Labyrinth of the Guilt Complex

Artist book, 2015

In Hitchcock’s Spellbound a traumatised interloper tries to prove his identity with Labyrinth of the Guilt Complex a book he’s supposed to have written. Unravelling the trauma that locks him in the lie is the only way to reveal his true identity and his connection to the book’s real author.

In 2015, I take up the position of the Real Author and write Hitchcock’s fake book. What does it mean to be a real? What does it mean when trauma requires a false attitude that denies the impact of the event? In a series of drawings and writings, this text revisits Freud’s Beyond the Pleasure Principle and almost a century on, considers the labyrinthine stories we tell ourselves to escape the realness of the real.