Interview with Mandy El-Sayegh Can psychotherapy make you a better artist?

By Emily Steer

[...]

Mandy El-Sayegh has a complicated relationship with analysis. The British-Malaysian artist’s expansive practice is driven, in part, by psychoanalysts Jacques Lacan and Donald Winnicott; she also reimagined Freud’s study for an immersive show at Ropac in London in 2023. “I’m heavily engaged in Lacanian discourse, and it is the only one that contains terms and ideas of contradiction that typically resist theory, such as jouissance and the sinthome,” she tells me. ‘Jouissance’ is used to describe an intense form of pleasure that might cross over into discomfort, often connected with excess, as Lacan described it, “a backhand enjoyment”. His idea of ‘sinthome’, meanwhile, reflects an indispensable part of ourselves that connects the seemingly disparate realms of the real, symbolic and imaginary together. 

For El-Sayegh, these ideas are less about expanding creativity through personal therapy, and more focused on bringing psychoanalytic models of play and multi-layered contradiction to her artistic practice. She has worked with a number of therapists over the years but hasn’t yet found the right fit. “I avidly subscribe to the theory, the form and ideas used in particular forms of psychoanalysis. I use these methodologies as a way to generate movement, especially in relation to a creative practice; ideas like [Winnicott’s] free association. But personally, it didn’t work for me in the clinic.” 

She is now drawn to more intuitive, physical approaches. “What worked therapeutically, with incidental effects on artistic practice, was with people in more unconventional disciplines. Embodied, ritualistic practices aren’t common in Western culture, but they are essential to the therapeutic ideas of working through and with others.”