Jung - had already associated it to Anubis, the jackal-headed Egyptian god, who protects the treasure of the underworld. Overlooking a possible model in Picasso, Wolfe speculates that the dog is rightly placed at the bottom of the composition because it belongs to "the instinctual animal world". Reading the picture upwards, she identifies different levels of consciousness in the psyche as outlined by Jung. Thus, the dog guards the mysterious central panel - "casket, bed or altar" - which Wolfe, quite rightly, takes for a cryptogram of the unconscious, i.e., "the secret". Wolfe, however, overlooked a number of interesting clues about such guard-dogs in "Symbols of Transformation"; Freke mentions some of these - the association to Anubis, for example - but omits others. In "Symbols of Transformation", however, Jung not only notes that "snakes and dogs are guardians of the treasure" if the netherworld, he assimilates the "hound of hell" to Hecate, "Goddess of the underworld", who is "dog-headed, like Anubis" and serves as "guardian of the gate of Hades". Given that "her attributes are dogs", Jung sees this canine Goddess "as deadly mother" - an embodiment of the archetype he calls the Terrible Mother. We therefore find, ironically, that on the lone occasion when Pollock identified the psychological significance of one of his early images, he attributed to it precisely the opposite symbolism (i.e., "father figure") than we would be led to expect from Jung's references. 

Jackson Pollock with his dog Ahab

One wonders, moreover, that the elucidation of the symbolic dog of "Guardians of the Secret" should be restricted solely to archetypal, "mythic" references. Would not a man who likes dogs, owns one, indeed, dream about them, have associations to that animal which, though perhaps prosaic and certainly individual, might be equally revealing? The detail of a page from a notebook of 1950-56 records a dream Pollock had about hid dog; it's imagery serves well - despite its later date - to illustrate the principle involved.

"Painting is self-discovery. Every good artist paints what he is." Jackson Pollock.