What is the relationship between Psychoanalysis and Art?

Few people are unaware of the fact that the father of psychoanalysis was Sigmund Freud (1856-1939), who, at such an early date Around 1899, he published his revolutionary work The Interpretation of Dreams, considered the starting point of the technique psychoanalytic. After the discovery of the subconscious, nothing would ever be the same again.

Neither did the world of art, which began to feed on the precepts of Freud and his disciples and gave as currents unquestionably inspired by Freudian theories, such as surrealism or the Dadaism. It is indisputable, then, that André Breton's surrealists, through their automatic system (which prompted the release of the unconscious during artistic creation) followed Freud's ideas regarding the need for disinhibition of the mind, flooded with traumas and complexes.

And, although the distinguished Austrian psychiatrist was very soon interested in the relationship that existed between psychoanalysis and art, the curious thing about The point is that he never understood the Surrealist movement nor did he make any effort to attend to Breton's efforts to capture it for his group.

What relationship exists between psychoanalysis and art? Are Freud's theories correct, according to which all works can be interpreted in a psychoanalytic key? What did the work of the psychiatrist mean for art in general (and not only for the surrealists)? In the following lines we try to tell you about it.

• We recommend you read: "Regression: what is it according to psychoanalysis (and criticism)"

The relationship between psychoanalysis and art. Freud and his psychic vision of art

At the beginning of the 20th century, around 1914, Sigmund Freud published a series of studies in which he examined the relationship between the psyche and the work of art.. One of these writings is his study of Michelangelo's Moses, as well as his analysis of Leonardo's production and personality.

In a letter to his wife Marta, dated 1912, Freud, who was on one of his frequent stays at Rome, comments that he longs to unravel the mysteries of Moses, a sculpture that a stranger exercises over him bewitchment Through an exhaustive contemplation of the work, Freud concludes that Michelangelo represented the prophet just after he descended from Sinai. and seeing his people in full pagan adoration, anger invaded him and, in an act of supreme control, he restrained himself from destroying the Tablets of the Law.

That is to say, that the Florentine genius renounces representing him at the moment of his greatest anger, when he throws the Tablets to the rebellious people, to offer it to the viewer in an attitude very different from that used in the history of art.

The work of art as a reflection of the artist's psyche

Although on this occasion the Viennese does not strictly enter psychoanalytic fields, he is capturing a vision of the work of art from a psychic point of view, that is, based on what the artist intended to communicate. artist. Many authors have seen in these studies of Freud the embryo from which the a current that interprets artistic creations with respect to the psyche and the most intimate personality of the artist.

In the magnificent interview that the Spanish Society of Psychoanalysis conducted with the psychoanalyst Anna Romagosa (see bibliography), she picks up on this idea when She comments that, indeed, for Freud there was a relationship between the unconscious and art, in the same way that there is a connection between him and the dreams.

Romagosa also insists that, after the work of the Viennese psychoanalyst, others picked up the baton: the so-called Kleinian school (for its initiator, Melanie Klein) maintained that art facilitated the release of internal conflicts and traumas dragged from the childhood.

In other words, it represented a repair. On the other hand, after the Klein school, the psychoanalyst Donald Meltzer (1922-2004) added to all this the concept of aesthetics, through the idea of ​​aesthetic conflict, based on the impact that the complex beauty of what surrounds him produces on the newborn.

The work of art as a dream experience

Wilfred R. Bion (1897-1979), who had been nourished by Freud's and Melanie Klein's theories about the connection between art and the unconscious, proposed a relationship between the experience of human emotions and the creation. This idea was directly connected to the work of some surrealists, who expressed an entire dream world through images..

About this, the work of René Magritte (1898-1967) is usually indicated as an example, whose paintings of everyday objects linked without any apparent logic seem to refer to the world of dreams. However, the Belgian painter never wanted to know anything about psychoanalysis; in fact, he categorically denied that there was any “hidden” or “symbolic” meaning in his paintings.

As he himself says, and as stated by Anna Romagosa and Antònia Grimalt in their article Magritte and the psychoanalysis (see bibliography), the artist did not know why he was painting a picture, and "he did not want to know it”. It is evident that psychoanalysis tends to interpret reality as a mask for a hidden meaning, insofar as it is a reflection of the traumas and conflicts of the psyche. But, can this idea be transferred to art?

Is it logical to reduce art to a manifestation of the artist's subconscious?

This is the big question, the one that should be suggested in all the lines of this article. After the appearance of the Freudian theories of the relationship between art and psychoanalysis, a important current of art historians who claimed to see in the works manifestations of the psyche of his actor.

There are very curious cases, such as Correggio's Noli me tangere, where the garden hoe was interpreted as a phallic symbol. On the other hand, Oskar Pfister (1873-1956), a disciple of Freud and interested in his psychoanalytic study of Da Vinci, "clearly" saw a vulture in the way that the mantle of the Virgin draws in the work of Leonardo The Virgin with the Child and Saint Anne, which was quickly connected with the anecdote expressed by the painter that, in his childhood, a vulture approached him abruptly, I remember that Freud interpreted it as a desire for "fellatio passive”.

Apart from the fact that the theory already seems, per se, quite far-fetched, we must not forget that both Correggio's painting and Da Vinci's involved also their respective workshops, so it does not seem very plausible that in the work there is such an evident trace of the "unconscious drives" of the artists.

Currently, the psychoanalytic interpretation of works of art is taken from a certain perspective. Without the intention of completely rejecting it, the new currents prefer to see the creations artistic as a hodgepodge of factors, not all linked to the hidden desires and fears of their author.